Madame Celnart’s Works of the Toilet.--Literature of Beauty.--Cares of the Toilet.--Arts of Coiffure and Lacing.--How to Hold a Needle Gracefully.--Iris Powder for Tresses.--Arts of Italian Women.--Depilatory used in Harems.--Spirit of Pyrêtre.--Herbs used by Greek Women.--Mexican Pomade.--Dusky Perfumed Marbles.--Lost Perfumes.--Sultanas’ Lotion.--Brilliant Paste for Neck and Arms.--Baking Enamel. If ever a woman deserved a seat in the French Academy for the value of her literary labors to her kind, it was Madame Celnart. The works of this lively author on manners, dress, cosmetics, and kindred topics no less interesting to her sex, are found in eight small octavos in their native French. The lady was an industrious and brilliant writer on themes of the toilet, the household, and deportment, on which Mrs. Farrar, author of _The Young Lady’s Friend_, of our mothers’ time, and Mrs. Beeton, the editor of _The Englishwoman’s Magazine_, in our day, have succeeded her with much adornment but hardly equal scope. Madame Celnart talks--one can hardly imagine her holding a pen--like a Parisian, with empressement, with drollery, precision, and inimitable sprightliness. Her lectures sound like those of a gentle old beauty, secure in the charm of her finished manner against the loss of her earlier fascinations, telling the secrets of her age to a younger generation, with half a smile at their readiness to seize these arts, and seriously pointing out the most graceful or the most modest way of doing things, with the concern of one who is conscious that grace and prudence do not come to all her sex by nature. Imagine the arch gentleness with which she opens her work on the toilet in such easy, sparkling guise as this: