Enter a Parisian shop, and ask to be shewn velvet, silk, or riband, to assort with a pattern you have brought of some particular colour or quality, and the mercer, having glanced at it somewhat contemptuously, places before you six or eight pieces of a different tint and texture.
You tell him that they are not similar to the pattern, and he answers, "That may be; nevertheless, his goods are of the newest fashion, and infinitely superior to your model." You say, "You prefer the colour of your pattern, and must match it." He produces half-a-dozen pieces still more unlike what you require; and to your renewed assertion that no colour but the one similar to your pattern will suit you, he assures you, that his goods are superior to all others, and that what you require is out of fashion, and a very bad article, and, consequently, that you had much better abandon your taste and adopt his.

This counsel is given without any attempt at concealing the contempt the giver of it entertains for your opinion, and the perfect satisfaction he indulges for his own.
You once more ask, "If he has got nothing to match the colour you require ?" and he shrugs his shoulders and answers, "_Pourtant_, madame, what I have shewn you is much superior," "Very possible; but no colour will suit me but this one," holding up the pattern; "for I want to replace a breadth of a new dress to which an accident has occurred." "_Pourtant_, madame, my colours are precisely the same, but the quality of the materials is infinitely better!" and with this answer, after having lost half an hour--if not double that time--you are compelled to be satisfied, and leave the shop, its owner looking as if he considered you a person of decidedly bad taste, and very troublesome into the bargain.
Similar treatment awaits you in every shop; the owners having, as it appears to me, decided on shewing you only what _they_ approve, and not what you seek.

The women of high rank in France seldom, if ever, enter any shop except that of Herbault, who is esteemed the _modiste, par excellence_, of Paris, and it is to this habit, probably, that the want of _bienseance_ so visible in Parisian _boutiquiers_, is to be attributed..