In November the days are sad; the sunshine is pale and intermittent; the horizon is veiled in yellow mist, and the pavement, all black and moist, is dotted with fallen leaves, which decompose visibly into a bituminous jelly, suggestive of the slime of the primitive chaos. On AllSaints' day Paris remembers its dead. In the proletarian cemetery of Pantin and in the aristocratic necropolis of Père-laChaise the scene is the same: a thick and sable-clad crowd, in a landscape lighted by the pale November sun; high-born ladies going to pray in the private chapels of their family sepulchres; women of the poorer classes going to kneel on the viscous earth of the fosse commune, that common grave of poverty, whose soil is turned so often that no grass has time to grow around the meagre wooden crosses. In the cemeteries there are interminable processions of men, women, and children carrying bouquets and wreaths of immortelles. Outside the cemeteries the wine shops and restaurants are thronged with mourners who, having fulfilled their duty to the dead, find nothing better to do than to enjoy life. Let us eat, drink, and be merry, they say, for to-morrow we may die; and, after having eaten and drank, they pass the afternoon at the theatres, where morning performances are always given on the occasion of the great public holiday known as the Day of the Dead-"Le Jour des Morts." era. rées. In midwinter the Parisians of wealth and leisure continue their normal existence with such distractions as the regular programme offers, namely, dinner parties, receptions, the theatres, and the opJanuary is a great month for soiIn January M. and Mme. Carnot, both of them tranquil, linear, and unfaltering, receive at the Élysée, and lavish official smiles upon guests whom they do not know. In January, in the gray solitudes of the vast capital, the noctambulant bachelor, returning from the club or the comedy, perceives here and there a score of cabs drawn up in front of a house. He looks at the façade, and on the first, second, third, fourth, or fifth story sees windows flaming with lights, and pictures to himself the ignoble reality of a soirée, with its accompaniment of dancing, recitations, supper, and marriageable maidens, of the soirée where the women play the rôle of the spider and the men that of the fly, where the bait is called a dowry, and where the spider is often the ultimate victim. "It is there," says the recalcitrant bachelor to himself—"it is there that they are suffering, the weak and ambitious brethren, the voluminous mammas, the portly and gastralgic papas, and the flat daughters; it is there that they are dancing with Occidental impudency in an atmosphere of fleshly emanations, mingled with the odors of face powder and Spanish leather, irresistibly continuing the fatal saraband which ironical Nature imposes upon her victims." So, with the aid of some passing furor, such as a Russian or a Polish pianist, or two or three phenomenal lyric artists, the worldlings reach the Lenten season, when concerts are considered the most fashionable distraction from the austerities of the hour. The period of Lent is respected by the Parisiennes-I mean, of course, by the Parisiennes of the fashionable categoryonly the practices which this respect involves are rather of etiquette than of devotion. The Parisiennes are exact in the performance of ritual duties, because, in these days of republicanism, it is agreed that a woman who is a free-thinker, or simply indifferent in matters of religion, cannot be distinguished or well-born. They are assiduous in their attendance at the lectures of Father Monsabré and other eloquent preachers; they observe fasts and abstinence as much by advice of their doctors as out of piety; but at the same time they devise the most refined menus, where sea-monsters and costly delicacies are substituted for meat. In the same spirit the Parisiennes hide their shoulders during Lent, but they are none the less exquisitely dressed on that account. Lent the Parisiennes simply put into practice the coquettish idea of chastening their coquetry—a coquetry which exercises its fascination over Paris from Lent to Lent from winter to winter, from summer to summer, throughout the cycle of the worldling year. II. In Paris is the city of art and poetry, but of all the artists and poets that Paris fosters, the greatest are the Parisiennes. Nature confined her efforts to inventing the eglantine, out of which the genius of man has developed that splendid and delightful flower which we call the rose. So, as Banville ingeniously remarked, the hazards of history and social life produced women born in Paris or living in Paris, gives the mysterious word of order by virtue of which at the beginning of each season we see similar toilets blossom forth spontaneously and simultaneously in all the places of elegant resort? How does it happen that these toilets are different in cut and in material from those that were worn in the preceding season? Formerly it would have been easy to reply that the court was responsible for the creation of fashion, and in reality it was the Empress, or one of the ladies of her suite, who took the initiative of wearing some new style of toilet, the result of long consultations between the lady herself and a dressmaker of genius. If the toilet pleased and was susceptible of adaptation to all the requirements of various types of feminine beauty, it would be accepted by the court, and from the court it would penetrate to the upper middle classes, and if it were not too dear, it would finally permeate to the ranks of the lower middle classes. Nowadays, however, we have no court, and it is certainly not at the democratic balls and receptions of President Carnot and his ministers that we may look for new manifestations of feminine elegance. Nevertheless, the creation of fashion continues in the same conditions as in the past, only with more liberty and perhaps with more artistic preoccupations. The great ladies of the imperial court have not all abdicated; other great ladies have been born with the genius of elegance and the gift of taste; and these, together with the most elegant women of the rich middle classes, the stage, and the demi-monde, co-operating with the great artists like Worth, Félix, Rodrigues, Doucet, MorinBlossier, Laferrière, etc., and, meeting on the neutral ground of the trying-on room, discuss, create, and perfect the new fashions. The Parisienne knows her own worth and the worth of other women, for in Paris a spontaneous and impeccable justice reigns over the souls of men and women alike; each one knows who is the true hero and who the amusing impostor, and to each one is allotted the honor or the contempt which is his or her due. Therefore it is not the fact of having been born in some historic mansion of the Rue de Varennes that makes a Parisian woman a princess or a duchess in the true sense of the term, but rather the splendor of her visage, the sincerity of her look, the grace of her bearing, and the beauty and fine proportions of her When once created, much in the same form. The princesses of Paris come as way as in the time of the empire, by the often from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine combined efforts of the princesses of eleas from the Faubourg Saint-Germain, gance and of the dressmakers of genius, and they owe their beauty as much to the new fashions are no longer propagated their own genius and to the perpetual de- as they were of old. The official salons sire to be beautiful as to the accidental are absolutely without influence; the gift of nature. That magnificent poetry other salons, the salons of what is called of feminine life, dress, is the creation of le vrai monde, have never been more sethe princesses of Paris, whose inventive- lect and exclusive than at the present ness and taste in all that concerns tiring day; the various delegates of elegance enable them to give laws to the universe whom we have seen meeting in the salon in all matters of fashion. of the dressmaker never meet in private Who invents the new fashions? Who life; on the other hand, the theatres are |