Their finery and decorations—and I do believe
the aim of that silent and solitary system is to
let flounces and furbelows overflow the panels
with the better effect—savour terribly of
provinciality. The skimmings of Parisian fashion,
after oozing down through Lyons, and then on
to Marseilles, would seem to reach here, in a
refreshing but diluted shower, at about the
second generation. I can take on me to say—
though, as not coming from an expert, this
testimony should be received with caution—that
these deliciously barbaric jackets, which our own
empresses of fashion have snatched from the
fighting Algerians, and have covered so daintily
with rich embroidery, had not passed the Eternal
customs at this date. A corner-shop in the
great "Course" stands dedicate ex voto to the
goddess of millinery; and is, I believe, the sole
temple of their vestiary worship. The noble
come hither to purchase, inconveniently crowding
the thoroughfare, and make but an
indifferent show after all. None of that delicate
pairing of undefined tint, with tint yet more
undefined, that matchless power of combining pure
nothings, in which their Parisian sister of the
guild excels. She can dress as from a
palette, and mix her tints of ribbons and silks as
with a brush. Beside a strip, say one hundred
yards of this unrivalled French boulevard, where
are the shop palaces running up in sculptured
stories, one stage of rich detail after the other,
and embroidered so thickly with gold and bronze
balconies, where are the richly stored bazaars—
not shops—and the green foliage waving over
the windows, and the quaint pagodas, so Eastern
with their gold and gaudy proclamations, and
the shifting crowd, polyglot, and polychromatic,
halting, staring, chattering, lounging, and coffee-
sipping, and where the canoe-shaped carriages,
exquisite in their fine lines and appointments,
bounding and springing under their light freight
—all with a freight—whose robes do indeed
overflow their panel sides, but as a cloud of
vapour or airiest écume de mer—beside this
hasty glimpse out of the gay Paris kaleidoscope,
does not our poor Roman exhibition fade
out utterly into a dull rubbed and battered bit
of scene paint, on which the daylight comes
inopportunely through a skylight?

To my mind, the prettiest piece of a lady's
ball-room furniture is that sweet-smelling
bouquet of many colours which she now inhales
(the carpets of novels must be strewn with
the prodigious quantity of "petals" that have
been "picked" to pieces at embarrassing
situations), and which now she lays upon her
chair to keep her place. With a strange
eccentricity, our noble Roman ladies shrink
from flowers as from the deadly upas. But a
few years back, it was a gross infringement upon
taste to introduce flowers into a room. There are
traditions of ladies stricken down mysteriously
in a sudden faint, and of the cause being at
last discovered—a bunch of flowers which she
had incautiously approached too near. And
though even now at many a corner you see men
and boys at counters with heaps of cut flowers
before them, making up those charming combinations
specially Roman, concentric rings of white,
red, and blue, and hanging them afterwards
on a sort of improvised clothes-horse, a gaudy
show: still the eye wanders vainly round the
line of boxes at the Opera, idly searches the
tossing mêlée of the ball-room, for this welcome
and refreshing adornment. Let the wicked Jew
that Shakespeare drew, add this to his list of
mysterious repugnances. The same inexplicable
distaste has extended to perfumes and fragrant
essences; and, not many years back, when the
sweet waters which Cologne distils were first
scattered in refreshing showers over the world
—the source itself remaining, like Gideon's
fleece, in perfect dryness and unsavouriness—an
unconscious lady, going out to an evening party
with the new-found perfume on her handkerchief,
found herself shunned as plague-stricken,
contiguous noble ladies being taken with qualms,
and rustling away in angry dignity from the
scented intruder. Is this fear of flowers and
scents a remnant of the wicked old Italian days
when flowers and scents were poisoned, perhaps?

Thinking, as I do often, very sadly, of those
noble ladies, and of the weary groove of early
dining and monotonous charioteering at fixed
hours, with perpetual holding out of their sickly
wan cheeks, on eternal view, as it were, to
the lieges—to Plebs and Populus—I wish
that the great donjon walls of their gloomy
prisons would part slowly to the right and left,
as such counterfeit structures do in the plays,
and let me look into the select cell or boudoir
where madame lives her inner and domestic life.
There, am I convinced, does she sit beating
moral hemp and picking social oakum: so slow
and stagnant, so wearily, runs by the course of
her days. I half suspect she is about as free as
one of the Grand Seignior's Circassian ladies:
about as bond a slave to fashion as a Chinese
woman, though she does not cramp her feet
into slippers. I have a dim conviction that
their noble spouses, the Principe Babuino and
the Duca di Cornuti, are not tender solicitous
husbands; nay, may be neglectful careless lords,
walking abroad and offering sacrifice at other
temples. Though for this hint—Heaven help
me!—I have no reason in the wide world beyond
what is to be read in those weary aspects. And yet
those books called women's looks are not such
deceiving guides after all. I wonder, do such as have
grand galleries attached to their prisons, great
glittering halls very cold and very chilling, do
they ever, when the gaping public has closed its
knowing glasses, and laid by the screen-shaped
catalogue, and duly fed the custode, and has
dismissed the wise connoisseur expression, and
gone its road with an aching nape of the neck—
I wonder, I say, does the noble lady ever wander
down into her frigid Valhalla, and find poor
comfort in her magnificence? Does she take exercise
over the shining slippery marble floor, wherein
she can see herself reflected, and trip lightly
against the great round shot which lies sacredly
in its old spot where it first alighted from the