ermons at Notre Dame, in which he so
pathetically lamented the sinfulness and enormities of such a fashion,
that the ladies, to show their contrition, made _auto da fes_ of their
Syrian bonnets in the public squares and market-places; and as the
Church fulminated against them all over Europe, the example of Paris
was universally followed.

Many attempts had previously been made by zealous preachers to effect
this alteration. In the previous century a Carmelite in the province
of Bretagne preached against this fashion, without the power to
annihilate it: all that the ladies did was to change the particular
shape of the huge coiffures after every sermon. "No sooner," says the
chronicler, "had he departed from one district, than the dames and
damoyselles, who, like frightened snails, had drawn in their horns,
shot them out again longer than ever; for nowhere were the _hennins_
(so called, abbreviated from _gehinnin_, incommodious,) larger, more
pompous or proud, than in the cities through which the Carmelite had
passed.

"All the world was totally reversed and disordered by these fashions,
and above all things by the strange accoutrements on the heads of the
ladies. It was a portentous time, for some carried huge towers on
their foreheads an ell high; others still higher caps, with sharp
points, like staples, from the top of which streamed long crapes,
fringed with gold, like banners. Alas, alas! ladies, dames, and
demoiselles were of importance in those days! When do we hear, in the
present times, of Church and State interfering to regulate the
patterns of their bonnets?"[95]

It is no wonder that fashions so very extreme and absurd should call
forth animadversion from various quarters. Thus wrote Petrarch in
1366:--

"Who can see with patience the monstrous, fantastical inventions which
the people of our times have invented to deform, rather than adorn,
their persons? Who can behold without indignation their long pointed
shoes; their caps with feathers; their hair twisted and hanging down
like tails; the foreheads of young men, as well as women, formed into
a kind of furrows with ivory-headed pins; their bellies so cruelly
squeezed with cords, that they suffer as much pain from vanity as the
martyrs suffered for religion? Our ancestors would not have believed,
and I know not if posterity will believe, that it was possible for the
wit of this vain generation of ours to invent so many base, barbarous,
horrid, ridicul