"To go later for a walk in Hyde Park, or to conduct a lady to pay her visits or make her purchases in London, and /to offer her your hand in descending from the carriage/: coloured kid Gloves braided. "To go to a dinner-party: yellow dog's skin Gloves--and in the evening for a ball or rout: Gloves of white lamb-skin embroidered with silk." What odious tyranny is so exacting a fashion! And how sensible was Balzac when he wrote: "Dandyism is a heresy of fashion; in making himself a dandy, a man becomes a piece of furniture of the boudoir, an extremely ingenious puppet, which can pose on a horse, or on a sofa, which sucks habitually the end of a walking-stick, but a reasonable being--never!" It is, however, with some dandy of the school of Rubempré and Rastignac, that often, on quitting the ball, an author shows us a romantic young lady in love, whose jealousy gnaws at her heart, who re-reads the letters of old times, and with wandering looks, like one overwhelmed, nervously tearing with her teeth a finger of her Glove, sadly dreams that the lover who is no longer all, is nothing, and that the moralist much deceived himself who wrote: "Woman is a charming creature, who puts off her love as easily as her Glove." How many things are there, look you, in a Glove! In the novel /The Lion in Love/ of Frédéric Soulié, Léonce signs the register of marriages at the mayoralty with a gloved hand; and when Lise's turn comes, the young girl stops, saying in a voice tinged with just a touch of mockery, "Pardon me, let me remove my Glove." "Léonce understood," then says the author, "that he had signed with his gloved hand." Sign an act of marriage with a Glove! Léonce meditated a little, and said to himself: "These people have certain delicacies. What difference makes a Glove more or less to the holiness of an oath, or the signature of a document? Nothing assuredly; and yet it seems that there is more sincerity in a naked hand, which affixes the signature of a man in testimony of the truth. It is one of those imperceptible sentiments of which we are unable to give an exact account, but which nevertheless exist." The fact is, that the Glove is not really, as has been said, a tyrant of which the hand is the slave, but quite the contrary--it is the hand's servant; and with the hand, as Montaigne wrote, "We request, promise, call, dismiss, menace, pray, supplicate, deny, refuse, interrogate, admire, number, confess, repent, fear, shame, double, instruct, command, incite, encourage, swear, witness, accuse, condemn, absolve, injure, contemn, distrust, track, flatter, applaud, bless, humiliate, mock, reconcile, recommend, exalt, feast, rejoice, complain, sadden, discomfort, despair, astonish, write, suppress," &c. I stop out of breath: verbs of every kind may pass into the list.