Elegance may be defined as “always suggest[ing] refinement, polish, propriety, especially as the result of breeding or nice selective instinct” [emphasis Etiquetteer’s]. Etiquetteer has been meditating on a few elegant aspects of daily life we might do more to bring back. Most of this list, a little surprisingly, has to do with dinner or coffee.
Deportment
Were you hectored by your parents to stand or sit up straight? This is why. Etiquetteer thinks of deportment mostly as posture, but it is really about how you hold all of yourself (your “carriage”) and how you move. The late Duchess of Devonshire, née Deborah Mitford, summed up Etiquetteer’s attitude when writing about tiaras: “Tiaras elevate the wearer, making her look more distinguished and taller because of the unaccustomed posture (which used to be taught as ‘deportment,’ long forgotten in this sloppy age.”*) Deportment is a cure for sloppiness.
Don’t have a tiara? Practice the old-fashioned way, balancing a book on your head while walking. For advanced practice, balance a book on your head walking up a flight of stairs. (Etiquetteer is not liable for damages if you fall.) When filming her famous staircase descent in Sunset Boulevard, Gloria Swanson imagined a steel rod down her back. Etiquetteer generally thinks of Wagner’s overture to Die Meistersinger.
Unhurried punctuality
There is really nothing like walking into a room knowing that you are in exactly the right place at the right time. The way to do this is to schedule travel time, and then schedule a little extra (when you can) in case of a) emergency, or b) unreliable traffic and/or transportation. Etiquetteer knows this is not always possible, but it can be done.
Arriving late in order to make a grand entrance is simply Not Perfectly Proper. Etiquetteer once witnessed a Texas lady attempt this at a dinner of about 100 people, as well as her chagrin when no one noticed. (But her deportment was impressive.) The only person who could really get away with it was the late Queen Alexandra, but a) she was the queen, and b) she’s dead now anyway. Don’t let your folie de grandeur make you look ridiculous.
Separate dining rooms
The trend these last few decades is for larger eat-in, entertain-in kitchens, which Etiquetteer blames on the disappearance of domestic staff for the middle class. (That may be an issue to take up another day.) But Etiquetteer longs for the dining room which, removed from the barely controlled chaos of the kitchen, represents a calm and leisurely atmosphere conducive to good conversation. That Mr. Dimmick Who Thinks He Knows So Much has worked out a hybrid approach: a kitchen with no table and chairs — meals must be consumed in the dining room — but with two small armchairs for the cocktail hour for very small dinner parties.
Dinner for six
Sometimes described as the number of harmony, six makes a nice dinner party because it’s small enough for general conversation but large enough for widely divergent areas of expertise. Also, if your domestic staff has disappeared, it’s not an unmanageable number of prepare for and clean up after.
Candle shades, preferably pink
“I have never admitted that I am more than twenty-nine, or thirty at the most,” said Mrs. Erlynne in Lady Windermere’s Fan. “Twenty-nine when there are pink shades, thirty when there are not.**” Candlelight is always kind to the complexion, and kinder still when seen through rose-colored shades clipped to the top. Marie and César Ritz, after much experimenting with their electricians over different fabrics, “eventually yielded a solution: a pleated silk lampshade, white, with a silk inner lining that was pale apricot-pink. The resulting light was warming but not too bright and, Ritz exclaimed ‘reduced the appearance of a woman by ten years!’”*** These days, silk is preferred, but paper shades will do quite nicely, thank you very much.
Electric silver coffee pots or urns
Now plastic and only for the kitchen, coffeemakers were once made to adapt beautiful antique designs to the modern convenience of electricity. No, Etiquetteer is not talking about those 36-cup cylindrical percolators Dear Mother used to bring out for bridge club, marvelous though they are, but percolators or coffee pots designed to look like 18th-century silver urns. The closest thing Etiquetteer can find online is this coffeepot, but there were beautiful Queen Anne and Georgian-style urns as well. So much more convenient, and twice as lovely, when serving directly from the breakfast table.
Café Brûlot
Café brûlot “is not just coffee,” Emily Kimbrough tells us excitedly in So Near and Yet So Far, “it is a decoction and a ceremony.” Invented at Antoine’s in New Orleans back in 1880 (read its history here), Miss Kimbrough witnessed it in a private home performed by an expert: “The room was in complete darkness. Mrs. Munson struck a match to the alcohol in the tray. The flame, bright blue, rose quickly, surrounding the bowl. Mrs. Munson took up a long silver ladle . . . She spooned into the bowl and lifted high into the air the ingredients placed there, but what we saw was a running sliver of flame, up from the tray, filling the ladle. Up and down, dipping and pouring, she carried the dancing, bright blue flame, and laughed with the pleasure of a child at our exclamations of astonishment. When the flame died out, and she had added the coffee, Mrs. Munson ladled it from the bowl into the brûlot cups.****”
Etiquetteer is absolutely enchanted with this image, but is not at all liable if you burn down the house attempting it yourself. The emergency arrival of the fire department is seldom elegant.
Demitasse
If café brûlot feels too risky, and it might, we could always attempt demitasse. And by that Etiquetteer means not after-dinner coffee in a regular-sized coffee cup, but a Perfectly Proper teeny-tiny demitasse cup after dinner in the parlor. Those cups are so beautiful, and you shouldn’t be drinking that much coffee after dinner in the first place.
Posy pins
Etiquetteer has written about the posy pin before, and it’s still true. But truly to bring this back requires wearing a jacket with a lapel in which to sport it, and too many gentlemen just don’t want to take the “trouble.” It’s most distressing.
Furlane
“We shall walk in velvet shoes,” goes the old poem by Elinor Wylie, but Etiquetteer does not think she was thinking about furlane. Also spelled friulane, these Venetian velvet slippers are Perfectly Proper for anything, day or night. Etiquetteer still treasures a pair from Piedaterre in Venice, but daily wear for something like eight years reduced them to a state of Jeffersonian disrepute.
*All in One Basket, by Deborah Mitford, Duchess of Devonshire, 2011, page 237.
**Lady Windermere’s Fan, by Oscar Wilde.
***Ritz and Escoffier, by Luke Barr, page 215-216.
****So Near and Yet So Far, by Emily Kimbrough, 1955, pages 81-82.