When the singer arrives for her first trying-on, the fitting room is filled with lengths of material, and Mademoiselle herself stands in the midst, brandishing a huge pair of shears. She throws a length of silk over one of your shoulders, puts in two pins, and bunching the material in her left hand, gives a slash with the scissors in her right, with a recklessness that makes you shudder. A pull here, a fold there, two more pins—and the stuff hangs as almost no one else can make it hang, accentuating a good figure and disguising a poor one.
Occasionally in filling a regular order she will stumble upon an unusual effect. One day they were making Moyen-Age sleeves for the dress of a well-known singer whom Mlle. Muelle has gowned for years, but who has never been included in the list of her special favourites. The sleeve was of slashed silvery grey, lined with cerise, the lining showing on the edges. She picked up a bit of cloth of silver and pulled it through the slashes. The effect charmed her.
"Tenez!" she said, "That is too good for her. We'll keep that for La Belle Geraldine."
"La Belle Geraldine," as Miss Farrar is known in Paris, is one of Muelle's most constant patrons. Ever since her Berlin days she has been costumed by the Maison Muelle, and she stands very high in the list of Mademoiselle's favourites.
The outer room may contain the photographs of celebrities great and small, but in the inner room there are just two—a portrait of Miss Farrar as Elizabeth and one of myself as Carmen.
Opening off the main reception and fitting rooms are others lined with armoires and stacks of boxes running to the ceiling. Then come the rooms for cutting and sewing, and the embroidery rooms. Muelle uses quantities of solid embroidery and appliqué work, where other costumers are content with stenciling and gilding. She has the secret of a metal thread that does not tarnish. Her idea is that the use of first-class materials, good silks and satins, real velvets is a necessity in these days of electric lighting, which is as revealing as sunlight; that the substitution of imitation fabrics went out with the use of gas in the theatre, and that the superior wearing qualities alone of the best materials justify the greater expense.
The capacity of her armoires and the size of the accumulated collections they contain were tested some years ago by the special production of Strauss's "Salome" at the Châtelet Theatre in Paris, when Muelle was called upon, at ridiculously short notice, to furnish all costumes for a cast of 150 people. There was a royal ransacking of cupboards and jewel cabinets, but everything was ready on time for the dress rehearsal.
A greater feather in her cap was the order to costume the new productions of the Russian Ballet, from designs by no less a personage than the great Leon Bakst himself. Then ensued a dyeing of silks and a printing of chiffons, a stringing of beads and knotting of fringes which set the whole establishment humming like a beehive.
For all their thousand problems, the costumes were finished and delivered at the appointed time.