The Empress Eugenie, Her Immoral Drawers III

( Originally Published Early 1900's )

By now, certainly, it is clear enough that a student exploring the subject of drawers has to have his wits about him all the while. Referring to the year 1840 or thereabout, a correspondent in 1874 of a publication called The English-woman's Domestic Magazine writes:

Such tasteless, shapeless, things as the girls' trousers of thirty years ago were by no means universal, as neither my sisters nor I have ever worn them; and at a fashion-able finishing school where I was sent for two years when about sixteen, certainly more than half the young ladies did not wear drawers of any kind.

A colorful excerpt from the letter of another correspondent of this publication for the same year follows:

Those persons who, like myself, can remember the dress of little girls thirty or forty years ago, will recollect that even at that time all girls wore low frocks, fastened behind, and short sleeves, and when they went out of doors they put on a pelisse or a spencer, or a tippet and sleeves. No children except those of quite the higher classes, wore drawers, or trousers as they were then called, and all stays laced behind and had a busk 0f steel for grown people and generally wood for girls. Even in these days, when all girls dress like young ladies, you will generally find that the drawers are only put on, with the other finery, on Sundays.

As the designation "these days" refers to 1874, blossoming girls at that period presumably were sufficiently robust not to require drawers—except on Sundays.

In respect to the practice of wearing leggings: this fashion, while it flourished, appears to have been more generally adhered to by small girls; those as young as five or six are described as very often wearing the short "drawers" which terminated above the knee, together with extremely short bouffant skirts, the legs otherwise bare except for open-work socks, the spectacle tipped off with strap shoes. The little drawers, so called, seem to have been designed as the display feature of the costume of these innocent tots, arrayed with touching maternal solicitude.

In contradistinction to the fashion for younger girls, real drawers and stockings were the prerogative of the "miss." When the drawers of a lass ceased to show beneath her skirts, she was considered to be a grown-up girl. In other words, at the period of her development when, before the bob came in, she "put up her hair," a young lady, so to say, put up her drawers.

In illustration of this social mandate, it is interesting to turn to a novelist who, by virtue of his directness, has been accounted the truest chronicler of English fiction. Outside of his clergy, Anthony Trollope's young women are best, many of them representing what we conceive the typical English girl to be.

"They were," he writes in a novel published in 1862, "Gertrude and Linda Woodward, and not the Miss Woodwards: their drawers came down below their frocks, instead of their frocks below their drawers." Later, in describing the youngest sister, aged fourteen, is this: "And Katie was there, very pretty and bonny, still childish, with her short dress and long trousers." And in Barchester Towers we find a "little girl about eight years of age" overdressed in the fashions of the time: "Her dress was all flounces, and stuck out from her as though the object were to make it lie off horizontally from her little hips. It did not nearly cover her knees; but this was atoned for by a loose pair of drawers, which seemed made throughout of lace; then she had on pink stockings."

Nearly a score of years after these bits of portraiture, a London newspaper spoke of a "short-frocked pantaletted contingent of girls." And at about the same time, far from the English scene, Mark Twain in Life on the Mississippi wrote, "The young ladies, as children, in slippers and scalloped Pantalettes." As late as 1887 the author of a volume en-titled Lazy Minstrel, J. Ashby Sterry, had a Song of School-girls containing these lines :

Come the dainty dimpled pets,
With their tresses all in nets,
And their peeping pantalettes
Just in view.

It is interesting to note the symbolical connotation taken on by the word pantalettes, similar to that acquired by the name of another feminine garment—the petticoat. As an instance of that, he reminds us, Irving in Tales of a Traveller wrote, "There was nobody knew better how to make his way among the petticoats than my grandfather." And later, among those of humorous vernacular, such a sense came to be given to the word skirt, as, "He was out last night with a skirt."

As an instance of the term pantalettes used to mean a young woman or a girl, we find that in 1878 a turbulent English journalist wrote for a London society paper he founded a set of satiric verses containing the line, "Sterry, the pet of Pantalettes, the laureate of frills." The same J. Ashby aforesaid.

A gentlewoman who has now blithely encompassed some three score and ten years tells the Professor that in her youth her Aunt Matilda's drawers were "so long that their ruffles often showed below her dress." The dress, he learned, touched the floor; and Aunt Matilda was a reigning belle. This ruffled garment must have been a hangover from the older pantalettes and closely akin to the drawers discussed by the lovers of Oreley, which "reached to the ankle."

The Britannica states that drawers were added to the Englishwoman's wardrobe of underclothing "in the nineteenth century." Yes, but just about when in the course of that hundred years ? This is the pronouncement: "Many women of the better class only adopted drawers at the end of the forties, and it may be presumed that the fashion reached the humble sort at a much later date." So, after all, what are we to do about the lovely story of Eugenie sending her immoral drawers to England in "the sixties"?

The answer, the Professor surmises, may be discovered in the relationship to be found, in one respect, between the Empress Eugenie and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. In elucidation of his point he presents an article which appeared in Punch, June 18, 1859, quoting it in full because of its hand-some flourish:

IMPERATRICE DE LA FRANCE ET DE LA MODE

It is to the wife of Louis Napoleon that the fashionable world is indebted for the elegant invention of the crinoline. Again, it is to the same imperial inspiration that the ladies have reason to be grateful for the endowment of that sumptuous and becoming colour, which modistes and Mantallinis delight in calling Mauve. How many more tasteful creations have sprung from that imaginative brain, our milliners and Jenkinses know infinitely better than we can tell; but we think we have said amply sufficient to warrant us in placing the jewelled crown of Fashion on the fair head of the accomplished daughter of the Comtesse de Montijo, and whom Scotland is not too proud to own as one of her loveliest children. In grace and conception, in beauty and imagination, it must be willingly acknowledged that the real Empress of Fashion is Eugenie. Her power is absolute, for her rule is one of love, expressed in the prettiest forms by all, from the viscountess to the washer-woman. We ask the ladies, the most impartial judges in the difficult art of personal adornment, if they can point their little finger to any other Empress, whose edicts are more cheerfully followed by her millions upon millions of admiring subjects. It is said that there is the love of Fashion in the heart of every woman. Taking this to be the truth, and not satire, it is therefore perfectly clear—much clearer than the Koh-i-Noor diamond—that Eugenie, as the undisputed "EMPRESS OF FASHION," must live in the hearts of all those whose greatest happiness it is on this earth to pay loving obedience, even to a matter of slavery, to her.

The celebrated hat, her immoral drawers, the "elegant" crinoline, the color mauve, all these "inventions"—and how many more "tasteful creations" ?—associated with the name of the "undisputed Empress of Fashion" ! Now, as we have seen, the crinoline of the Victorian era had its spring (if, the Professor remarks, he may be allowed the pun) in the sixteenth century with the appearance of the vertugadin or farthingale. And various legends have connected several celebrated ladies with this great innovation in feminine costume.

How does Whistler come in? Somewhere in Trilby Du Maurier, in his portrait of Whistler, said that so great had become the master's reputation as a wit that anyone could get a laugh for a story by the expedient of prefixing it with the phrase, "As Whistler once said." And so it came about that any excellent bon mot, whatever its source, within a short time was generally attributed to him whose signature was the Butterfly.