opposition. Decamps's absurd cartoon
of Charles X hunting, which we have reproduced, is a not unfaithful
presentation of the state of public opinion concerning this purblind
monarch.

All these revolutions in the political world were, of course, followed
in the, perhaps, minor world of fashion. _Souvent femme varie_, and
_Toute passe, tout casse, tout lasse._ "Paris, in its revulsion from the
severity of the earlier Revolution," says an unsympathetic English
writer, "took refuge in the primitive license of the Greeks. 'It was a
beautiful dress,' says a lady in a popular modern comedietta; 'I used to
keep it in a glove-box.' The costume of a _belle_ of the _Directoire_
was equally portable.... With the triumph of the Empire, a more martial
and masculine tone prevailed. So the _Parisienne_ cast off her Grecian
robes--a comparatively easy process--and put on the whole armor of the
tailor-made. She wore cloth instead of diaphanous gauze, and her gowns
were cut with a more austere simplicity. Then came the Restoration and
the Romantic movement, and the great days of 1830. Woman read her
Chateaubriand and her Victor Hugo and her Byron, and became sentimental.
It was _bon-ton_ to languish a good deal, and the dressmakers were
required to find a suitable costume for the occupation. They proved
equal to the demand.... In England, these vestments are called Early
Victorian, and are scoffed at, together with the horse-hair sofas and
glass lustres of the period.

"At any rate, it did not last. Nothing lasts in feminine fashions....
Romanticism and sentiment died out or became _bourgeois_. Gay Paris grew
alert, lively, animated, dashing. The lady who used to be called a
_lionne_ when people were reading Murger and De Musset, displaced the
_femme incomprise_. The 'lioness' was not unlike the vigorous young
person of a later epoch. She was distinctly loud in her manners and free
and easy in her conversation.... At any rate, she was a healthier type
than the pleasure-loving matron of the Second Empire, whose life was one
whirl of unwholesome excitement. The vulgarity of thought and conduct,
the destruction of all standards of dignity, which characterized the
regime of Louis Napoleon's stock-jobbing adventurers, were reflected in
the dress of the women. Never was female attire more extravagantly
absurd.... Man, with all his tolerance, could not really like the Paris
fashions of the Second Empire, and he might have found consolation for