Page:Costume, fanciful, historical, and theatrical (1906).djvu/128

90 The pastoral simplicity of the Petit Trianon should have really made more lasting impression than it did. For the Court ladies played at milkmaids under the rule of their farmer Queen, and churned butter with their own fair hands, and found a wide field for dainty disguises in rustic and ruinous simplicity. The peasant girls' dresses of stuffs and muslin were glorified by rich silks and muslin and challis decked with lace fichus and crowned with rose-coloured and be-ribboned straw hats, and embroidered holland and Persian cambric were affected economies no less expensive than the maize-coloured silk and striped green and white satin of avowed prodigality. The Trianon was a happy hunting-ground for flirtation, but that is another story, indeed a great many; but it served too as a pretext for innumerable new frocks, and the colour-prints of the time convincingly prove the dainty possibilities afforded by the artifice of simplicity allied to a nice taste in ribbons.

We have to go back to the days of Marie Antoinette for a practice which aroused some interest and amusement when a dressmaker in London last year was fired with a desire to revive it. Gowns were invested with the power to express special emotion, and Moliére held the notion up to ridicule in his famous Précieuses. Long narrow shoes with the seam at the heel, whose socket was studded with jewels, were called venez-y-voir; and this suggestion of forwardness was again evident in a ribbon which went by the name of "marked attention." Other absurdities often quoted were the gown known as the "stifled sigh," trimmed with " superfluous regrets," and