# The Ugly-Girl Papers/Chapter 13
### CHAPTER XIII.

* Madame Celnart's Works of the Toilet.
* Literature of Beauty.
* Cares of the Toilet.
* Arts of Coiffure and Lacing.
* How to Hold a Needle Gracefully.
* Iris Powder for Tresses.
* Arts of Italian Women.
* Depilatory used in Harems.
* Spirit of Pyrêtre.
* Herbs used by Greek Women.
* Mexican Pomade.
* Dusky Perfumed Marbles.
* Lost Perfumes.
* Sultanas' Lotion.
* Brilliant Paste for Neck and Arms.
* Baking Enamel.
If ever a woman deserved a seat in the French Academy for the value of her literary labors to her kind, it was Madame Celnart.
The works of this lively author on manners, dress, cosmetics, and kindred topics no less interesting to her sex, are found in eight small octavos in their native French. The lady was an industrious and brilliant writer on themes of the toilet, the household, and deportment, on which Mrs. Farrar, author of The Young Lady's Friend, of our mothers' ​time, and Mrs. Beeton, the editor of The Englishwoman's Magazine, in our day, have succeeded her with much adornment but hardly equal scope. Madame Celnart talks—one can hardly imagine her holding a pen—like a Parisian, with empressement, with drollery, precision, and inimitable sprightliness. Her lectures sound like those of a gentle old beauty, secure in the charm of her finished manner against the loss of her earlier fascinations, telling the secrets of her age to a younger generation, with half a smile at their readiness to seize these arts, and seriously pointing out the most graceful or the most modest way of doing things, with the concern of one who is conscious that grace and prudence do not come to all her sex by nature. Imagine the arch gentleness with which she opens her work on the toilet in such easy, sparkling guise as this:
"Je viens de feuilleter les arts de plaire, les livres de beauté, et autres évangiles des courtisane," which may be freely translated, "I come to speak of the arts of pleasing, the literature ​of beauty, and other evangels of coquetry." She has a well-bred curl of disdain for "une allure bourgeoise mesquine," but with the reverence of a true Frenchwoman, whose creed is her mirror, she pronounces her work "consacré à la toilette, et la conversation de la beauté." These duties she divides with serions precision into the "soins de la toilette," which include cosmetic arts, and "l'art de se coiffer, lacer, et chausser." It was indeed an art, in the time of hundred-boned corsets without clasps, to lace one's self, and in the days of classic sandals to put on one's shoes. She is as exact in all her details as a school-mistress, though one fancies a covert smile on her wise face as she rallies the young demoiselles who dreaded the bath—because it was so cold? Oh no; but because their modesty could not endure the baring of their person even to themselves. Such, she gravely advises, may save their "pudeur" by bathing in a peignoir. One inevitably recalls Lola Montez's dedication of her famous Book of Beauty, "To all men and ​women who are not afraid of themselves," on encountering these French demoiselles with their conventual susceptibility.
The graceful preceptress goes on with directions for sitting, for holding one's needle, for dancing, and holding one's petticoats out of the mud. Nobody will allow that these hints are superfluous who notices the varied awkwardness which women fall into who are habitually thoughtless on these points. Some of these nice customs may have been carried to our shores, possibly with Rochambeau's French ladies at Newport or Salem. I remember hearing one of the fine Newburyport ladies, who answer to the description of gentlewomen still, maintain earnestly that it was most graceful to "sew with a long point"—that is, to push the needle nearly its whole length through at each stitch, instead of pulling it out, so to speak, by the nose. And she was right, as you can verify by the next sewing you take up.
In the time of Madame Celnart, fine ladies ​used to powder their hair with the dust of Florentine iris, which gave their love-breathing tresses the violet odor of spring. A pleas ant idea; but their iris, our orris root, must have been a trifle fresher than comes to this country. It makes us sure that the beauties of Titian's and Guido's times were real women, to know that they steeped their tresses in bleaching liquids and dyes, and spread their locks in the sun for hours to gain the coveted golden tinge; and the hair of the Bella Donna herself might have caught part of its enchantment from the sprinkling of violet powder that lent its waves a soul. Those immortal beauties would have canonized Lubin had he been alive with his pomades and perfumes in their time. Celnart was a courageous advocate of cosmetics, or else she was wise enough to put the worst first, for one of her earliest recipes is this depilatory, which is not at all quoted by way of recommendation. It is the Oriental Rusma, a depilatory used in harems:
​Page:Ugly-girl papers.djvu/151 ​Page:Ugly-girl papers.djvu/152 ​Page:Ugly-girl papers.djvu/153 ​Page:Ugly-girl papers.djvu/154 ​Page:Ugly-girl papers.djvu/155 ​Page:Ugly-girl papers.djvu/156 ​An elegant preparation for whitening the face and neck is made of terebinth of Mecca, three grains; oil of sweet almonds, four ounces; spermaceti, two drachms; flour of zinc, one drachm; white wax, two drachms; rose-water, six drachms. Mix in a water-bath, and melt together. The harmless mineral white is fixed in the pomade, or what we would call cold cream, and is applied with the greatest ease and effect. It must be to some preparation of this subtle sort that the lustrous whiteness of certain much-admired fashionable complexions is due. It is a cheap enamel, without the supposed necessity of baking, which, by the way, is such a blunder that I wonder people of sense persist in speaking of it as if it could be a fact.