FANS.

Madame de Genlis, whose general information it would be uncandid to dispute, (though it be so frequently perverted to substantiate her favourite doctrine of the optimism of the past), has attributed the invention of that pretty bauble, the fan, to the excessive modesty of the French ladies before the revolution! In the happy times which preceded that terrible event, the times of Agnes Sorrel, Diana of Poitiers, Montespan, Pompadour, and Du Barry, the fan, it seems, was an object of solute necessity to screen the blushes of the timid and bashful innocents who used them. “In times when the ladies often blushed, and desired to hide their embarrassment and timidity, they carried large fans. They were at once a veil and a countenance.⁠[4] By agitating the fan the female concealed herself. In the present times ladies blush but little, and are not at all timid; they have no desire whatever to conceal themselves, and they carry only invisible fans, (des éventails imperceptibles).”

What a falling off since the times of the Palais Royal, and of the petits soupers at Monceaux, when the king’s mistresses displaced his ministers, and made out plans of campaigns with their rouge, and patches for field marshals; when the de Boufflers and the Luxembourghs, the highest rank and oldest blood in France, were candidates on the list of royal concubinage; when nothing was natural but the children, and nothing moral but that which was past the power of sin. These were the times, the only times, when Frenchwomen blushed, and used fans: and well they might! Let Madame de Genlis compare the Orleans family in the time of Louis the Fourteenth, when the duke poisoned his wife; in the time of the regency, as reported by the Dowager Duchess of Orleans herself; in the time of the husband or lover of her aunt, Madame de Montesson, and in the time of her own friend Egalité; and let her compare these Orleans with the Orleans of the present times, the model of husbands, fathers, citizens, and princes—schooled, not by the lessons given in the cloisters of Belle Chasse, but by those of the world and of the circumstances in which he has lived—and then talk of anti-revolutionary modesty and timidity, and the origin of fans! The fan, like every thing else, applicable to human use, has its origin in necessity. It is purely an oriental fashion, and was invented for personal relief and convenience in those ardent climates, where such portable ventilators and shades were indispensable. A Chinese dandy would no more be seen without his fan, than a Chinese belle; and the fan of the Rajah serves far better purposes, than concealing the blushes and embarrassment of his wives. The fans of the east are made of feathers. The domestic fans of Spain are suspended from the ceiling of the apartments over the tables, from which, during dinner, they keep off insects.

The fan was early introduced into the Roman church,—when the christians removed from the “cool grots and mossy cells,” in which their pure and persecuted sect was obliged to celebrate its devotions, to those superb temples, where the consecrated fans of infallibility, borne before the pope, still shew that even infallibility is no proof against heat.

The fan, likewise, makes a part of the ceremonies of the Greek church; and is placed in the hands of the deacon, on the day of his consecration, in allusion to his office of keeping off the flies from the priests, while they officiate. This must be a sinecure in Russia; but the form survives the want; and woe to the infidel, who, in that region of ice, would propose a chaufferette, to replace the fan established by the church and state, at some glorious and immortal epoch.

Fans came into England, with other eastern objects of use, ornament, or curiosity. The fan with which Queen Elizabeth is said to have graciously tapped an Irish lord lieutenant, (Sir J. Perrot,) would knock down a modern courtier. In the time of Charles the Second a French fan was a fatal gift. That which saved the modesty of Madame de Genlis’s Dianas, purchased too often the honour of the Maid of Honour of the English court. The Duchess of Portsmouth, of course, brought over her own fan from the Palais Royal; from which she was despatched by the Duchess of Orleans, to rule over the heart and councils of the king of England: and, above all, to secure the king’s salvation, by enabling him to live and die “ferme catholique” which he did.⁠[5] The zeal and the views are the same: the form only differs. Other times—other modes.

The fan, however, was not the great rampart thrown up before the citadel of English modesty, under the Stuarts. The modesty of those times had a strange habit of going to see plays so immodest, that it was deemed necessary to cover the face “pour dissimuler son embarras;” and the mask was resorted to, while the fan was simply retained, then, and for a century afterwards, for the only and innocent purpose of

The tactics and manœuvres, necessary for the operating of these double purposes, produced the well known “exercise of the fan,” so delightfully detailed, for the benefit of posterity, in that treasure of a work, the Spectator.

At last, in the decadence of manners, (historically marked in the memoirs of a fan, and its philosophy, as clearly as in the decline and fall of empires,) this elegant little implement of the coquetry of our ancestresses fell to be an article of mere utility—returning, as all things must, to its origin.

Our mothers and aunts appeared, during summer, with a good housewife-like green fan, to keep off the sun: for “l’affaire du parasol,” for which Louis the Fifteenth was obliged to issue a decree, had not yet travelled into Great Britain; and the fan of “ma tante Aurore” was the only fan known to our aunt Tabithas. French philosophy, and a total abandonment of the constitution of 1688, at length banished this instrument as an indispensable part of the toilette. The parasol was found more convenient; and the fan, only employed to “cool the matchless dame” after a walk through a quadrille, or a lounge through a waltz, was reduced to that fairy size to which Madame de Genlis gives the reproachful title of éventail imperceptible. “The history of fashions is not so frivolous as has been imagined; it is, in fact, the history of manners,”—and so far, je suis d’accord, with the venerable, but not very veracious, historian of the “Fan.”