asion, where one of the figures has a boot
on one leg and a shoe on the other. The Dauphiness of Auvergne, wife
to Louis the Good, Duke of Bourbon, born 1360, is painted in a garb of
which one half all the way down is blue, powdered with gold
fleurs-de-lys, and the other half to the waist is gold, with a blue
fish or dolphin (a cognizance, doubtless) on it, and from the waist to
the feet is crimson, with white "fishy" ornaments; one sleeve is blue
and gold, the other crimson and gold.

In addition to these absurd garments, the women dressed their heads so
high that they were obliged to wear a sort of curved horn on each
side, in order to support the enormous superstructure of feathers and
furbelows. And these are what are meant by the "horned head-dresses"
so often referred to in old authors. It is said that, when Isabel of
Bavaria kept her court at Vincennes, A.D. 1416, it was necessary to
make all the doors of the palace both higher and wider, to admit the
head-dresses of the queen and her ladies, which were all of this
horned kind.

This high bonnet had been worn, under various modifications, ever
since the fashion was brought from the East in the time of the
Crusades. Some were of a sugar-loaf form, three feet in height; and
some cylindrical, but still very high. The French modistes of that day
called this formidable head-gear _bonnet a la Syrienne_. But our
author says, if female vanity be violently restrained in one point, it
is sure to break out in another; and Romish anathemas having abolished
curls from shading fair brows, so much the more attention was paid to
head-gear, that the bonnets and caps increased every year most awfully
in height and size, and were made in the form of crescents, pyramids,
and horns of such tremendous dimensions, that the old chronicler
Juvenal des Ursins makes this pathetic lamentation in his History of
Charles VI.:--

"Et avoient les dames et damoyselles de chacun coste, deux grandes
oreilles si larges, que quand elles vouloient passer par l'huis d'une
chambre il fallait qu'elles se tournassent de coste et baisassent, ou
elles n'eussent pu passer:" that is, "on every side old ladies and
young ladies were seen with such high and monstrous ears (or horns),
that when they wanted to enter a room they were obliged perforce to
stoop and crouch sideways, or they could not pass." At last a regular
attack was made on the high head-gear of the fifteenth century by a
popular monk, in his s