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ODIOUS
CREATURE OF HABIT After she was widowed, the Duchess
of Berry took an apartment in a Carmelite convent. The nuns'
simpler mode of dress may have had a strong appeal to her
after the sartorial demands of Rion. wikimedia.org photo
sion is sacred to anyone who cares about clothes, as
the Duchess clearly did. In 1715, before she came under
her Rion’s spell, she even organized a meeting of
the “reigning fashion plates, as well as the most clever
tailors and the most celebrated couturieres” to plot “a
fashion coup,” according to Joan DeJean, in her book
The Essence of Style (2007). These ladies of the French
court demanded that they get first crack at all the new
styles – a precursor to Fashion Week that was more like
"Fashion Cheats."
That the Duchess, said to have had her own way
from an early age, should become subservient to any
man is strange enough. But when those who knew
him tell us he was clearly hit with le baton laid (the ugly
stick), it’s downright incroyable. Stendhal writes that
he was “a short, stout lad with a round, pale face, so
thickly covered with pimples that it bore no bad resemblance
to an abscess.” The Princess Palatine Elizabeth
Charlotte, a memoirist and royal busybody of the
day, found that he was not just another ugly face, but
rather much worse: “I cannot conceive how any one
can love this rogue: he has neither face nor figure; he
has the appearance of a water-sprite, for he has a green
and yellow countenance ... one would take him for a
baboon rather than a Gascon, as he is. He is foppish
and not in the least intelligent; he has a big head shut
in between broad shoulders; and one sees by his eyes
that his sight is not very good.” Perhaps the Duchess
of Berry’s sight was even worse? The cause of her infatuations
remain a mystery, as it was, H. Noel Williams
tells us, even to Rion, who “found himself the object
of a passion such as few men so shabbily treated by
Nature can ever have been fated to inspire and which
must have occasioned him as much astonishment as
joy.”
Of course, we can’t discount the possibility that the
lusty Duchess thought Rion’s sexual prowess was also
incroyable. According to Princess Palatine, he was said
to be especially “amorous,” and a notoriously goatish
lady of the time had spent two days “shut up with
him.” However, we don’t know whether Rion spent
most of those 48 hours jumping her bones or rifling
through her closet – for future reference in case she,
too, were to fall under his sartorial spell.
Due to the complexity of French royal ladies’ outfits
worn at the time, Rion’s options for messing with the
Duchess were as varied as a medieval torturer’s devices.
Women wore both overskirts and underskirts, and
each was usually trimmed with embroidery. So, Rion
could first call for a blue overskirt with a single border
of silver embroidery, and a white underskirt with a
double border of gold-and-silk embroidery. Then, just
when the Duchess – or more accurately, her servants
– had slipped the white underskirt over her hips, he
could revise his instructions and demand a white overskirt
with a double border of gold-and-silk embroidery
and a blue overskirt with a single border of silver embroidery.
He must have had a field day with the tiers
of ribbons placed on each side of the bodice, often in
alternating colors, called echelles or ladders. I can just
see him snickering over his cafe au lait and croissants
as he went through a whole crayon box of colors while
changing his orders for the Duchess’s ladders. Cuffs
were such an important part of a woman’s “carefully
arranged toilet,” we learn from Augustin Challamel in
his History of Fashion in France (1882), that one woman
of means, who was not even under the control of a
man, spent a whole hour putting them on. If that was
the case, could the Duchess’s cuffs have possibly been
good to go before lunchtime?
If I have sympathy for the Duchess, I feel nothing
less than pity for the servants who attended her
while she got dressed. No sooner would they finish
buttoning or tying one of their lady’s garments than
See a brief video
about 18th-century
French clothing at
artenol.org.
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