t 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 _role_ 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
couturiere_ 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 couturiere_--Madame, as