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CHAPTER XIV.

THE SKIN AS A BEAUTIFUL TISSUE.

DISTINGUISHED French author tells us that "to have

just enough plumpness, not a whit too much nor too little, is with women the study of their lives.". Being a Parisian of good society, literary, a bon-vivant, who had had fear for himself of the encroachment of obesity, a fatherly adviser of ladies of his acquaintance as to the course to pursue to check tendency to it, and, lastly, a connection of Madame Récamier's, the most beautiful woman of her time, he may justly be deemed to possess a combination of advantages entitling him to judge of beauty, and of all that can increase or mar its attractiveness. This author, Brillat Savarin, with whom the reader had better make acquaintance if he does not already know him, discourses eloquently on the devastating inroads which obesity makes in female beauty. Better by far is it, in our opinion, too, for a woman possessed of any physical attractions, to be as thin as a rail rather than for her to descend to the commonplaceness of fat, destructive of every line and every hue of beauty. Yet thousands of women would seem, through their addiction to the eating of sweets and other food conducive to obesity, and their avoidance of exercise, deliberately to invite and welcome its inroads. Savarin says of its effects in the fair sex :

There is a sort of obesity which is confined to the stomach; I have never observed this among women. As they are generally of delicate fibre, when obesity attacks them it spares nothing. . . . I belong to the other class. I have none the less regarded my stomach as a redoubtable enemy. I have conquered it, and fixed it at the majestic type.

We can claim the advantage over Savarin of having seen in women the type of obesity which he says he never met with, but it is, undoubtedly, very rare. He is right in his observation that

when obesity attacks women, it does, owing to their less compactness of fibre as compared with that of men, tend to involve the whole person.

Obesity and complexion are intimately related to each other. A fat person of either sex has lost the contours which produce delicate effects of light and shade, and are indispensable not only to delicacy of form, but to subtle play of color. All is tense, rigid, suffused with the same tint on a rounded surface, without the slightest fineness of modeling. The expression of a fat face is as distinctive as is the expression of a dwarf or a giant. The surface, being rounded, and uniformly suffused with color, not broken up into tints with delicate transitions, has ceased to be attractive from the point of view of beauty. The best that one can say of a complexion of the sort is what is often said of it,— that it is a nice, clean, fresh-looking skin. It produces that impression through its excessively tense smoothness of appearance, but that impression is not one of beauty. If cleanliness is desirable, the appearance of it is desirable; but the freshness that suggests cleanliness is not beauty, for cleanliness itself does not constitute beauty. At best, the fat face affords the humblest gratification to the sight from perception of ruddy smoothness, destitute of distinction; and it is frequently coupled with vulgarity of expression. Fat equally debases the figure, destroying all its lines of beauty, suggesting incapacity of motion without effort, besides diminishing the feeble power of locomotion possessed by human beings, and rendering the simplest movements painfully devoid of ease and grace.

Putting undue plumpness, amounting to fatness of face, out of consideration, it is to be remarked that mere clearness and redness of skin do not constitute a complexion of the highest order. If that were the case, the typical English milkmaid's ruddy hue of health would be the most beautiful complexion in the world. But pink and white, merely as such, especially if

they have very distinctly marked boundaries, are always destitute of the distinction which marks the ideal complexion. Neither, although it has lately been the fashion, is the colorless, creamy-tinted complexion the highest type. It is, however, as to its effect, the very opposite of that of the milkmaid pink and white, giving rare distinction. It lacks transparency, however; so that, while it escapes wholly the vulgarity of the other, it does not possess its inestimable advantage in clearness.

