"The Queen is the leader of fashion. Her dresses - about 150 each year - are made by Rose Bertin, an expensive but necessary modiste with premises on the rue Saint-Honoré. Court dress is a sort of portable prison, with its bones, its vast hoops, its trains, its stiff brocades and armoured trimmings. Hairdressing and millinery are curiously fused, and vulnerable to the caprice du moment; George Washington's troops, in battle order, sway in pomaded towers, and English-style informal gardens are set into matted locks. True, the Queen would like to break away from all this, institute an age of liberty: of the finest gauzes, the softest muslins, of simple ribbons and floating shifts. It is astonishing to find that simplicity, when conceived in exquisite taste, costs just as much as the velvets and satins ever did. The Queen adores, she says, all that is natural - in dress, in etiquette. What she adores even more are diamonds; her dealings with the Paris firm of Böhmer and Bassenge are the cause of widespread and damaging scandal. In her apartments she throws out furniture, tears down hangings, orders new - then moves elsewhere.
'I am terrified of being bored,' she says."
From A Place of Greater Safety
