The Jersey City news. (Jersey City [N.J.]) 1889-1906, 1890-06-23
FAIR BUT FALSE.
A Short History of the Introduction
and Use of False Hair.

-
In the past woman put her foot on
the head of the serpent, says Theo-
dore de Banville, today she has
put it upon the head Of man. Not
only has she reduced him to slavery,
which amounts to nothing-for a well
| dressed andwell fed slave may be alto
gether happy, if he does not yearn for
freedom-but she has forced him to
go about uniformly clad in black to
| express that he is in mourning for his
lost sovereignity, while she decks her.
self in purple, silk and satin OF every
hue. feathers. jewels and all that in
dicates the intoxication, the dazzle
and the tumult of joy.
But the enemy once vanuuished the
savage fails to scalp him. Hence
woman has scalped her enemy, within
the of her means, be it UNI
derstood, and taking into account the
conditions of modern life. OF course,
she does not actually take his hair,
since he has none to speak of, but she
has usurped, requisitioned and turned
to her own use all the ~tresses, all the
braids and all the curls, condemning
man, the workman, the toller, b
serf, to show his Uranium as bald as
the speech of a member OF the French
Academy. And adorned thus with
wavy locks as black as night OF as re-
spIendent as the sun, she looks down
from the boxes of the theatre with in
sulting contempt upon the orchestra
stalls, where the mems skulls resem-
BILE a sea of polished billiard balls,
which gives ground to suppose that
I1.aooo %l,a oNr1rfrxr IF D1Ennnru and
Monsieur Scribe, produces only Es-
chyluses!
After a definite conquest of Gaul
the women began to assume real inn
portance in Roman society; hence
they hastened to have wigs made for
themselves out of the iaxen hair cut
from the heads of the Gallic females.
1t was to accomplish this result that
800 towns had been taken by assault,
800 nations defeated and 1000, 900 of
men killed or made prisoners. But
the Roman ladies then realized a
highly desirable ideal, for they were
able to show the patricians and actors,
by whom they were beloved, the
brunette adorned with blonde hair,
which was the rage and the charming
fad.
In the seventeenth century man was
the master; at that period adventur-
ers welded ~princesses, the males wore
embroidered coats and satin pour
points covered with ribbons; they
triumphed. Apollo's car was drawn
by women, and in token of tyranny
and victory he kept for himself all the
wigs, the blonde curls of which mag
nificently swept his white or scarlet
coat and the glittering steel of his
cuirass.
Before, at the time of that superb
renaissance when woman reigned by
right of beauty, and also by that of
science, for il will be remembered that
Marie Stuart, at the age of fourteen
years, in the hall of the Louvre, pub
licly acclaimed "a speeche in Latyn
which she had maydenin the presence
of King Henry, the Queen and all the
court-and particularly by the grace
of the poets, the immortal Ronsards,
Marguerite de Navarro, so beautiful
that LasQui, the Polish Ambassador,
spoke of putting out his eyes that he
might no longer see after having seen
her, made innumerable wigs in order
to show that everything belonged to
her.
We are told by Tallemant des
Reaux that she kept a troupe of
blonde pages whose locks were cut off
to deck that divine head. We should
have been very much less informed
had we had only Brantome, for he
had vowed to his Queen an idolatry
beside which that of Monsieur Cousin
for Madame Chevreuse and for Ma
dame de Longueville was totally in
significant. In fact. the good Bourde-
vile admits the wigs, since there was
no means of doing otherwise, but,
through excess of alteration. he in
vents for Marguerite a head-dress
which she never possessed. II have
seen her also deck herself sometimes
with her natural hair, without adding
to it any a~rtifice of the wig-maker,n
says he b~razenly, and this pious false
hood in favor of the adored Mar
guerite will bring tears to your eyes
even at this distance of time.
In 1880, in the romantic period, the
glory OF the men effaced that of the
women; in consequence, false hair was
forbidden to the trembling Eloas, as
slender and flexible as the willows, so
it happened that, forced by her
genius to remain eternally young, the
greatest modern actress, to conceal
her white locks, was compelled to en-
ploy q dye with a base of lead, which
entering into the pores OF the skin
acted as a poison and killed her.
But, under the Second Empire, the
women took their full revenge. They
directed politics, named the officials
and raised their little sofas to the dig
nifty of thrones. The first act Of their
reign was to inaugurate the wearing
of wigs of all hues, red, blonde,
yellow, fresh butter color,
pink, corn color, sometimes even
violet, and thus award themselves I'M
alterable beauty. 1t is true that the
actresses started the fashion, but the
great ladies were not slow to follow in
their footsteps. One OF the first
actresses, who frankly, audaciously
assumed the entire wig, with a flower
stuck straight up in it like a tree amid
the grass, was that beautiful Blanche,
who died SO young and whom we saw
in a wild operetta by Herve, armed
like a Minerva with a BASQUE and
cuirass Of gold. She had SO many
imitators that false hair has today be-
come a recognized portion of a lady's
costume which she changes with her
dresses.
ne People complain, and with reason.
of the lot of certain There
n~u fhA-1 -, %1,t, A.1o4 askx~ Dcy.