The Ladies' Paradise Read online

  ‘That’s Bourras,’ said a voice behind her.

  She leaned forward and caught sight of Bourras, standing motionless at the end of the street in front of the window in which, that morning, she had noticed a whole ingenious display of umbrellas and walking-sticks. The tall old man had slipped out in the dark to feast his eyes on this triumphal display; his expression was heart-rending and he did not even notice the rain beating on his bare head, making his white hair drip.

  ‘He’s stupid,’ the voice remarked, ‘he’ll catch his death of cold.’

  Then, turning round, Denise found the Baudus behind her again. In spite of themselves, like Bourras whom they thought so stupid, they always came back there in the end, to this scene which was breaking their hearts. They had a passion for suffering. Geneviève, very pale, had noticed that Colomban was watching the shadows of the salesgirls passing by the windows on the mezzanine floor; and, while Baudu was choking with suppressed rancour, Madame Baudu’s eyes had silently filled with tears.

  ‘You’re going to go there tomorrow, aren’t you?’ the draper asked, tormented with uncertainty, but sensing that his niece had been conquered like the rest.

  She hesitated, then said gently:

  ‘Yes, Uncle, unless it pains you too much.’

  CHAPTER 2

  THE next day, at half-past seven, Denise was standing outside the Ladies’ Paradise. She wanted to call there before taking Jean to his employer, who lived a long way off, at the top of the Faubourg du Temple. But being used to early rising, she had been in too much of a hurry to get up: the shop assistants were only just arriving and, filled with shyness and the fear of looking ridiculous, she turned away to walk up and down the Place Gaillon for a moment.

  A cold wind was blowing and had already dried the pavement. From every street, lit by the pale early morning light under an ashen sky, shop assistants were busily emerging, their overcoat collars turned up, their hands in their pockets, caught unawares by this first nip of winter. Most of them hurried along alone and disappeared into the depths of the shop without addressing a word or even a glance to their colleagues striding along around them; others were walking in twos or threes, talking fast, taking up the whole of the pavement; and all, with an identical gesture, threw their cigarette or cigar into the gutter before entering.

  Denise noticed that several of these gentlemen stared at her as they passed. This increased her timidity; she felt quite unable to follow them, and resolved to wait until the procession had ended before going in herself, blushing at the idea of being jostled in the doorway in the midst of all those men. But the procession continued, and in order to escape their glances she walked slowly round the square. When she came back she found a tall young man, pale and ungainly, planted in front of the Ladies’ Paradise; he too appeared to have been waiting there for some time.

  ‘Excuse me, miss,’ he asked her finally with a stammer, ‘are you one of the salesgirls?’

  She was so overcome at being spoken to by this unknown young man that at first she did not reply.

  ‘Because, you see,’ he went on, getting more embarrassed, ‘I thought I might see if they wouldn’t take me on, and you might be able to give me some information.’

  He was just as shy as she was, and had dared to speak to her because he sensed that she was trembling like himself. ‘I’d be happy to, sir,’ she replied at last, ‘but I’m no better off than you are. I’ve come to apply for a job too.

  ‘Oh, I see,’ he said, quite disconcerted.

  And they blushed deeply, faced with their common shyness for an instant, touched by the similarity of their positions, yet not daring to wish each other good luck out loud. Then, as they said nothing further, and were feeling more and more uncomfortable, they separated awkwardly and began to wait again, in separate places, a few steps apart.

  The shop assistants were still going in. Now Denise could hear them joking as they passed close to her, giving her a sideways glance as they went by. She was becoming increasingly embarrassed at making an exhibition of herself in this way, and she was on the point of deciding to take half an hour’s walk in the neighbourhood when the sight of a young man coming quickly along the Rue Port-Mahon made her wait a moment longer. Obviously he must be the head of a department, for all the shop assistants were greeting him. He was tall, with fair skin and a carefully trimmed beard; and his eyes, the colour of old gold, and as soft as velvet, fell on her for a moment as he crossed the square. He was already going into the shop, indifferent, while she stood motionless, deeply disturbed by his glance, filled with a strange emotion in which there was more uneasiness than pleasure. She began to feel really afraid, and started to walk slowly down the Rue Gaillon, then down the Rue Saint-Roch, waiting for her courage to come back.

  It was not just the head of a department, it was Octave Mouret himself. He had not slept that night, for on leaving a party at a stockbroker’s he had gone to have supper with a friend and with two women whom he had picked up backstage in a small theatre. His buttoned-up overcoat hid his evening dress and his white tie. He quickly ran upstairs, washed his face, and changed; and by the time he sat down at his desk in his office on the ground floor he was quite ready for work, eyes bright, skin fresh, just as if he had had ten hours’ sleep. The vast office, furnished in old oak and hung with green rep, had as its only ornament a portrait of Madame Hédouin, who was still the talk of the neighbourhood. Since her death Octave remembered her with affection, and he was grateful to her memory for the fortune she had showered on him when she married him. And so, before setting about signing the bills which had been placed on his blotter, he gave the portrait the smile of a happy man. After all, when his escapades as a young widower were over, when he left the bedchambers where he was led astray by the need for pleasure, didn’t he always come back to work in her presence?

