HOMAGE TO THE LORETTE. 
51 
also, the light, the gi-aceful, is called frivolous ; the heavy and 
pedantic is entitled serious. Those unfortunate English ladies who 
have never known how to dress themselves, but who also, for the 
most part, make excellent nurses, treat the Parisians as coquettes, on 
whom every thing sets well, especially the undress costume — that 
primitive dress, so simple, and yet so difficult to wear. The wife 
of the broker, the virtuous lady citizen, who makes so large a con- 
sumption of crinoline, only shows herself so intolerant with regard 
to the levities of the lorette, because the latter is not obliged, like 
her, to add by art to the insufficiency of her charms. The crinoline 
is a tacit homage which virtue pays to beauty — the common to the 
noble. Rich women, of little charm, dress themselves to hide 
themselves. The Parisienne of blood would be less naked without 
her robe. I have had great quarrels on account of so frankly ex- 
pressing my preference for the lorette, merely from the point of 
view of art and of form. 
The disdain of small journals and small wits for the type of the 
lorette, superior, by msany degrees, to the type of the Greek Ye- 
nuses, does not surprise me at all. France is a generous nation, 
but generally endowed with remarkable ignorance in matters aesthe- 
tic, and absurdly prepossessed in favor of every thing foreign. 
I remark that there has been, in all time, an alliance offensive 
and defensive against the lorette, between the moralist and the 
ugly woman. Both have accused her, for example, with intention 
to injure her, of exerting a pernicious influence over lately acquired 
inheritances. These poor people are ignorant that this is precisely 
the most charming side of the part which pretty girls play in 
civilization, which consists in causing to be restored to the mass of 
laborers the parasitical capital levied by the rich upon labor, and 
buried by hoarders, to the great detriment of society. On the 
day when France sank under the triple coalition of English gold, 
Moscovite frost, and the sequestration of grains, which succeeded 
in causing the opening of the campaign of Moscow to be delayed 
six weeks; on that day, when crushed France paid an indemnity 
of fifteen hundred millions to victorious Europe, which did not 
keep a centime of it, it was not the moralists that made the enemy 
disgorge. 
