Page:LadysRealmXIII278.png

278 Some of the earlier examples of waists fashionable during the earlier part of the Revolution are extremely pleasing and grace­ful in their simple following of the lines and curves of the body. But then the return to nature did not have a very long life, and soon fashions in waists were marked by the most extraordinary eccentricities—such, for instance, as the ventre postiche which was the favourite mode in the feverish hours of Barras' régime. The waist-line moved up from its proper place to the armpits, and except in the case of women who had slight figures the effect was not alluring. Undoubtedly the Empire waist suits young and slender women, but nobody else. So far as England was concerned, short waists became modish in 1794, and that portion of the body which only a few years previously had been preposterously long, reaching nearly to the hips, appeared to vanish altogether beneath the arms. But in the last year or two of the century waists became longer and longer again, until they had come back to their natural position.

The beginning of the present century beheld the corset revived, and some of its worst horrors were again reproduced. So much so was this the case that Napoleon alluded to it in the severest terms. Turning to one of his Ministers, he passionately exclaimed: "This wear, born of coquetry and bad taste, which murders women and ill-treats their offspring, tells of frivolous dispositions, and warns me of an approaching decadence." Cuvier, the eminent scientist, took a striking way of suggesting to a young lady of his acquaintance that her tight-fitting stays were injurious to her health. At the Jardin des Plantes he showed her two flowers—one fresh and beautiful, the other drooping and dying. The explanation was not far to seek, for around the stem of the plant which bore the dying flower there had been tightly fastened a string whose close embrace was slowly strangling it. Behold, said he in effect, the result of tight-lacing!

After the accession of Queen Victoria there was a gradual lengthening of the waist. In the early days of her reign waists were worn short—that is, com­paratively short as we would consider them now, and the corsets were often very tightly laced. This was carried to much greater excess across the Channel, where perhaps fashions have a way of exaggerating themselves. The last king of France sarcastic­ally said of his countrywomen: "Once you met Dianas, Venuses, or Niobes; nowadays only wasps." Rousseau, years before, had said much the same thing when he wrote: "It is not agreeable to see a woman cut in two like a wasp; it offends the eye and is painful to the imagination. The delicacy of the form has, like everything else, its due propor­tions, its measure beyond which it becomes a defect; this defect would be apparent in the nude, and why should it be a beauty when clothed?"

In conclusion, it is surely not necessary to point out that no one laced into a cuirass, a mould of steel and whale­bone, can hope to have that suppleness, that grace of carriage and of motion which is the poetry of the human form, and that untrammelled freedom which the necessities of our modern life require.