Nothing can be more amusing than the scene in her vast saloons about four o’clock in the afternoon.  The grande couturiere—­Madame, as her employees respectfully call her—­issues from her private rooms and finds herself in presence of a score of ladies, not merely actresses, but society ladies, to whom she has given rendezvous for that day.

“I am exceedingly sorry, mesdames,” the great artist will exclaim, “but I cannot attend to you to-day.”

“But, dear madame, you wrote to me—­”

“I must have my dress for to-morrow.”

“My ball takes place to-night—­”

“Mesdames, I repeat, it is impossible.  If one of my assistants likes to take you in hand, well and good.  That is all I can do for you.”

Then, turning round, she perceives a stout lady who looks imploringly at her, and declares brusquely, “Ah, madame, I have already told you that I cannot undertake to dress you.  You are not my style.  I do not understand plump women.”

“But, Madame Rodrigues—­”

“If one of my premieres cares to take you in hand, I have no objection; but that is all I can do for you.”

The only thing that calms the great artist is the arrival of one of her favorite actresses.

“Ah, bonjour, Madame Judic:  you will have your toilets on Friday—­”

“But the first performance is announced for Wednesday.”

“They must put it off, then, for I am not ready.  We will try your dress for the second act this afternoon.”  And the grande couturiere settles herself in her arm-chair, calls for her footstool, her fan, her cup of beef-tea, her smelling-salts, and so proceeds to preside over the terrible and imposing ceremony of trying on the dress of a fashionable actress.

Doubtless the luxury of the Parisiennes is not so great now as it was under the Empire; but the falling off in the home trade is partly compensated by the increase in the foreign customers.  In Paris alone the dress-making trade represents the movement of fifty millions of dollars a year and gives employment to some fifty thousand women; and many of the elegant society women spend from twenty to thirty thousand dollars a year on their costume and toilet.  But it must not be believed that the modern couturier is the first who has known how to draw up big bills, or that the modern lingere is the first who has dared to charge two hundred dollars for a chemise and half as much for a pocket-handkerchief.  Dress has always reigned supreme in France at least.  Louis XVI. has been guillotined, Napoleon I. exiled, Charles X. dismissed, Louis Philippe and Napoleon III. replaced without their leave by a new form of government.  But dress has never been dethroned; and, just as in our own days Dupin thundered in the Senate against the desperate luxury of the Parisiennes of the Empire, so in the eighteenth century old Sebastien Mercier lamented that the fear of the milliners’