  There was a knock at the door and, without waiting, a young man entered, a tall, skinny fellow, with thin lips and a pointed nose, very gentlemanly in his appearance, with sleek hair in which strands of grey were already beginning to show. Mouret looked up; then, continuing to sign his papers, he said:

  ‘Did you sleep well, Bourdoncle?’

  ‘Very well, thank you,’ replied the young man, who was strutting about the room, quite at home.

  Bourdoncle, the son of a poor farmer from near Limoges, had started at the Ladies’ Paradise at the same time as Mouret, when the shop had been at the corner of the Place Gaillon. Very intelligent and energetic, it had seemed then as if he would easily outdo his friend, who was less serious-minded, distracted in many ways, who seemed thoughtless, and had disquieting affairs with women; but he did not have the touch of genius possessed by the ardent Provençal, nor his daring, nor his winning charm. Indeed, with the instinct of a prudent man, he had bowed to him submissively, and had done so without a struggle from the very beginning. When Mouret had advised his assistants to invest their money in the shop, Bourdoncle had been one of the first to respond, even entrusting an unexpected legacy from an aunt to him; and little by little, after working his way up through the ranks, salesman, assistant buyer in the silk department, then buyer, he had become one of the chief’s lieutenants, the one he liked best and listened to the most, one of the six men who had money invested in the shop and helped Mouret to run it, forming something like a council of ministers under an absolute monarch. Each of them looked after a province. Bourdoncle was in charge of overall supervision.*

  ‘What about you?’ he resumed familiarly. ‘Did you sleep well?’ When Mouret replied that he hadn’t been to bed he shook his head, murmuring:

  ‘Doesn’t do your health any good.’

  ‘Why not?’ said the other gaily. ‘I’m not as tired as you, old chap. Your eyes are puffy from too much sleep; your good habits are making you dull… Have some fun, it’ll liven you up a bit!’

  They always had the same friendly argument. In the past, Bourdoncle had beaten his mistresses because, so he said, they prevented him from sleeping.
Now he professed to hate women, no doubt having chance affairs which he did not talk about, so unimportant was the place they had in his life, and contenting himself in the shop with exploiting the customers, feeling the utmost contempt for their frivolity, which led them to ruin themselves for ridiculous clothes. Mouret, on the contrary, affected to go into raptures over women; he was entranced and affectionate in their presence, and was always being carried away by new love-affairs; and his amorous adventures were a kind of advertisement for his business: it seemed as if he enveloped all the women in the same caress, the better to bewilder them and hold them at his mercy.

  ‘I saw Madame Desforges last night,’ he resumed. ‘She was enchanting at the ball.’

  ‘But you didn’t have supper with her afterwards, did you?’ asked his colleague.

  Mouret protested.

  ‘What an idea! She’s very respectable, my dear fellow … No, I had supper with Héloïse, the little girl from the Folies … She’s a silly little thing, but so amusing!’

  He took another bundle of bills and went on signing them. Bourdoncle was still strutting about. He walked over and took a look through the high window-panes at the Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin, then came back saying:

  ‘You know, they’ll have their revenge.’

  ‘Who will?’ asked Mouret, who was not listening.

  ‘The women, of course.’

  At that Mouret became even more expansive, allowing his fundamental brutality to show through his air of sensual adoration. With a shrug of his shoulders he seemed to declare that he would throw them all away like empty sacks on the day when they had finished helping him to make his fortune. Bourdoncle, in his cold way, obstinately repeated:

  ‘They’ll have their revenge. There’ll be one who’ll avenge the others, there’s sure to be.’

  ‘Don’t you worry!’ cried Mouret, exaggerating his Provençal accent. ‘That one’s not yet born, my boy. And if she does come, you know …’

  He had raised his penholder, brandishing it and pointing it in the air as if he wished to stab some invisible heart with a knife. His colleague started pacing up and down again, giving in as usual to the superiority of his chief, whose genius, flawed though it was, nevertheless disconcerted him. He who was so clearheaded, so logical and passionless, incapable of slipping, could still understand the feminine side of success, Paris yielding in a kiss to the boldest man.

  Silence reigned. Nothing could be heard but Mouret’s pen. Then, in reply to his brief questions, Bourdoncle gave him information about the big sale of winter fancy goods which was to take place the following Monday. It was a very important affair; the shop was gambling its fortune on it, for the rumours going round the neighbourhood had some foundation: Mouret was throwing himself into speculation like a poet, with such ostentation, such a need for the colossal, that it looked as though everything would crumble beneath him. It was quite a new style of doing business, a type of commercial imagination which had worried Madame Hédouin in the past, and which still sometimes dismayed those concerned, in spite of some initial success. The governor was blamed behind his back for going too fast; he was accused of having dangerously increased the size of the shop without being able to count on a sufficient increase in customers; above all, people were afraid when they saw him gamble all the money in the till on a single venture, loading the counters with a pile of goods without keeping a penny in reserve. Thus, for the forthcoming sale, after the payment of considerable sums to the builders, the entire capital was tied up: once more it was a case of victory or death. And in the midst of all this anxiety he kept up his triumphant gaiety, his certainty of gaining millions, like a man who, worshipped by women, cannot be betrayed by them. When Bourdoncle ventured to express fears about the undue development of departments whose turnover was still unsatisfactory, Mouret gave a splendid, confident laugh, exclaiming:

  ‘Don’t worry, old chap, the shop’s too small!’

