livres a pound in money. Hence we have white wigs* and grey stockings,
medallions and gold chains with coloured handkerchiefs and discoloured
tuckers, and chemises de Sappho, which are often worn till they rather
remind one of the pious Queen Isabel, than the Greek poetess.

* Vilate, in his pamphlet on the secret causes of the revolution of
the ninth Thermidor, relates the following anecdote of the origin of
the peruques blondes. "The caprice of a revolutionary female who,
on the fete in celebration of the Supreme Being, covered her own
dark hair with a tete of a lighter colour, having excited the
jealousy of La Demahe, one of Barrere's mistresses, she took
occasion to complain to him of this coquettry, by which she thought
her own charms eclipsed. Barrere instantly sent for Payen, the
national agent, and informed him that a new counter-revolutionary
sect had started up, and that its partizans distinguished themselves
by wearing wigs made of light hair cut from the heads of the
guillotined aristocrats. He therefore enjoined Payen to make a
speech at the municipality, and to thunder against this new mode.
The mandate was, of course, obeyed; and the women of rank, who had
never before heard of these wigs, were both surprized and alarmed at
an imputation so dangerous. Barrere is said to have been highly
amused at having thus solemnly stopped the progress of a fashion,
only becuase it displeased one of his female favourites.--I
perfectly remember Payen's oration against this coeffure, and every
woman in Paris who had light hair, was, I doubt not, intimidated."

This pleasantry of Barrere's proves with what inhuman levity the
government sported with the feelings of the people. At the fall of
Robespierre, the peruque blonde, no longer subject to the empire of
Barrere's favourites, became a reigning mode.