rées of betrothal, meetings of four-inhand clubs, four thousand guinea balls given by the Princesse de Sagan and the Princesse de Léon, amateur acrobats and fancy riding at M. Molier's private circus, play-acting at the swell" clubs, receptions here, garden parties there; and so fêtes succeed fêtes, and the days and the nights are too few for their multitude. At last, however, the Grand Prix is lost and won, and the worldlings cease to labor, at Paris at least. Aix-les-Bains, Luchon, Trouville, the sea-side resorts and the inland watering places, invite their presence, and they accept the invitation either really or nominally.

During the summer months Paris remains the beautiful city of marvels, and although the "Tout Paris," or the Upper Ten, are supposed to have migrated to the mountain, the ocean, or the baronial hall, the city continues to be animated in a calm way. Summer is the season of that open-air life in which the Parisians particularly delight, when the popular restaurants in the city place their little dinner tables on the sidewalk, and when the restaurants of the Champs Elysées spread snowy cloths for the weightier purses in the vicinity of plashing fountains and brilliant flower beds. Then it is pleasant of a warm and still evening to dine at Laurent's or the Ambassadeurs, and to recognize many of the notabilities of the capital as they sit at the neighboring tables, on each of which is a little lamp that casts opaline reflections on the faces of the women. Gradually the glow of sunset fades away; overhead you hear President Carnct's rooks returning in loquacious bands to their nests in the garden of the Élysée Palace; little by little the mystery of darkness seems to issue from and envelop the landscape; and then, by the time we have reached the moment of coffee and cigars, we see festoons of gigantic pearls whitening into luminousness beneath the trees, and lighting up brilliantly the under side of the delicate green chestnut leaves. A few minutes later there is heard a clashing of cymbals and a flonflon of commonplace music, dominated at the regular intervals of the couplet by the voices of singers-Paulus, Elise Faure, Yvette Guilbert--summoning the amateurs to the gaudy joys of the cafés concerts.

The cafés concerts, the Cirque d'Éte, the Hippodrome, such are the amuse

Paris,

ments of elegant Paris during the summer, when the theatres are closed, with the exception of the Opéra and the Comédie Française. In September the theatres reopen their doors, and the intellectual and frivolous life of Paris is resumed with renewed ardor. The summer holidays are over. In October everybody is back, and the dramatic authors imperiously claim attention for their new pieces. It is the season of "first nights." The first performance of a new play is always somewhat of an event in Paris. The French stage has a prestige that no other stage possesses, and the French audience dispenses greater glory than any other European public, insomuch that those who have not danced, sung, or acted before Paris can scarcely be said to have danced, sung, or acted at all; their fame, however great it may be elsewhere, requires the ratification of Paris before it can be considered to be absolute. as Victor Hugo said, is the starting-point of success, the anvil on which great renown is forged. Therefore the privilege of being present at the "first night," particularly if the piece be by an author of supreme celebrity, is highly esteemed and persistently solicited. A "première" is, in a way, a social function, and constant attendance at such ceremonies constitutes a patent of Parisianism. Certainly a "first night" is interesting; it has the charm of novelty and uncertainty, the attractions of a plot yet to be disentangled, of a witticism that bounds across the foot-lights for the first time, of a scene that will be the talk of the town for the next nine days, of a costume that will be the fashion of to-morrow. above all, one is interested by the house itself, by the animation of the lobbies during the entr'actes, the exhibition of well-known faces, the presence of the great glories of literature, art, war, and politics, the consoling spectacles to which the eye has become accustomed, the avantscènes that reveal the latest arrangements made between wealthy seigneurs and distinguished Cythereans, the baignoires full of mystery, the balcony radiant with powdered beauty, the whole audience vibrating with lively scepticism, and with that passion for movement and life which characterizes the élite of adventurers, fools of fortune, and men and women of genius who compose what is called the Tout Paris."

But,

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."

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 opera. January is a great month for soirées. In 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 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. In 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.

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, and with these creatures as a basis, the Parisienne developed herself by an unparalleled process of remaking, remodelling, and reshaping after the pattern of some marvellous and unformulated ideal of grace, beauty, elegance, and youth. All women are born distinguished, according to Michelet's theory; whether they become eventually more refined or whether they lapse into vulgarity depends on the surroundings amidst which they grow up. The Parisiennes have, above all other women, an innate gift of synthesis and a love of order and rhythm, which produce all the graces and even the sublime grace of virtue; they fashion for themselves the kind of beauty that they desire even out of the poorest materials-witness Rachel, whom nature made ugly, and art and will made admirably beautiful. Nature has given women but about five years of true youth and beauty, and yet by means of some prodigious magic the Parisienne obliges her youth to last thirty years. Furthermore, as she has a knowledge of everything by intuition and without studying, like the grand seigneurs of old, her conversation is in itself a liberal education.

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 form. The princesses of Paris come as often from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine as from the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and they owe their beauty as much to their own genius and to the perpetual desire to be beautiful as to the accidental gift of nature. That magnificent poetry of feminine life, dress, is the creation of the princesses of Paris, whose inventiveness and taste in all that concerns tiring enable them to give laws to the universe in all matters of fashion.

Who invents the new

Who

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 her self 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.

When once created, much in the same way as in the time of the empire, by the combined efforts of the princesses of elegance and of the dressmakers of genius, the new fashions are no longer propagated as they were of old. The official salons are absolutely without influence; the other salons, the salons of what is called le vrai monde, have never been more select and exclusive than at the present day; the various delegates of elegance whom we have seen meeting in the salon of the dressmaker never meet in private life; on the other hand, the theatres are