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By Root 786 0

Egypt, the fashion now was for rings or bracelets made out of fragments of exploded shells or copper bands from 75 millimetre ammunition, and for cigarette-lighters constructed out of two English pennies to which a soldier, in his dugout, had succeeded in giving a patina so beautiful that the profile of Queen Victoria looked as if it had been drawn by the hand of Pisanello; and it was also because they never stopped thinking of the dear boys, so they said, that when one of their own kin fell they scarcely wore mourning for him, on the pretext that “their grief was mingled with pride,” which permitted them to wear a bonnet of white English crêpe (a bonnet with the most charming effect, “authorising every hope” and “inspired by an invincible confidence in final victory”) and to replace the cashmere of former days by satin and chiffon, and even to keep their pearls, “while observing the tact and propriety of which there is no need to remind Frenchwomen.”

The Louvre and all the other museums were closed, and when one saw at the head of an article in a newspaper the words: “A sensational exhibition,” one could be sure that the exhibition in question was not one of paintings but of dresses, of dresses moreover which aimed at reviving “those refined joys of art of which the women of Paris have for too long been deprived.” So it was that fashion and pleasure had returned, fashion, in the absence of the arts, apologising for its survival as the arts had done in 1793, in which year the artists exhibiting in the revolutionary Salon proclaimed that, though “stern Republicans might find it strange that we should occupy ourselves with the arts when Europe united in coalition is besieging the soil of liberty,” they would be wrong. The same sort of thing was said in 1916 by the dressmakers, who, with the self-conscious pride of artists, affirmed that “to create something new, to get away from banality, to assert an individual character, to prepare for victory, to evolve for the post-war generations a new formula of beauty, such was the ambition that tormented them, the chimera that they pursued, as would be apparent to anyone who cared to visit their salons, delightfully installed in the Rue de la …, where to efface by a note of luminous gaiety the heavy sadness of the hour seems to be the watchword, with the discretion, naturally, that circumstances impose.”

“The sadness of the hour”—it was true—“might prove too strong for feminine energies, were it not that we have so many lofty examples of courage and endurance to contemplate. So, as we think of our warriors dreaming in their trenches of more comfort and more pretty things for the girl they have left behind them, we shall not pause in our ever more strenuous efforts to create dresses that answer to the needs of the moment. The vogue”—and what could be more natural?—“is for the fashion-houses of our English allies, and the rage this year is the barrel-dress, which, with its charming informality, gives us all an amusing little cachet of rare distinction. We may even say that one of the happiest consequences of this sad war will be,” added the delightful chronicler (and one expected: “the return of our lost provinces” or “the reawakening of national sentiment”)—“one of the happiest consequences of this sad war will be that we have achieved some charming results in the realm of fashion, without ill-considered and unseemly luxury, with the simplest materials, that we have created prettiness out of mere nothings. To the dresses of the great designers, reproduced in a number of copies, women prefer just now dresses made at home, which affirm the intelligence, the taste and the personal preferences of the individual.”

As for charity, the thought of all the miseries that had sprung from the invasion, of all the wounded and disabled, meant naturally that it was obliged to develop forms “more ingenious than ever before,” and this meant that the ladies in tall turbans were obliged to spend the latter part of the afternoon at “teas” round a bridge table, discussing the news from the “front,” while