The Ladies' Paradise (BBC tie-in) (Oxford World's Classics) (12 page)

‘There!’ exclaimed Mouret when he had finished. ‘Leave it like that… Let me know if it doesn’t attract the women on Monday!’

Just as he was rejoining Bourdoncle and Robineau, a woman appeared; she remained for a few seconds rooted to the spot, entranced by the display. It was Denise. She had waited for nearly an hour in the street, paralysed by a terrible attack of
shyness, and had at last made up her mind to come in. But she was still so beside herself with shyness that she could not follow even the simplest directions; the assistants, when she stammeringly enquired for Madame Aurélie, pointed out the mezzanine staircase to her in vain; she would thank them, and then turn left if she had been told to turn right; so that for ten minutes she had been wandering round the ground floor, going from one department to another, surrounded by the ill-natured curiosity and sullen indifference of the salesmen. She felt a desire to run away and, at the same time, a need to stop and admire. She was so lost and small inside the monster, inside the machine, and although it was still idle, she was terrified that she would be caught up in its motion, which was already beginning to make the walls shake. And the thought of the shop at the Vieil Elbeuf, dark and cramped, made this vast shop appear even bigger to her; it seemed bathed in light, like a town, with monuments, squares, streets, in which it seemed she would never find her way.

She had not dared before to venture into the silk hall; its high glazed ceiling, sumptuous counters, and church-like atmosphere frightened her. Then, when she had at last gone in, to escape the grinning salesmen in the linen department, she had stumbled straight into Mouret’s display; and though she was scared, the woman in her was aroused, her cheeks suddenly flushed, and she forgot herself as she gazed at the blazing conflagration of silks.

‘Hey!’ said Hutin crudely in Favier’s ear, ‘It’s that tart we saw in the Place Gaillon.’

Mouret, while pretending to listen to Bourdoncle and Robineau, was secretly flattered by this poor girl’s sudden fascination with his display, as a duchess might be by a brutal look of desire from a passing drayman. But Denise had raised her eyes, and she was even more confused when she recognized the young man she took to be the head of a department. She thought he was looking at her sternly. Then, not knowing how to get away, quite distraught, she once again approached the nearest assistant, who happened to be Favier.

‘Could you tell me where I can find Madame Aurélie, please?’

Favier gave her an unpleasant look and replied curtly:

‘On the mezzanine floor.’

Denise, anxious to escape from all these men who were staring at her, thanked him and was once more walking away from the staircase she should have climbed, when Hutin yielded to his natural instinct for gallantry. He had called her a tart, but it was with his most amiable salesman’s smile that he stopped her.

‘No, this way, miss … If you would be so good as to …’

He even went with her a little way to the foot of the staircase in the left-hand corner of the hall.

There he bowed slightly, and smiled at her with the smile he gave to all women.

‘Upstairs, turn left… The ladieswear department is straight ahead.’

This tender politeness moved Denise deeply. It was like a brotherly hand extended to her. She had raised her eyes, she was gazing at Hutin, and everything about him touched her, his handsome face, his smiling look which allayed her fear, his voice which seemed to her sweet and consoling. Her heart swelling with gratitude, she expressed her friendship in the few disjointed words her emotion allowed her to stammer out.

‘You’re too kind … Please don’t trouble … Thank you so much, sir …’

Hutin had already rejoined Favier, to whom he said under his breath, in a crude tone:

‘She’s skinny, eh!’

Upstairs the girl found the ladieswear department straight away. It was a vast room with high cupboards of carved oak all round, and plate-glass windows facing the Rue de la Michodière. Five or six women in silk dresses, looking very smart with their chignons curled and their crinolines
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sweeping behind them, were moving about, talking to each another. One of them, tall and thin, with an elongated head which made her look like a runaway horse, was leaning against a cupboard, as if she was already tired out.

‘Madame Aurélie?’ Denise repeated.

The saleswoman looked at her without replying, with an air of disdain for her shabby dress; then, turning to one of her companions,
a short girl with a pasty complexion, she asked in an artless, wearied manner:

‘Mademoiselle Vadon, do you know where Madame Aurélie is?’

The girl, who was in the process of arranging long cloaks in order of size, did not even take the trouble to look up.