  His colleague seemed flabbergasted, seized with fear which he no longer tried to hide. The shop too small! A draper’s shop with nineteen departments and four hundred and three employees!

  ‘Of course,’ Mouret went on, ‘we shall be forced to expand within eighteen months … I’m seriously thinking of it. Last night Madame Desforges promised to introduce me to someone at her house tomorrow … We’ll talk about it when the idea’s ripe.’

  And having finished signing the bills, he got up, and gave his lieutenant some friendly taps on the shoulder; but the latter couldn’t get over his astonishment. The terror felt by the prudent people around him amused Mouret. In one of the outbursts of sudden frankness with which he sometimes overwhelmed his close friends, he declared that basically he was more Jewish than all the Jews in the world: he took after his father,* a cheery fellow who knew the value of money, whom he resembled both physically and in character; and, if he had got his excitable imagination from his mother, it was, perhaps, his most obvious asset, for he was aware of the invincible force of his charm in daring everything.

  ‘You know very well that we’ll stand by you to the end,’ said Bourdoncle finally.

  Then, before going down into the shop for their usual look round, the two men settled certain other details. They examined a sample copy of a little counterfoil book which Mouret had just invented for sales invoices. Having noticed that the larger the commission an assistant received, the faster obsolete goods and junk were snapped up, he had based a new sales method on this observation. In future he was going to give his salesmen an interest in the sale of all goods; he would give them a percentage on the smallest bit of material, the smallest article they sold: a system which had caused a revolution in the drapery trade by creating among the assistants a struggle for survival from which the employers reaped the benefit. This struggle, moreover, had become his favourite method, a principle of organization he constantly applied. He unleashed passions, brought different forces into conflict, let the strong devour the weak, and grew fat on this battle of interests. The sample counterfoil book was approved: at the top, on the counterfoil and on the piece to be torn off, the name of the department and the assistant’s number were printed; then, also on both sides, there were columns for the measurement, a description of the goods, and the price; the salesman merely signed the bill before handing it to the cashier. In this way, checking was extremely simple: the bills given by the cash-desk to the counting-house simply had to be compared with the counterfoils kept by the assistants. Each week the latter would get their percentage and their commission, without any possible error.

  ‘We shan’t be robbed so much,’ observed Bourdoncle with satisfaction. ‘That was an excellent idea of yours.’

  ‘And I thought of something else last night,’ Mouret explained. ‘Yes, my dear fellow, last night at that supper … I’d like to give the counting-house staff a small bonus for every mistake they find in the sales counterfoils, when they check them … You see, we’ll be certain then that they won’t overlook a single error; they’ll be more likely to invent them.’

  He began to laugh, while his companion looked at him in admiration. This new way of applying the struggle for survival enchanted him; he had a genius for administrative systems, and dreamed of organizing the shop in such a way as to exploit other people’s appetites for the complete and quiet satisfaction of his own. He often said that to make people work their hardest, and even get a bit of honesty out of them, it was necessary to bring them up against their own needs first.

  ‘Well, let’s go down,’ Mouret resumed. ‘We must deal with this sale … The silk arrived yesterday, didn’t it? Bouthemont must be getting it in now.’

  Bourdoncle followed him. The receiving department was in the basement, on the Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin side. There, level with the pavement, was a kind of glazed cage where the lorries discharged the goods. They were weighed, then tipped down a steep chute; the oak and ironwork of this shone, polished by the friction of bales and cases. Everything entered through this yawning trap; things we
re being swallowed up all the time, a continual cascade of materials falling with the roar of a river. During big sales especially, the chute would discharge an endless flow into the basement, silks from Lyons, woollens from England, linens from Flanders, calicoes from Alsace, prints from Rouen; and sometimes the lorries had to queue up. The parcels, as they flowed down, made a dull sound at the bottom of the hole, like a stone thrown into deep water.

  As he was passing, Mouret stopped for a moment in front of the chute. It was in full activity: rows of packing-cases were going down on their own, the men whose hands were pushing them down from above being invisible; and they seemed to be rushing along by themselves, streaming like rain from some spring higher up. Then some bales appeared, turning round and round like rolled pebbles. Mouret watched without saying a word. But this deluge of goods falling into his shop, this flood releasing thousands of francs a minute, lit a brief light in his limpid eyes. Never before had he been so clearly aware of the battle he was engaged in. His task was to launch this deluge of goods all over Paris. He didn’t say a word, but went on with his tour of inspection.

  In the grey light which was coming through the broad ventilators a gang of men was receiving consignments, while others were un-nailing packing-cases and opening bales in the presence of the managers of the various departments. The depths of this cellar, this basement where cast-iron pillars held up the arches and the bare walls were cemented, were filled with the bustle of a shipyard.