Grayville Weekly Herald

Female Painting—A Woman's Trick.

Painting is said to be carried to great excess at the present time among the fashionable ladies of Paris, notwithstanding the use of paints ruins the natural complexion.

A malicious practical joke which an English lady devised to torment the painted beauties, is thus "made a note of" in a Paris letter to the N. O. Picayune:

They tell a very good joke here of an elderly English woman who had trained a little Havana dog to lick the face of the persons who kissed it. They say that whenever she meets with a lady under false colors, she makes her puppy jump on the lady's lap; the lady caresses the dear little creature without suspecting that it is a perfidious little scoundrel, which unpaints the cheek with its false, but vigorous licking.

Not long ago, this English woman was at a brilliant party in the Faubourg Saint Honoré; she singled out among all the guests an Italian lady of noble birth, who is extremely addicted to paint, and at the conventions all signal "Bibi" jumped into the Italian's lap and began to ply its tongue with great energy—one side of the Florentine's cheek was a line of peach smothered in cream, the complexion of sweet sixteen: the other side was shrivelled, wrinkled, yellow. It required all the French dexterity of smothering laughter to suppress the peals of merriment which this sight excited to explosion; and the malice of the English woman was delighted by the laughing eyes of the whole room. But that night "Bibi" was taken sick with a gastritis, and two days afterwards it growled its last bow-wow-wow in the arms of its weeping and desolate mistress, who told everybody that it was the paint of the Italian which killed this angelic pup, and she spreads this report so industriously, it is said there is no small chance of its getting into the court house in the shape of a suit for slander.