Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885

During these long séances, 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 jupière 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 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 rôle 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 moitié dans la réussite 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 their breath, the great man expresses his satisfaction, perhaps even falls on his knees in mute admiration of his masterpiece, or in the twinkling of an eye gives a pinch to a frill or a twist to a plait which transforms and perfects the whole, such is the magic power of those marvellous fingers when they touch the delicate tissues of silk or lace or velvet. Then, while the master is sating his eyes, all the staff of the house defiles through the saloon,—the chief saleswoman, the cutter-out, the chef des jupes, the chef des corsages, the chef des garnisseuses, the première brodeuse, and half a dozen other premièeres, who open the door and ask, with caressing intonations of voice and pretty smiles, "Vent-on me permettre de voir un pen?"

What other mysteries are there to be revealed in the house of the couturier? We have glanced at the packing-rooms, the working-rooms with their battalions of girls and women toiling away with their needles by daylight and gas-light. We caught a glimpse of the reception-saloons and the trying-on-rooms, all strewn with fragments of dresses,—disjecta membra,—mountains of silk, and peopled with automatic human mannequins, essayeuses, who, as the moralists will tell you, are all "vicieuses qui ne manquent de rien," and who are destined sooner or later to reinforce the demi-monde. We have seen the process of creating and fitting a dress, the ceremony of trying-on, and the rôle of the creating artist in all this. Now, to make our indiscretion complete, we have only to peep into the salon des amazones, a room draped in green velvet and decorated with whips, stirrups, and side-saddles. The table in the middle is piled up with heaps of dark-colored cloth and hats with green, brown, and blue veils. At one end is a life-size wooden horse, and presiding over this room is a blonde effeminate young man, whose business it is to offer his clasped hands as a mounting-stone to help the ladies to jump on to the back of the wooden steed, while the tailor arranges the folds of their riding-habits.

Besides Pingat, the most artistic of the Parisian dress-makers, besides Worth, who has a specialty of court-dresses for exportation and showy dresses for American actresses, and whose style is pompous and official, besides Felix, the dresser of slender women, the favorite artist of the aristocracy of birth and talent,—all three so well known that the mention of their names here cannot be regarded as an advertisement,—there are a dozen other bearded dress-makers in Paris whose talent is worthy of admiration, and whose caprices might amuse us if we had time to dwell upon them. There is, however, a grande couturière who surpasses all her masculine rivals in fatuity and caprice, namely, Madame Rodrigues, the great theatrical dress-maker. Madame Rodrigues always asks the journalists not to mention her by name. "Put simply," she says, "the first dress-maker in Paris. Everybody will know who is meant." This lady regards herself as the collaborator of Sardou and Dumas and Augier. Dumas is her peculiar favorite. "We understand each other," she says, "and he finds that my genius completes his."

Nothing can be more amusing than the scene in her vast saloons about four o'clock in the afternoon. The grande couturière—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 premières 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 couturière 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 lingère 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' bills prevented young men from marrying, and so left fifteen hundred thousand girls without husbands! The great dress-makers of those days were Madame Eloffe, the artist who dressed Marie Antoinette, and whose account-books have recently been published; with notes and curious colored plates, by the Comte de Reiset, and Madame Cafaxe, the modiste-couturière of the Fauburg St.-Honoré, celebrated for her exorbitant charges. One has only to consult the curious historical researches of the brothers De Goncourt in order to appreciate the luxury and extravagance of the past century. Imagine that in the wedding-trousseau of Mademoiselle Lepelletier Saint-Fargeau there figured twelve blonde wigs, varying in shade from flax to gold! Madame Tallien alone possessed thirty of these wigs, each of which was valued at that time at one hundred dollars,—that is to say, some two hundred dollars of modern money. None of our modern élégantes would ever think of buying six thousand dollars' worth of false hair. At the same epoch the ladies who had fallen in love with Greek and Roman fashions had abandoned the old-fashioned shoe in order to adopt the cothurnus; and Coppe, the chic shoemaker, or corthurnier, of Paris charged sixty dollars a pair for his imitation antique sandals, with their straps. Alas! Coppe's sandals were no more durable than the fleeting rose, and whenever a fair dame came to show her torn cothurnus to the great Coppe he replied sadly, "The evil is irremediable: madame has been walking!"

THEODORE CHILD.

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OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP

A Future for Women.

From the last report of the Bureau of Education it appears that twice as many girls as boys enter high schools in the United States, and that three times as many complete the four years' course. "Nature," in commenting upon this fact, attributes it to the great attractiveness of commercial pursuits in this country, and the consequent eagerness of boys to enter upon them at as early an age as possible. This is doubtless the true reason, and the disproportion is more likely to increase than to diminish, even though the actual number of boys who rush into a money-making career as soon as they have mastered the arithmetic necessary for it may be growing smaller. It is beginning, moreover, to be an every-day matter for women to receive a college education. There are already three well-filled colleges of high rank exclusively their own, and the new Bryn Mawr bids fair to be a powerful rival to Vassar, Smith, and Wellesley. Many of the colleges for men are open to them; now, and the capitulation of those strongholds of conservatism. Cambridge. New Haven, and Baltimore, is only a question of time. Great colleges are ravenous for fresh endowments, and the offer of a large sum of money may at any moment procure from them the full admission of women. It is not impossible that before many years have passed there will be as many women as men receiving a college education. How is this army of educated women going to occupy itself?