‘No, Mademoiselle Prunaire, I don’t know,’ she said rather primly.

A silence ensued. Denise stood there, and no one took any further notice of her. However, after waiting a moment she plucked up enough courage to ask another question.

‘Do you think Madame Aurélie will be back soon?’

Then the assistant buyer of the department, a thin, ugly woman whom she had not noticed, a widow with a prominent chin and coarse hair, called to her from a cupboard where she was checking price tickets:

‘You’ll have to wait if you want to talk to Madame Aurélie personally.’

And, addressing another saleswoman, she added:

‘Isn’t she in the reception office?’

‘No, Madame Frédéric, I don’t think so,’ the girl replied. ‘She didn’t say anything; she can’t be far away.’

Denise remained standing. There were a few chairs for customers, but as no one told her to sit down she did not dare to take one, although she felt that her legs might drop off with fatigue. These young ladies had clearly sensed that she was a salesgirl coming to apply for a job, and they were staring at her, stripping her naked, out of the corners of their eyes, with the veiled, ill-natured hostility of people seated at table who do not like moving up to make room for those outside who are hungry. Her embarrassment grew; she crossed the room very quietly and looked out into the street, just for something to do. Just opposite, the Vieil Elbeuf with its rusty frontage and lifeless windows seemed to her so ugly, so wretched, seen thus from the luxury and life of her present vantage-point, that her heart was wrung with something akin to remorse.

‘I say,’ whispered tall Mademoiselle Prunaire to little Mademoiselle Vadon, ‘did you see her boots?’

‘And her dress!’ murmured the other.

Her eyes still on the street, Denise felt herself being devoured. But she was not angry; she had not thought either of them beautiful, neither the tall one with her bun of red hair hanging down her horse-like neck, nor the short one with the sour-milk complexion which made her flat and seemingly boneless face look flabby. Clara Prunaire, the daughter of a clog-maker in the forest of Vivet, had been seduced by the footmen at the Château de Mareuil, where the Countess employed her to do the mending; she had worked later on in a shop in Langres, whence she had come to Paris, where she was now avenging herself on men for the kicks she had received in the past from old Prunaire. Marguerite Vadon had been born in Grenoble, where her family owned a cloth business; she had had to be sent off to the Ladies’ Paradise to hush up a slip she had made, a child conceived by accident; if she behaved well she would eventually return home to run her parents’ shop and marry a cousin who was waiting for her.

‘Anyway,’ Clara resumed in a low voice, ‘she certainly won’t get very far here!’

But they stopped talking as a woman of about forty-five came in. It was Madame Aurélie, very stout and tightly laced in a black silk dress; the bodice, stretched over the massive curves of her shoulders and bust, shone like a piece of armour. Beneath dark coils of hair she had large, unwavering eyes, a stern mouth, and broad, rather pendulous cheeks; and in the majesty of her position as chief buyer her face was acquiring the puffiness of the bloated mask of some Caesar.

‘Mademoiselle Vadon,’ she said in an irritated voice, ‘why didn’t you put the model of that close-fitting coat back in the workroom yesterday?’

‘It needed an alteration, ma’am,’ the saleswoman replied, ‘so Madame Frédéric kept it out.’

At that the assistant buyer took the model from a cupboard, and the dispute continued. All opposition was crushed when Madame Aurélie thought she had to assert her authority. Extremely vain—to the point of not wishing to be called by her real name, Lhomme, which annoyed her, and of not admitting that her father, whom she always referred to as a tailor in a shop, was
really just a caretaker—she was friendly only to those girls who were pliable and fawning, bowing down in admiration to her. When she had tried to set herself up in the dressmaking business she had become embittered, continually dogged by bad luck, exasperated at the feeling that she was made for affluence and yet encountered nothing but a series of catastrophes; and even now, after her success at the Ladies’ Paradise, where she earned twelve thousand francs a year, she still seemed to have a grudge against the world, and she was very hard on beginners just as, in the beginning, life had been hard to her.

‘That’ll do!’ she said tartly. ‘You’ve got no more sense than the others, Madame Frédéric … Have the alteration done straight away!’

