The chief interest naturally centres in that portion which is most complete, and which illustrates the female fashions that have prevailed in France and Italy from the time of the Valois to that of the First Empire. One of the earliest examples is a female shoe of the age of Henri II. (1). It is of white stuff, ornamented on the instep with a large rosette of silver lace and a long metal point of gilt copper engraved in chevrons. The heel is so enormously high, that the lady must literally have stood on her toes. The long metal point is a remnant of a fashion which prevailed from the Eleventh to the Fifteenth Century, and which, though stigmatised by the bishops as immoral and impious, and moreover rendered illegal in France by royal decree, and in England by Act of Parliament, refused to do more than retire into temporary banishment, reappearing in the reign of Louis XI. under a form more offensive than ever. This was the long-peaked shoe, called in France the _chaussure à poulaine_, from the resemblance of the point to the prow of a ship. William of Malmesbury attributes its origin to a certain follower of William Rufus, and evidently regards it as part and parcel of the disgraceful morals of the Anglo-Norman court. In France it is traced back to Geoffrey Plantagenet, father of Henry II. of England, who is said to have had a great excrescence at the end of his foot, obliging him to wear a peculiar form of shoe. The cordwainer appears to have hit the public taste; for the Plantagenet shoe at once became the fashion, and every one wore a long point, which gradually became elongated to two feet, and had to be attached to the knee by a metal chain. Its full proportions, however, were confined to princes and great nobles; lords and very rich people were permitted to wear toes a foot long, but the middle-class might not exceed six inches. These protuberances were embroidered and trimmed with lace, the ends being shaped like a horn, a claw, or some other grotesque point. This prevailed until the last quarter of the Fourteenth Century, when the fashion gave way to a kind of slipper with a very broad toe just rounded off. But in another hundred years the peaked toes reappeared, and this time men wore points of iron a foot long, through the end of which a chain was passed, so that they were held aloft in the air. The same fashion appears to have obtained in England, for Camden speaks of “shoes and patterns being snowted and piked more than a finger long, looking upwards.” And here in this shoe we have evidence of a lady as late as the days of Henri II. wearing a long metal point. When we find such remarkable persistency in a fashion apparently unreasonable, we suspect that in some way it peculiarly expressed the spirit of the latter Middle Ages. In the shoe before us, the union of the high heel with the peaked toe produces a foot which very truly represents a court in which the men were satyrs and the women sirens.