There is another aspect to the question. Not only is the mass of women better fitted than ever before for worthy occupation, there has never been a time nor a country in which their traditionary sphere has shrunk to so small dimensions. Nowhere else are there so many women of such a station that they are not obliged to toil and spin, nor to sleep all day to make up for nights of dissipation. For all those who do not have to concern themselves with the wherewithal of living, the art of living easily has been brought to a state of great perfection. The general care of the house and of the children is still the duty of the woman, but the labor involved in acquitting herself of that duty is a very different matter from what it was a generation ago. Then all her energies were needed to bring up a family well. Brewing and baking and soap- and candle-making were all carried on in the house, and there were a dozen children to be kept neatly dressed with the aid of no needle but her own. Now the purchase of the day's supplies is the only important demand upon her time; well-trained servants, the descendants of the raw Irish girl her mother struggled with, are capable of carrying on the cooking and the scrubbing by themselves. Sewing it is hardly worth her while to do in the house. Stitching her linen collars was once an important item in her year's work; now it is safe to say that there is not a single woman who does not buy her collars ready made. Making cotton cloth into undergarments has become a manufacture in the unetymological sense of the word. The Viscount de Campo-Grande, in addressing the Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences at Madrid, two years ago, admitted that sewing was no longer an economy, but urged women to practise it still for the purpose of quieting their nerves. But the modern American woman who has had a healthy bringing up, who has divided her girlhood between vigorous study and active out-door exercise, who can row and skate and play ball and tennis with her brothers, has no unquiet nerves. She does not ask for sedatives, but for some high stimulus to call into play her strong and well-trained faculties. Money-making, the natural sphere of man, has become a more and more absorbing pursuit, while the usual feminine occupations have become more than ever trivial and unimportant at the very moment when the feminine mind has taken a new start in its development. The woman who is fresh from reading Gauss and Pindar, and who has taken sides in the discussion between the adherents of Roscher and of Mill, cannot easily content herself with the petty economies that result from doing her own cutting and fitting and dusting and table-setting. Still less, if she has not married, is she satisfied to look forward to the position of nursery governess to her sister-in-law's children. Her education has fitted her for something better than to save the wages of an upper servant. Again the question is forced upon her, where can she find a fitting field for the exercise of her powers?

To many people, who have all the means of existence they care for without a struggle, it seems that the only thing that can give a thorough interest and zest to life is to devote themselves to the elevation of the degraded classes of society. They find such monotony in their own comfortable ways of living, and the misery of the very poor seems so appalling to them, that they cannot escape from the passionate desire to spend themselves in their service. The problems connected with the relief and the prevention of the wretchedness by which they are surrounded have all the interest of a scientific experiment, and are capable of calling out all the fervor of a religion. But for the few people here and there who have now the passion of the reformer it is not impossible that another generation may see many thousands. A second christianization of the world may convert all the happy into the consolers of the unhappy, instead of leading people to absorb themselves in the question of their own salvation. No one can say how great a change might be made in the fair face of the earth if the effort to remove the causes of poverty and of disease should become the serious occupation of half mankind. In the lower stages of existence the extermination of evil has been the work of a slow and gradual process. Millions of individuals have been sacrificed in order to produce the few who were fitted to their surroundings. But at last a creature has been produced of so much intelligence that he is able to undertake his own further development. He can speculate upon the causes of his failures in the search for happiness, and he can apply remedies. It is true that those remedies have often been productive of more harm than good, it is true that it would be hard to calculate the evil effects of the English poor-laws, for instance, but all the experiments that have hitherto worked badly are but so much material from which to draw a knowledge of better methods. When the Wlllimantic Thread Company has found a way to make its girls come singing from their work as they go to it, and to make better thread at the same time, no one can say that great changes may not be brought about when once scientific methods shall have been discovered for the extermination of disease and crime. What more interesting field for investigation, for theory, for active work, can women find than that large kind of charity which is to supersede in the future the indiscriminate alms-giving of the past? The unselfishness that is demanded by the life of a reformer they have already in large abundance. There is no limit to the devotion which many women show their families, but such devotion has in these days become so unnecessary as to be little more than a higher form of selfishness. Perhaps it only needs a leader to turn this store of energy into wider channels and to make it subservient to larger ends. Perhaps the labor and patience and self-renunciation that are necessary to the regeneration of the world are to come from women. Such an absolute disregard of self as they are capable of, if it were once allowed to overflow the narrow limits of the home, might in no long time turn a goodly portion of the world into a garden of roses. There are still men who wish to appropriate to themselves all the high qualities of their women, but they belong to a race that is destined to rapid extinction, and to most rapid extinction in this country. That American men are more thoroughly chivalrous than English is a common belief. It was curiously confirmed by the English clergyman who wrote to the "Nation," some years ago, to describe the qualities which an English clergyman ought to have in order to be successful in this country, and who said that he had found it necessary not to let it be known that his wife warmed his slippers for him. The theory that woman exists solely for the purpose of smoothing the wrinkles from the brow of man is one that seldom finds expression now, except in the Lenten sermons of men who are content to drop out of the ranks of those who influence opinion. But the great freedom that the modern woman has gained for herself, the thorough education that is for the first time within her reach, the strong sympathies that are her inheritance,—these are grounds of a responsibility that she cannot but feel to be a heavy one. What better outlet can she find for her activities than to carry forward that slow process of fitting together the human race and its surroundings which it is no longer necessary to leave to chance?

