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| In the painting below, a 3-year-old princess is dressed in clothes that are beautiful but not very comfortable. She wears
a stiff corset to keep her back straight. Courtesy of the Musée du Louvre, Paris/High Museum, Atlanta |
What if you lived in France during the 1600s and 1700s?
If you were a kid in the 17th or 18th centuries, everything about your life – from your clothes to what you eat – would have been very different.
from the November 27, 2007 edition
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Even very small children wore fancy clothes. "The Infanta Margarita" is one of the greatest paintings in the art show. It was painted by the famous Spanish painter Diego Velásquez in 1654. Margarita, a 3-year-old princess, has great, sad eyes, golden hair, and a gorgeous satin and lace gown. In spite of its beauty, an outfit like that would have been heavy and uncomfortable for a little girl – or even a grown-up – to wear.
Margarita is actually wearing a corset – an undergarment that cinches in the waist and can make it difficult to breathe. Corsets were worn not only to make the waist smaller but, because it was so tight and stiff, to make a woman's or girl's back straighter. Corsets were made from heavy cloth, whale bones, and laces that tied tightly down the back. Imagine a 3-year-old trying to toddle around the palace in clothes like that! Maybe that's why the princess looks sad.
Another portrait, "Child With A Top," by French painter Jean-Siméon Chardin, shows a 9-year-old boy with powdered hair (maybe a wig?). He's also wearing a fancy coat, vest, and shirt. And these are just regular, everyday clothes. The boy is standing before a desk that holds formidable-looking books, a quill pen, ink, and rolled-up paper. The painting seems to indicate that he didn't get to play outside much. His mother may have been mad if he got those clothes dirty!
Just think how much more comfortable clothes are today. We're also much more comfortable because many of us have air conditioning in summer, and in winter, our houses are much more snug than any palace used to be.
Back to that hot chocolate treat: Chocolate came from the New World and was hard to obtain in Europe. So when Queen Marie Leczinska's son was born, she received a most unusual and dainty gift. It was called a necessaire.
It was a kind of royal picnic set that was used to serve the queen and her guests that rare and expensive treat she adored – hot chocolate from Mexico.
Not only was chocolate rare, sugar was, too. And one way of showing off how rich you were was to have lots of sugar added to your sweet treats. The richer you were, the more sugar you could afford! The queen's tiny china cups must have held very sweet beverages indeed!
Marie Antoinette was queen of France from 1775 to 1793. When she was in her early teens, she became the wife of the man who was to become the French king Louis XVI and moved from her native Austria to his country.
There's a marble bust of her in the exhibit (see opposite page). It shows her trademark "big hair" and her fashion sense. Marie Antoinette changed fashion in France: She refused to wear a corset (read more in the main article), she invented the styles of shoes known as pumps and mules, and she made simpler, more comfortable clothing fashionable.
She was also a bathing trailblazer! She bathed in tubs of milk and rose petals. This made bathing more popular at the royal court.
But Marie Antoinette wasn't well-liked in France. She was accused of excessive spending and extravagant living, as well as promotion of Austria's interests. A popular – but untrue – story has her saying, when told that the peasants had no bread, "Let them eat cake." But it turns out that she actually gave bread to the poor and was known for acts of charity.
Yet, the tide of public opinion was against her. And this ultimately helped fuel the French Revolution and led to her execution in 1793.
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