Why, in Philadelphia a hat may be worn by two faces; here it is a constituent part of the woman it was invented for, and they cannot be separated from each other without injury to both. Do you believe that Madame Palmyre ever makes two frocks alike? it would be the ruin of the woman’s reputation. What kind of feelings must a lady have, coming into an assembly, and finding another woman’s frock having the same physiognomy as her own! I have seen more than one in a fit of hysterics from this very occurrence. And do you believe that Simon’s chapeaux are formed upon the cold precepts of the schools, or Herbault’s bibis? Do you think that Michael’s shoes, or those exquisite bottines of Gelot, or those kid gloves of Boivin are produced without enthusiasm? or Batton’s flowers or Cartier’s plumes, without inspiration?
A modiste in America indeed!—why the same woman cuts out a frock and makes it! The same woman who does the head-work of a bonnet, does the stitchings! In France there is an adaptation of labour to the abilities of the artist; and a modiste en chef no more thinks of the manipulation of a frock, than Scribe of a vaudeville, or Carème of a dinner.
Nor does she suffer her genius to be dissipated and wasted upon varieties even the most important. Each branch has its professor, whose whole mind is concentrated upon this one object. Even the invention has its specialities. One adapts colours to complexions, and another studies the proportions of the human form, and its shapes, and the congruity of dresses with its various sizes; how to bring out an attraction more seductive by the sacrifice of one less potent; where to enhance a beauty by a defect; and how to discover a charm under pretext of concealing it; one is a kind of Minister of the Interior, another of Foreign Affairs.
In the manual operations, too, the same series is observed. One folds, another crimples, one bastes, another rips; one spends her days in “undoing,” another in “trying-on,” another again grows old in puckering, and so in crisping, pranking, curling, and flouncing—all have their several functions, and all their tasks assorted to their several abilities.
At the fête of the Longchamps the eye is dazzled by the splendour, and the attention is distracted by the variety. A fashion, to have vogue, must present itself in a more “questionable shape.” A pretty woman is therefore selected, who for a season may personate the many-coloured goddess; she is called during her reign the “Most fashionable”—not indeed as the king is called the “Most Christian,” for truly, she is the most fashionable—“la plus à la mode de Paris.”
The Parisians have a way of getting this fashionable woman up, pretty much as we get up a great man in the United States. A few of the leaders of fashion, young gentlemen in their first down, having made choice of a fit person, first direct upon her all the rays of their admiration. She is not required to be a duchess, or to have any more beauty or accomplishments than her neighbours, but she had better be the wife of a rich banker. If she rides out of an afternoon to the Bois de Boulogne, then will a dozen of these fashionables gather around her barouche; and hats in hand, they will canter alongside; they will be unable to contain their admiration, and they will set the multitude gaping. Thus in the crowd one stares at the heavens, and another, till at last the world is on the gaze; and as all see different wonders in the skies, one a whale, another a weasel, and many phantasms and idle visions; so in the heaven of this lady’s face, beauties are now struck out that had remained, but for this general regard, for ever undiscovered; beauties which herself, if possible, had never seen.
——“As learned critics view
In Homer, beauties Homer never knew.”
The same gallants pursue her to the opera, and there gather into her box with noise and bustle and assiduities, till they have drawn the whole house upon her, and every glass is pointed; as in the chase, where the hare stands at bay, and the hunters have but a single aim; only that here the danger is reversed.
So at the concert, and so at the ball, where she is engaged for twenty sets a-head, before half up the stairs; so every where the same ardour, the same empressement, the same adoration. She is gazetted too in the newspapers, and all her particulars, jetty hair, inky eye-brows, turn-up nose, pouting lips; every thing circumstantially described. Every one knows her, every one loves her, and every one not wishing to pass for a clown, without taste, swears she is adorable. She is in every one’s mouth, she is in every one’s heart, she is —— in a word, she is la femme la plus à la mode de Paris.
Thus our fashionable lady is turned about in the vortex of dissipation till Spring, and enjoys a flood of frothy adulation beyond the lot of all other monarchs. The spring arrives, and then the summer; and being fashionable, she leaves of course during the warm months for the Waterings, or her castle in a distant province, and returns in the Autumn: and in the Autumn she finds another “Fashionable Lady” in her place. It is scarce to be expected that such violent admiration should be bestowed on the same person for more than a season. She now abdicates and sinks into obscurity, or which is more common, being unable to endure the reverse of fortune, dies of mortification and spite.