Beauty's Aids Or how to be Beautiful Author:C--- Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: should always be preserved in a state of perfect cleanliness. As to perfumes for the toilet and aromatic vinegars, etc., etc., we shall deal with them in deta... more »il when we have arrived at the face, which is more particularly the province of coquetry, the present chapter being only reserved to the toilet properly speaking. CHAPTER IV THE PERSONAL TOILET Underlinen WE now arrive at the most important question to a pretty woman, who wishes to please. We are going to speak of the private toilet, of under- linen, of all those gew-gaws of lace and batiste which are hidden under the clothes of an elegant woman, to which so much importance is attached nowadays, and with good reason. The times are past now when the essential clothing of a pretty woman consisted in the outside, that which one saw, and the more intimate attire, that which one didn't see, was outrageouslyneglected. The time is indeed remote when at the Court of Louis XIV., in the midst of the refined luxury of the palace of Versailles, and the splendour of courtesans, a woman was laughed at for an unusual refinement of elegance, because her chemises were trimmed with lace, and she was extravagant of clean linen! Our mothers, in fact, paid little enough attention to their underclothing, while they sacrificed themselves willingly to the luxury of the official toilet; there even existed a prejudice, which lasted for a long time, against the virtue of women who showed too much care for their underlinen. This error is yet in existence in certain quarters, and many a virtuous woman would consider it departing from her principles to wear some coquetterie in her " secret attire." Happily we are not like that now, if anything, the opposite. Cast a glance to-day at the wardrobe of a pretty woman and tell me if it would not...« less