The inference to be drawn from observation of all types is that what constitutes the ideal complexion, whether blonde or brunette, is the fineness of the outer skin, the disposition of its. blood-supply, and its translucency. Of all Madame Récamier's traits of physical beauty, none seem to have struck her contemporaries so much as the wonderful effect of her complexion. It stood the severe test of the closest inspection as she appeared in open calêche, or face to face with the throngs that surged through the public halls and promenades of Paris in the rebound from the terrible days of the Reign of Terror. It stood even the test of jealousy and envy, and remained unscathed. Because we could not elsewhere find so authentic an example for our purpose, we shall continue to cite the case of Madame Récamier as a wellknown and accepted queen of beauty, by way of exemplifying what we have to say of complexion of the highest type. To this effect we quote here the testimony of another beauty of that period as to the effect that Madame Récamier's appearance always produced. The speaker is Madame Regnault de Saint-Jean-d'Angely, at a time when she, no longer young, had retired from

the

gay world. She says: "I was at an entertainment where my appearance attracted and captivated all present, when Madame Récamier arrived. The brilliancy of her eyes, which, nevertheless, were not very large, the inconceivable whiteness of her shoulders, eclipsed, crushed everything; she dazzled. At the end of a moment, it is true, good judges returned to their

allegiance to me." Probably the world never heard that they did except through this phrase. The testimony as it stands from a celebrated beauty is convincing; we can make our own allowances for the weakness of vanity.

Translucency of skin, indispensable as it is to a perfect complexion, may, however, reach a point where it becomes a defect, as we sometimes see in the wasting of consumption, where the veins show in the temples and elsewhere as if painted in blue water-color on the outside of the skin. But, in an otherwise fine skin, translucency to a proper degree is indispensable to the most perfect manifestation of its beauty. In sickness the skin is not as it is in health. It becomes either dull, opaque, and lustreless, or else, in certain diseases, shrunken to a vitreouslooking, transparent membrane. With health, its due translu cency and brilliancy return. To what degree it is capable of transmitting light, one can ascertain by placing any child sidewise, so that the light from a near window shall show back of the ear. We well remember a picture in the Dusseldorf gallery, in New York, where this feature of beauty was exhibited in a figure of Desdemona seated with her back to a casement, listening to the Moor, the ear through which the light appeared being illuminated like a pink-tinted shell. So, in a delicate ear, we can see light through a thickness of cartilage and two thicknesses of skin.

We yield to the temptation to speak here further of Madame Récamier, in view of the base uses to which her name has been put in connection with cosmetics, leaving the popular impression in this country that she was little but an animated, pretty doll. To the best of our knowledge, Brillat Savarin never mentioned her at all in his writings. The only occasion in which he seems publicly to have appeared with her was that on which General Moreau, with various other persons, was on trial for conspiracy, Napoleon being First Consul, when she caused a sensation by

appearing in court because General Moreau had missed her as one of his sympathizing friends. The time was not devoid of terror, although the Reign of Terror had ceased. Some, even of the partisans of the First Consul, reprobated the murder of the Duc d'Enghien.

Madame Récamier, escorted by Brillat Savarin, made her appearance in court, in total disregard of what she knew would be the displeasure of Napoleon at her appearance there. From first to last of his career, all efforts to induce her to identify herself with the new régime were fruitless. The key-note of her whole life was devotion to her friends. Chateaubriand, and others almost equally eminent, received the benefit of her profound knowledge of the world, and indulged in the charm of her intimate friendship. Her salon in Paris was the ground where clashing interests could meet without warring, where she presided calmly indifferent to Napoleon, until her devotion to Madame de Staël led to her own exile. Madame de Staël stands to the world as the strong mind on which Madame Récamier relied, when the truth is, that in all crises Madame Récamier bore herself with infinite courage and discretion, and Madame de Staël it was who in her own time of greatest need leaned on her.

With all her gifts of mind and character, Madame Récamier possessed, in addition, great personal beauty-so great that the renown of it has led in the public mind to the overshadowing by it of her other claims to admiration, in superior judgment, great amiability, and an almost unrivaled unselfishness. An observer of her time painted her portrait as follows:

Her figure was supple and elegant, with fine neck and shoulders and a gracefully-poised head. She had spare, but charmingly-modeled arms; wavy, chestnut hair; a small, well-shaped mouth, fine teeth, and a delicately-formed nose of the French type. Lastly, she had a brilliancy of complexion which threw everything else into the shade. The general expression of her face was one of candor, with just a tinge of mischievousness, the whole effect being irresistibly attractive.

This was the woman who, without being distinctively intel