“_Je viens de feuilleter les arts de plaire, les livres de beauté, et autres évangiles des courtisane_,” which may be freely translated, “I come to speak of the arts of pleasing, the literature of beauty, and other evangels of coquetry.” She has a well-bred curl of disdain for “_une allure bourgeoise mesquine_;” but with the reverence of a true Frenchwoman, whose creed is her mirror, she pronounces her work “_consacré à la toilette, et la conversation de la beauté_.” These duties she divides with serious precision into the “_soins de la toilette_,” which include cosmetic arts, and “_l’art de se coiffer, lacer, et chausser_.” It was indeed an art, in the time of hundred-boned corsets without clasps, to lace one’s self, and in the days of classic sandals to put on one’s shoes. She is as exact in all her details as a school-mistress, though one fancies a covert smile on her wise face as she rallies the young demoiselles who dreaded the bath--because it was so cold? Oh no; but because their modesty could not endure the baring of their person even to themselves. Such, she gravely advises, may save their “_pudeur_” by bathing in a peignoir. One inevitably recalls Lola Montez’s dedication of her famous _Book of Beauty_, “To all men and women who are not afraid of themselves,” on encountering these French demoiselles with their conventual susceptibility. The graceful preceptress goes on with directions for sitting, for holding one’s needle, for dancing, and holding one’s petticoats out of the mud. Nobody will allow that these hints are superfluous who notices the varied awkwardness which women fall into who are habitually thoughtless on these points. Some of these nice customs may have been carried to our shores, possibly with Rochambeau’s French ladies at Newport or Salem. I remember hearing one of the fine Newburyport ladies, who answer to the description of gentlewomen still, maintain earnestly that it was most graceful to “sew with a long point”--that is, to push the needle nearly its whole length through at each stitch, instead of pulling it out, so to speak, by the nose. And she was right, as you can verify by the next sewing you take up.