What is the history of the color puce?

Origin and Definition of
"Puce"

Word
Origin
puce
1787,
from French puce meaning "flea," from Latin
pucilem (nom. pulex) meaning "flea," cognate
with Sanskrit plusih, Greek psylla, ....
"flea." It is the color of a flea. (Douglas Harper, Online Etymology
Dictionary)

Definition€‚
puce
adjective
1.
of
a dark or brownish purple.
noun
2.
a dark or
brownish
purple.
Origin:
1780€“90; 
< French:  literally, flea < Latin pÅ«lic-,  stem of pÅ«lex (Random House
Dictionary)

Historical Mention of
"Puce"

The earliest mention of "puce" in
history is in connection with French Queen Marie Antoinette (1755€“1793) who is said to have
held "puce" as a favorite color. href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puce">Puce has a
similar origin to that of the color href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochineal">carmine.
Both these colors are derived from insects that secret blood-red
colorant that is used as a pigment in cloth dying and painting.
Carmine, used from antiquity, comes from the cochineal while
puce, as the etymology and definitions above make clear, comes from
the troublesome and often quite dangerous flea (e.g. bubonic plague and typhus). In the case of
the cochineal, the red comes from the resin of the bark that it eats whereas, in the case of the
flea, the red comes from the blood of this parasite's host.

While English
translations of Thomas Mallory's Le Morte dArthur, such as the translation
by Keith Baines, refer to Gareth, the Red Knight in "The Tale of Sir Gareth," as the
Puce Knight, this is merely a translation convention so as not to
confuse the heroic Sir Gareth with the villainous Red Knight of the Red Lands. Since we must
reject Le Morte dArthur as the historical beginning of "puce," we
find that the color puce has historical roots in the sensuous court of Marie Antoinette and
begins its life c. 1787, or between 1780 and 1790.

Source of
the Color Puce

The brownish purple color of puce is seen in
nature under two circumstances. Should a hapless sleeper have been bitten by a flea in the night
during the 1700s, dark spots may stain the snow-white linen (linen: cloth
made from reeds) sheets and be found upon awakening. Should an individual happen to espy a flea
upon their person or upon the person of another individual, if the flea can be caught and
smashed, the parasitic flea will release dark fluid resulting from biting its host.

Cultural Association Between Fleas and Puce

This raises the question of how a parasitic flea's secretions could be associated with
a Queen's new and favorite color. The answer, which bares directly on the history of puce, lies
in the historical association of fleas with the unbridled, i.e.,
uncontrolled, desires of l'amor, of love. By
the 1300s, the firmly established French(conveyed in English) "to have a flea in the
ear" meant to be provoked with amorous desire. French poetry of 1300 and 1400s speaks of
putting fleas in young women's ears to arouse desire in them. A French poem written in the 1600s
by Jean de la Fontaine illustrates the continuance of this idiom associating fleas with
provoking amorous desire:

A longing girl
With
thoughts of sweetheart in her head,
In bed all night will sleepless twirl.
A
flea is in her ear, tis said. ( href="http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-fle1.htm">Jean de la Fontaine
qtd by Michael Quinion on World Wide Words)

Cultural Association of Fleas with Marie
Antoinette

Marie Antoinette had an unstable position in the
court of Louis XVI because his physical condition, phimosis, made
procreation of an heir a difficulty and an improbability. Since Marie Antoinette's sole role in
the royal household was to bear and rear the royal offspring and future Kings of France, the
absence of procreative relations with Louis made Marie Antoinette essentially superfluous.
Consequently, according to Mylynka Kilgore of the University of Texas, Marie Antoinette
established a role and position for herself by usurping that of royal mistress to the King, a
role represented by exuberance and extravagance in opposition to the representation of the
Queen's role through modesty and purity. As a result of willful association with the role of
mistress, Marie Antoinette's image was one of uncontrolled desire: Her image was one of a young
woman with a flea in her ear.

The color puce has as one of its sources the
dark spots that might be found on sheets after being in sleep. Marie Antoinette's sheets were
checked every morning for signs that her virginity had been overcome by King Louis. The color
puce came into existence. Puce was Marie Antoinette's favorite color. Courtier's for centuries
had written lewd poems about using fleas to induce sexual desire in pure young women.

History of the Color Puce

There is no
historical record that states the reason puce came into being or that says that the reason Marie
Antoinette favored puce was because she could not escape the ironic similarity between the spots
left by gorged fleas and by spots courtiers and ambassadors hoped would indicate the promise of
an heir to the French throne, but there certainly is an interesting cultural connection between
the idiomatic role played by fleas in French culture and the role of mistress Marie Antoinette
was forced to play in the French court. 

href="http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/32/sanders.php">http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/32/sanders.php
href="https://www.etymonline.com/word/pucelle">https://www.etymonline.com/word/pucelle