During this discussion Denise had stopped looking at the street. She thought this woman must be Madame Aurélie but, alarmed by the anger in her raised voice, she remained standing, still waiting. The saleswomen, delighted at having set their two superiors against each other, had gone back to their work with an air of complete indifference. Several minutes passed, and no one had the kindness to extricate the girl from her embarrassment. In the end, it was Madame Aurélie herself who noticed her and, surprised at seeing her standing there without moving, asked her what she wanted.

‘Madame Aurélie, please?’

‘I am Madame Aurélie.’

Denise’s mouth was dry and her hands cold; she was as frightened as when, as a child, she’d been terrified of being whipped. She stammered out her request, and then had to repeat it to make herself understood. Madame Aurélie looked at her with her large, unwavering eyes, and not a single fold of her imperial mask deigned to relax.

‘How old are you?’

‘Twenty, ma’am.’

‘What, twenty? You don’t look more than sixteen!’

Once more, the saleswomen were looking up. Denise hastened to add:

‘Oh, I’m very strong!’

Madame Aurélie shrugged her broad shoulders. Then she declared:

‘Oh well, I don’t mind putting your name down. We put down the names of all those who apply … Mademoiselle Prunaire, give me the book.’

But the book could not be found: Jouve, one of the shopwalkers, probably had it. Clara, the tall girl, was going to fetch it when Mouret arrived, still followed by Bourdoncle. They were just finishing their tour of the mezzanine floor; they had been through the laces, the shawls, the furs, the furniture, the underwear, and were winding up with the dresses. Madame Aurélie left Denise for a moment to speak to them about an order for some coats she hoped to give to one of the big Parisian contractors; usually she bought direct, and on her own responsibility; but for important purchases she preferred to consult the management. Bourdoncle then told her about her son Albert’s latest lapse, which seemed to fill her with despair: that boy would be the death of her; his father, though not a man of talent, was at least reliable. The whole Lhomme dynasty, of which she was the undisputed head, sometimes gave her a great deal of trouble.

Mouret, surprised at seeing Denise again, bent down to ask Madame Aurélie what the girl was doing there; when the buyer replied that she had come to apply for a job as salesgirl, Bourdoncle, with his contempt for women, was staggered at such pretension.

‘Surely not!’ he murmured. ‘It’s a joke! She’s too ugly.’

‘It must be said there’s nothing very beautiful about her,’ said Mouret, not daring to defend her, although he still felt touched by her rapture downstairs before his arrangement of silks.

But the book was brought in and Madame Aurélie came back to Denise, who had certainly not made a good impression. She looked very clean in her thin black woollen dress; they did not dwell on her poor get-up, as a uniform, the regulation silk dress, was provided; but she seemed very weak and puny, and her face was sad. Without insisting on the girls being beautiful, they wanted them to be attractive for the sales rooms, and beneath the gaze of all these ladies and gentlemen who were studying her, weighing her like a mare being haggled over by peasants at a fair, Denise finally lost what was left of her composure.

‘Your name?’ asked the buyer, pen in hand, ready to write at the end of a counter.

‘Denise Baudu, ma’am.’

‘Your age?’

‘Twenty years and four months.’

And she repeated, risking a glance at Mouret, at the man she took to be the head of a department, whom she kept on meeting and whose presence disturbed her:

‘I don’t look it, but I’m very strong.’

They smiled. Bourdoncle was studying his nails with impatience. Her words fell, moreover, in the middle of a discouraging silence.

‘What shop have you worked in in Paris?’ resumed Madame Aurélie.

‘But I’ve just arrived from Valognes, ma’am.’

This was a fresh disaster. Usually, the Ladies’ Paradise only took saleswomen with a year’s experience in one of the small shops in Paris. On hearing this, Denise thought all was lost, and had it not been for the children she would have turned on her heel in order to bring this useless interview to an end.

‘Where did you work at Valognes?’

‘At Cornaille’s.’

Mouret let slip a remark: ‘I know it, it’s a good firm.’

Usually he never interfered in the engagement of personnel, as the heads of departments were responsible for their own staff. But, with his sensitive flair for women, he felt a hidden charm in this girl, a quality of grace and tenderness of which she herself was unaware. The good reputation of the shop in which an applicant had started was very important; often it was the deciding factor in engaging someone. Madame Aurélie went on in a gentler tone: