shrivelled up and covered with shiny, glazed calico.  This is the studio of one of the most important of the secondary artists in dress-making, the corsagere.  The chief of this department takes the subject in hand, and, with the aid of pieces of coarse canvas, such as the tailors use to line coats, she takes a complete mould of the body, cutting and pinning and smoothing with her hand until the mould is perfect.  This is the first step toward the execution of the master’s plan.  At the next seance of trying-on, the subject passes simultaneously through the hands of several heads of departments,—­the corsagere, the jupiere, who drapes the skirts and arranges the train, and the second jupiere, who mounts and constructs the skirt.  The corsage is brought all sewn and whaleboned, but only basted below the arms and at the shoulder, and as soon as it is in place—­“crac! crac!”—­the corsagere, with angry fingers, breaks the threads, and then calmly and patiently rejoins the seams and pins them together so that the joinings may lie perfectly flat and even.  On her knees, turning patiently round and round, the jupiere drapes the skirt on a lining of silk, seeking to perfect the roundness, sparing no pains, and displaying in all she does the artist’s amour-propre, the desire to achieve a masterpiece in the detail which the masculine designer has allotted to her care.  These women who lend their light-fingered collaboration to the imagination of the bearded dress-maker are really admirable in their sentiment of their work, in their artist’s ambition, which thinks not merely of the week’s salary, but of the perfection of the masterpiece.  They seem to find intense personal satisfaction in producing a beautiful toilet, in fashioning a delicate thing which almost has the qualities of a work of art; and when the subject is naturally well formed,—­tout faite, as they say,—­and not artificially made up with what is called the taille de couturiere, their painstaking knows no bounds.

During these long seances, which last for hours together and occupy so large a place in the day of a woman of fashion, the common love of toilet makes, for the moment at least, the grande dame or the aristocrat the equal of the modest employee, and, while the jupiere is turning round and round madame la baronne, there often takes place a lively interchange of gossip and a review of the plastic qualities of the friends and rivals in beauty of madame la baronne who are also customers of the house.  The grand couturier himself is a treasure-house of queer stories and scandals, and naturally his employees take after their master.  The couturier, you see, is not a tradesman:  he is an artist, and he renders a woman far greater service than the artist-painter, who finds her already dressed and only has to copy her, whereas the couturier dresses a woman not once, but twenty times a year, and each