Chapter 3

Chapter III
Who Messire Jean Percerin Was
The King’s tailor, Messire Jean Percerin, occupied a rather large house in the Rue St. Honoré, near the Rue de l’Arbre Sec. He was a man of great taste in elegant stuffs, embroideries, and velvet, being hereditary tailor to the King. The preferment of his house reached as far back as the time of Charles IX; from whose reign dated, as we know, fancies in bravery difficult enough to gratify. The Percerin of that period was a Huguenot, like Ambroise Pare, and had been spared by the Queen of Navarre,- the beautiful Margot, as they used to write and say too in those days,- because, in sooth, he was the only one who could make for her those wonderful riding-habits which she preferred to wear, seeing that they were marvellously well suited to hide certain anatomical defects which the Queen of Navarre used very studiously to conceal. Percerin being saved made, out of gratitude, some beautiful black bodices, very inexpensive indeed, for Queen Catherine, who ended by being pleased at the preservation of a Huguenot on whom she had long looked with aversion. But Percerin was a prudent man; and having heard it said that there was no more dangerous sign for a Huguenot than to be smiled upon by Catherine, and having observed that her smiles were more frequent than usual, he speedily turned Catholic, with all his family; and having thus become irreproachable, attained the lofty position of master tailor to the Crown of France. Under Henry III, gay King as he was, this position was as high as one of the loftiest peaks of the Cordilleras. Now, Percerin had been a clever man all his life, and by way of keeping up his reputation beyond the grave, took very good care not to make a bad death of it; and so contrived to die very seasonably,- at the very moment he felt his powers of invention declining. He left a son and daughter, both worthy of the name they were called upon to bear,- the son a cutter as unerring and exact as the square rule, the daughter apt at embroidery and at designing ornaments. The marriage of Henry IV and Marie de Medicis, and the exquisite court mourning for the aforementioned Queen, together with a few words let fall by M. de Bassompierre, king of the beaux of that period, made the fortune of the second generation of Percerins. M. Concino Concini, and his wife Galigai, who subsequently shone at the French Court, sought to Italianize the fashion, and introduced some Florentine tailors; but Percerin, touched to the quick in his patriotism and his self-esteem, entirely defeated these foreigners by his designs in brocatelle,- so effectually that Concino was the first to give up his compatriots, and held the French tailor in such esteem that he would never employ any other; and thus wore a doublet of his on the very day that Vitry blew out his brains with his pistol at the Pont du Louvre.

It was that doublet, issuing from M. Percerin’s workshop, which the