CHRISTINE LADD-FRANKLIN.

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The Ice-Saints.

There are three days in the spring of the year called by the French Les Saints de Glace. These days are the 12th, 13th, and 14th of May, and the saints to whom they are dedicated are Saint Mamert, Saint Pancras, and Saint Servais. They are very obscure saints, in honor of whom few children have been named, and, were it not for the vast parish of Saint Pancras which once comprised all the northwestern part of London, their names as well as their history would be, to Protestants at least, entirely unknown. They have, however, the evil reputation of commonly bringing with them a nipping frost, and are abhorred in Burgundy as the great enemies of the vine.

Their advent this year was telegraphed to Paris by the New York "Herald," whose weather reporter was probably quite ignorant of any ecclesiastical traditions connected with the matter. On May 11 the following despatch was received in Paris: "A great depression, having its centre in the neighborhood of Lake Ontario, will be followed by a cyclone of great extent, travelling in the direction of Halifax, It will probably occasion great changes of temperature along the coasts of Great Britain and France, beginning May 12 and continuing till May 14." Never was prediction better fulfilled. The Ice-Saints sank the French thermometer to 6° Centigrade, corresponding to 21° Fahrenheit, a temperature more severe in those latitudes than the cold of an ordinary Christmas. When the Ice-Saints had departed the weather grew mild again.

M. Quetelet, the head of the Observatory at Brussels, has paid great attention to the periodicity of weather-changes in Europe. The result of his investigations is as follows:

I. That there is always a "cold snap" between the 7th and 11th of

January, during which ordinarily occurs the coldest day of the year.

II. That from January 22 to March 1 there is, as we say in our vernacular, "a let-up" on the coldness of the temperature. In France there is no ground-hog, or, if there is, he so generally sees no shadow upon Candlemas (February 2) that the three weeks succeeding it are called L'Été de la Chandeleur.

III. In April cold may be expected from the 9th to the 22d, and the Ice-Saints may prolong their influence to May 23, after which there is no more possibility of frosts in France, though within my memory June frosts have been twice known in Maryland and Virginia. The prolonged frost in May is said to be produced by an understanding between the Ice-Saints and what is called in France La Lune Rousse,—the Red Moon.

IV. Though it needs no prophet to foretell hot weather from June 6 to June 23. M, Quetelet's observations point to June 13 and June 22 as days of exceptionally high temperature.

V. Between July 4 and July 8 comes the hottest day of the summer, which is not to be looked for in the dog-days, which are from July 21 to August 20.

VI. July 25 distinguishes itself by being cool, and August 25 tempers ten days of heat which commonly begin on the 15th of August.

VII. September 14 and September 30 are days when the thermometer may be expected to make a sudden fall.

VIII. Cold weather may be looked for from October 20 to October 29, and from November 10 to November 19; but in the first ten days of November comes what we call Indian summer, and the French L'Été des Morts,—because it succeeds All-Souls' Day,—or L'Été de Saint Martin.

M. Quetelet adds no observations on December, it being presumably a cold month everywhere.

M. Fourmet, of Lyons, has also made meteorological observations of the same nature in Southern France, and especially in the valley of the Rhone. He says the lowest temperature in each month is as follows: January 9 and 21. February 3, 12, and 20. March 5 and 21. April 19. May 12, 13, and 14. June 8, 20, and 27. July 12 and 25. August 2, 12, and 24. September 5, 15, and 30. October 22. November 5 and 17. December 3 and 29.

M. Charles Sainte-Claire Deville has also been engaged in careful weather-calculations for many years, and has been in constant correspondence on the subject with the Académie des Sciences. His theory is based on the existence of the three Ice-Saints in May, and he considers that a similar periodic influence may be traced in other months of the year. He maintains that there are three days in every month, with an interval of about ten days between them, in which we may look for a fall of temperature, and that the weather gradually grows warmer during the interval that separates them. His observations are only in part corroborated by those of M. Quetelet and M. Fourmet.