Sauce Soubise, sauce d'Orléans, sauce d'Uxelles, and sauce à la Régence are all credited to great minds of the eighteenth century, so prolific of new culinary discoveries. Through their piquant instrumentality we may in imagination summon the splendours of the Regency and the reign of Louis, surnamed "le Bien-Aimé," with the brilliant toilets of its gay and pretty women--the high-heeled pointed shoe, the powdered hair, the rouge and beauty-spot, the painted fan and walking-stick of _fille_, duchesse, and marquise that still look at us from the canvases of Boucher and Watteau. We may see, too, the V-shaped satin corsage, the expansive pannier, the diaphanous _robe déshabillée_,--flounced, frilled, flowered, and furbelowed,--the embroidered petticoat and surge of lace and ribband, as fair dame and plumed gallant repair to the suppers of the Palais-Royal and the Parc aux Cerfs, or sit down amid umbrageous glades to the revels of a _fête champêtre_. Almost as many varieties of sauces exist as of soups. But these may vary little or largely from their usually accepted names. The cook will tell you, if you are unacquainted with the fact yourself, that by adding to simple melted butter a liberal amount of finely chopped parsley (some ruin the relish with grated nutmeg, a spice which should be used with great discretion), salt and pepper, and a dash of lemon, you have what is termed a maître-d'hôtel sauce. Add to this finely minced garden-cress, chervil, and a little tarragon and burnet, and you produce a different sauce under the same name. Thus plain onion sauce and sauce Soubise, in each of which the onion forms the dominant chord, may differ equally, and sauce piquante and sauce Robert vary only in their titles and the additional mustard called for by the latter. Sauce poivrade, in like manner, is a sauce piquante with an increased supply of pepper and without the pickled cucumber. Among the most valuable of all sauces, though employed only cold and served with cold viands, is that which at once suggests what Jules Janin in an inadvertent moment termed the "cardinal of the seas," and that at a luncheon or a late supper possesses a merit distinctively its own. This Carême has dealt with at length in his treatise on cold sauces. The origin of the word "mayonnaise," a blending supposed to be the invention of the Maréchal de Richelieu, has always remained in doubt. Its etymology has been attributed to Mahon, a town of southern France. Yet this supposed derivation is extremely dubious; and as it was also known as "bayonnaise," it might be ascribed equally to Bayonne, famous for its hams, its cheese, and its chocolate, and for having invented the bayonet.[48]