backed up by a sociologist, to study. What are the mysterious laws that govern this intangible, indistinct, and yet definite thing-la mode? How does it happen that all fashionable ladies will decide to resemble, according to the classic joke, either an umbrella or a bell, that they will either stir the dust with their trains or display their ankles, that they will puff out their sleeves with 'gigots' or leave their arms bare, that they will permit their waistlines to wander up and down?

Simple souls imagine that somewhere or other there is a supreme council that decrees according to its own good pleasure 'what will be worn this year.' If this occult power existed, there would be none greater on the surface of the globe, but it does not exist. Fashion is the result of spontaneous selection. There is, no doubt, a rhythm which one cannot transgress. It has its currents. It undergoes irresistible influences which are like the great waves in moral and social conditions. It is affected by wholly accidental influences - pure matters of chance.

To-day we are in a period where the simultaneous infatuation for all the styles makes us forget to have a style of our own. Our eclecticism sets Greece and the Middle Ages side by side, and confronts the art of Louis XVI with Negro art from the jungle. This mixing of æsthetic contradictions puts the couturier to a severe test. He has no tradition to restrain and guide him. His fancy and his audacity are free. No rule confines him only his own scruples and his own good taste. This taste he must train by a universal culture. He is a haunter of museums and libraries, he travels through picturesque provinces and strange countries. He builds up collections of his own: engravings, prints, bits of costume, ancient fabrics which he will have reproduced or conventionalized;

for he is master of the materials that he employs and not merely of the form he gives them.

However great the richness of his imagination, it cannot be sufficient for his task. He surrounds himself with assistants whom he directs and whom he inspires. These are designers, who suggest ideas to him, and the modelières or premières who tirelessly cut and drape, combine and harmonize.

People sometimes imagine that a gown is made from an artist's sketches the way a house is built from an architect's plan, but this is seldom the case. Almost always it grows through successive trials and from mental labor, like the statuette moulded by the fingers of the sculptor. The living mannequin stands there motionless. Upon her one drapes the cloth. There is cutting; movements must be tried; there is pinning, and adjusting; and the stores of precious silks are ransacked.

Sometimes the work goes swiftly and the gown emerges with joyous ease from inspired hands, but often it is a thankless task. The fold that hangs badly is undone and done over twenty times. Hours pass, nervous exhaustion begins, and the mannequin is ready to drop from fatigue. Sometimes, too, there are surprises. The first conception is transformed in being worked out. What started out to be a cloak finds itself suddenly covered with panels; the little afternoon-dress becomes a décolleté evening gown. The endeavors, doubts, despair, and intoxication of artistic creation the couturier knows them all.

Capricious and mysterious as fashion itself is the law that determines attraction and repulsion. Once upon a time there were ladies whether of the beau monde or of a demimonde of which our epoch knows nothing but a vulgar caricature who were known as the uncontested arbiters of good

taste. They determined what was elegant; others followed their lead. This régime is slowly disappearing. One may accuse the leveling tide of democracy or the improved education of individuals, according to one's taste. The result is the same. The couturier henceforward has to deal with the public. He has, it is true, means of influencing it-the races and the stage. But even this publicity, which is indispensable to him, may be turned against him, for it lays him open to counterfeiting and to being robbed of his ideas. For him alone the slow and costly working out of an idea, the delays and the discouragements. For the clever copyist, only the impudent and fruitful exploitation of his success.

Somebody has to pay for it all, and it is the modiste's clientèle who foot the bill. They complain sometimes of the high prices, but not always. A few weeks ago, a princess who bears a name that has been famous since the days of the First Empire presided over a committee of ladies, the patronesses of a dazzling affair that was being planned. She named the couturiers whom one might ask for costumes. She named three or four, and then, when another name was suggested, she cried: 'No, our set cannot go to him any more. He has begun to sell gowns at a bargain.' This 'bargain' was still well over one thousand francs.

- most of all the English pound and the American dollar make up for all that. A gown that cost 1200 francs in 1914 to-day costs about 3000. In 1914 an American lady would pay $240 for a gown which to-day she gets for less than $200. Let nobody be astonished, then, that our great couturiers do from fifty to eighty per cent of their business with England, Spain, South America and - most of all-with the United States. 'If the franc went back to par to-morrow,' one of these confided to me, 'we should be ruined.'

Such considerations have nothing to do with art. They are matters of commerce. The great couturier, who is an artist first of all, must likewise be the head of a business house, the director of a bank, and the manager of a factory. The ladies and gentlemen who find their way into luxurious salons - and who, when the hanging is lifted or when someone forgets to close the door, at best see only the waiting-room where the mannequins, like show girls at a theatre, dress and make upnever suspect that the business house, the bank, and the factory exist at all. But they do exist, finding as best they can a place to store their stocks of material and a place for their offices and workrooms in the seven or eight stories and the cellars and the additions behind the buildings.

The force of clerks, which is almost entirely feminine, and this does not diminish its fractiousness,-works here. In order to house these girls, to assure their comfort, to give them light and the amount of air required by health and demanded by a placard posted at the entrance to each room, miracles of ingenuity have been necessary. As the business has grown bit by bit, it has been necessary to take over neighboring buildings, to cut through walls, to open corridors and passageways and to arrange for elevators.

Enough goods for a big store accumulate and have to be taken care of. Everything that comes in and everything that goes out to supply the workshops is noted down by the business people. One item is 30,000 pins a month. Everything is carefully watched. A few inches more or less in the making of one gown is no great matter, but on eight or ten thousand gowns, which is the figure of production in some houses, it may affect the profits by several hundred thousand francs.

When you consider the size and the complexities of this organization, you are not surprised to hear the manager of one of these big houses say, 'My business? I learned most of it in America from Henry Ford. I am employing industrial methods. They call me 'the sergeant-major' and they are not wrong. If I did not carry carefulness to the point of mania, I should be wiped out. I get to my office every morning at 8:30. I receive the heads of my departments, one after another, a quarter of an hour at a time. If one of them does not finish in the time assigned him I put him off to the next meeting; but that does not need to happen. The most important thing in business is to be brief. Another secret of business prosperity is graphs. My whole business is shown in graphs. I look them over every day: one curve for orders, another for deliveries; another for money paid out, another for money received; curves showing the proportion of street gowns, of evening gowns; other curves showing sales of each model; and curves for the sales in France and those in the different foreign countries; comparison with the same month of previous years; proportion of old customers to new ones; condition of my personnel - more than I can tell you.

I

'By half-past ten I have seen everybody. I know what is in the mail. don't miss anything of importance.

There is a second report in the evening, under the same conditions, beginning at half-past five. In the meantime I can devote myself to my own particular work.

'First of all, I read the French, English, and American papers. There are two columns that interest me especially: the international money-market and the gossip of the fashionable world. If the pound and the dollar are up, I give the screw a turn to bring in my bills. If they are down, I let things go. I have divided my clients into ten classes with a secret key to them. One word on the folder of papers relating to each tells the way to deal with her. These words mean things like this: "pays on account"; "has to be checked up often"; "apply to husband."

'The fashion notes keep me in touch with the arrivals, the departures, with the marriages and deaths. There are several thousand people in two continents whose social standing, changes of position or fortune and residence, I have to know without hesitation and without error. An American turns up here for the first time. She mentions her name and the hotel where she is living. That ought to be enough. You have to know in advance who she is, how much she is worth, where she comes from, and what her connections are. If I do not, I am done for. The first reference you ask for annoys her; but luckily I have inherited an excellent memory from my father. Without that

'I am not speaking merely of the customers whom we already have, but also of the customers whom we do not have yet but whom we must have. For ten years I have been getting some seventy thousand names together, under my own direction and at my own suggestion, not by chance but from the yearbooks. There are seventy thousand women of every country

and of several classes, each of whom has her own taste and her own personality for us. I get in touch with them at the right time in all kinds of ways. Publicity? No, no. Propaganda and diplomacy. I have already got five thousand. Not a bad proportion, is it?

"That is the way a house prospers. That is how, year in year out, it reaches a figure for business done of fifty to sixty millions, more than one hundred and fifty thousand francs a day. There are taxes, it is true. To-day we give up seventy per cent of our profits to the State an enormous charge; and what makes it still worse is the perpetual modification of successive laws, contradictory and obscure, that confuse us in making declarations, taxes, and reductions. It is impossible to keep in touch with them all, and so I have a department for the study of taxation. Its one business is to study

the laws and advise me in my relations with the tax collector. This bureau costs us more than six thousand francs a year, but the money is not wasted.'

In this conversation the great couturier showed that, among the various qualities demanded by his profession, psychological sense is not the least. However, I did not want to leave the anterooms of this great dress-house where I had learned so much, without asking a single question.

'How much would it cost a welldressed woman to buy her clothes entirely from you?'

"That depends. If she is reasonable and can content herself with what is strictly necessary, she might get along gowns and cloaks only, of course for 50,000 francs a year.'

'And if she is not reasonable?' The only reply he gave was to raise his arms to heaven.

great crowd was moving. The steps of the gigantic mosque were black with people. The multicolored terraces, multicolored terraces, balconies, and roofs were crowded. The pitiless sunshine gleamed upon the silks, and satins, and the fanciful patterns of the rugs. The ragged policemen only just managed to keep control over the excited, vociferous mob. Tall black caracul caps turned and nodded in all directions, wide sleeves floated in the air while their possessors were gesticulating wildly. Beggars beat their copper plates, dervishes sounded their wooden mallets. The green-turbaned mullahs alone walked majestic and undisturbed among this human chaos. Donkeys painfully squeezed their way through, burdened with huge skins full of water, and their masters sonorously beat their metallic drinking cups, stopping the long-eared ishak every minute to sell a drink to a thirsty onlooker. I never remembered such a crowd on this square before and with reason.

Because on that day they were going to stone a renowned beauty. Only a few days before, she had been sold to a repulsive rich old man - a disfigured monster covered with festering wounds, rotting alive. And the day before her young lover was caught in her enderum. He was lucky enough to make his escape, climbing like a cat upon an old and crooked fig-tree that grew close to the wall, and jumping the fence. That was the last they saw of him, only a few ripe figs which he trampled underfoot stained the wall as if with blood. The pursuers ran to his parents' house, and were asked by those people to search all of their poor dwelling; but the lucky lover was not there. He was far away, about ten miles from Shiraz, in the magnificent and famous mosque of NureddinSultanieh. This mosque had the right of giving refuge. The young man just

managed to leap across its threshold and he became inviolable. The Shah himself could not demand his extradition. Such a sanctuary as this is never violated in Persia.

All of us Europeans were more than shocked by the terror of this impending execution. The monstrous husband was offered large sums of money to desist from vengeance, but he answered: 'I am rich enough. Gold will not quench my thirst for revenge.' Zeinal-Sultan himself intervened, but without success. The enraged old man shouted at him, 'If I forgive her to-day, to-morrow every beggar will spit in my beard. Law is law and it must be fulfilled.'

The British Consul alone kept smiling, and called his friends together.

'How much would you be willing to sacrifice to save this miserable woman?' he asked.

'How can you save her?' "That's my business.'

'But all Persia will rise against you!' 'Never fear. It's my risk.' Four hundred tomans were collected. 'Is that enough?' we asked him. 'If it is n't, I'll add more.' The French Resident was agitated above everyone else.

'John Bull always promises without fulfilling his promise!' he kept saying.

When these words were duly reported to the Briton, he said nothing and only tightened his lips. Toward night he called a few Persian Cossacks from the regular unit drilled by Liakhov after the Russian pattern.

Meanwhile, the people were getting ready for the execution, which is a survival of very ancient barbaric times. The woman accused of unfaithfulness to her husband or master is - without trial but in accordance with custom buried alive up to her throat. The crowd gathers a handful of stones and in an hour's time a bloody spot is all