time that he invents a becoming toilet he makes a new creation not only of the toilet, but of the woman.  There has, in fact, been a great change made in modern times in matters of dress.  Our modern women are no longer content with merely seasonable dresses, appropriate in form and material for spring, summer, autumn, or winter; they are no longer satisfied to have four interviews a year with the dress-maker.  On the contrary, every event in social life—­a wedding, a ball, a visit to a country-house, the annual excursions to sea-side and mountain—­gives occasion for special dresses, or rather costumes, for in modern toilets the element of pure costume plays a considerable role especially in those destined for wear in the country.  The modern woman of fashion needs endless morning, afternoon, and evening dresses, tea-gowns, breakfast-dresses, of endless varieties of form, stuff, and color.  Hence she is constantly in communication with the couturier, who has every opportunity of examining her morally and physically, confessing her, listening often to strange confidences.  Not unfrequently he combines with his artistic career that of a banker.  Naturally, ladies who run up yearly bills of twenty thousand dollars for gowns and mantles are often in a corner for want of a few thousands, and the Parisienne in such circumstances often thinks it equally natural to have recourse to the strange creature who dresses her and who thus comes to occupy a very curious position on the confines of society.

The final trying-on of the dresses of madame la baronne is a grand day, and often a few friends, both ladies and gentlemen, are invited to assist at the ceremony; for the Parisiennes recognize in some of their masculine friends, and particularly in painters, certain talents for appreciating dress.  Why not?  Were not these men the great innovators in modern dressing? and are not men still the great artists in costume?  Madame la baronne prepares herself in one of the little saloons.  First of all come the skirts and the young ladies who preside over the fabrication of the dessous, or underclothing, for it is an axiom in modern French dress-making that half the success of the toilet depends on the underclothing, or, as the French put it in their neat way, “Le dessous est pour la moitie dans la reussite du dessus.”  Then follows the tying of the skirt of the dress, which is suspended on hooks round the bottom of the corset, the buttoning of the corsage, the preliminary tapping and caressing necessary to make the folds of the skirt sit well, and then madame la baronne makes her appearance triumphantly before her friends assembled in the adjoining saloon.  The great artist himself deigns to contemplate the finished work.  Standing off at some distance, so as to take in the general effect, as if he were examining a picture, he gazes upon the dress with impassible eyes, and then, after a Napoleonic silence, during which all present hold