The Ladies' Paradise (BBC tie-in) (Oxford World's Classics) (24 page)

But what troubled Denise most was to have discovered Colomban’s secret. She could see him at all hours of the day on the other side of the road, in the doorway of the Vieil Elbeuf, always gazing upwards with his eyes fixed on the girls in the ladieswear department. When he felt that she was watching him
he would blush and turn his head away, as if afraid that she would betray him to her cousin Geneviève, although the Baudus and their niece had not spoken to each other since the latter had started at the Ladies’ Paradise. She had thought at first, on seeing his despairing looks, that he was in love with Marguerite, who was well-behaved and lived in the shop and was therefore not an easy prey. She was flabbergasted when it became clear that the shop assistant’s passionate glances were addressed to Clara. He had been like that for months, aflame with passion on the pavement opposite, unable to pluck up the courage to declare himself—and all that for a loose girl who lived in the Rue Louis-le-Grand, whom he could have accosted any evening before she walked off, always on the arm of a different man! Clara herself seemed to have no idea of the conquest she had made. Denise’s discovery filled her with a painful emotion. Was love really as stupid as this? This lad, who had real happiness within his reach, was ruining his life, worshipping this good-for-nothing girl as if she were a saint! From that day on, every time she caught sight of Geneviève’s pale, sickly face behind the green panes of the Vieil Elbeuf, her heart ached.

In the evenings Denise would day-dream as she watched the girls going off with their lovers. Those who did not sleep at the Ladies’ Paradise would disappear until the next day, and when they returned to their departments they brought with them in their skirts the smell of the outside world, all the disquiet of the unknown. Sometimes Denise would respond with a smile to a friendly nod from Pauline, for whom Baugé always waited regularly from half-past eight onwards, standing at the corner near the fountain in the Place Gaillon. She herself was usually the last to leave, and when she had taken a furtive walk, always alone, she would be the first to come in again; then she would either work or go to bed, her head swimming with dreams, full of curiosity about Parisian life, about which she knew nothing. She certainly did not envy the other girls, for she was happy in her solitude, in the unsociable life in which she shut herself away as if in a sanctuary; but her imagination sometimes carried her away, and she tried to guess at things, conjuring up pictures of the pleasures which were always being described in her presence—the cafés, the restaurants, the Sundays spent on the water and in
guinguettes
.
*
Afterwards she was left spiritually exhausted, filled with desire mingled with lassitude; she felt as if she was already tired of these amusements which she had never tasted.

However, there was little time for dangerous day-dreams in her daily working life. In the shop, worn out as they were by thirteen hours’ work, there was little opportunity to think about love between salesmen and saleswomen. If the constant battle for money had not already wiped out the difference between the sexes, the endless jostle of the crowd, which kept their minds busy and made their bodies ache, would have been enough to kill all desire. Very few love-affairs were known to have taken place in the midst of the hostilities and friendships between men and women, the relentless competition between departments. They were all nothing but cogs, caught up in the workings of the machine, surrendering their personalities, merely adding their strength to the mighty common whole of the phalanstery.
*
It was only outside that they could resume their individual lives, with the sudden flame of reawakening passions.

However, one day Denise saw Albert Lhomme, the buyer’s son, slipping a note into the hand of a girl in the lingerie department, after walking through the department several times with an air of indifference. The winter off-season, which lasted from December to February, was approaching; there were times when she had nothing to do, hours she spent standing and looking into the distance, waiting for customers. The salesgirls in the ladieswear department were especially friendly with the salesmen in the neighbouring lace department, although their enforced intimacy never went beyond jokes exchanged in low voices. The assistant buyer in the lace department was a bit of a joker, who used to pester Clara with salacious confidences just for a laugh, although he really had little interest in her and made no attempt to meet her outside. And it was like this in all the departments—the men and women exchanged understanding glances, remarks which they alone understood, sometimes sly conversations with their backs half turned and with pensive looks in order to put the terrifying Bourdoncle off the scent. As for Deloche, for a long time he contented himself with smiling at Denise; then, becoming bolder, he murmured a friendly word to
her when he bumped into her. On the day when she had noticed Madame Aurélie’s son giving a note to the girl from the lingerie department, Deloche, feeling a need to take an interest in her, and not being able to think of anything to say, was asking her if she had enjoyed her lunch. He too saw the white smudge of the letter; he looked at Denise, and they both blushed at this intrigue set up in front of them.

But, in the midst of these warm breezes which were gradually awakening the woman in her, Denise still kept her childlike peace of mind. It was only when she saw Hutin that her heart beat faster. But that was merely gratitude in her eyes; she thought that she was simply touched by the young man’s politeness. He could not bring a customer to the department without her becoming quite nervous. Several times, coming back from a cash-desk, she found herself making a detour, going through the silk department quite unnecessarily, her heart pounding with emotion. One afternoon she found Mouret there, and he seemed to watch her with a smile. He no longer paid any attention to her, and only said a few words to her from time to time in order to give her advice about the way she dressed and to joke about her looking like a tomboy, a little savage whom he would never be able to turn into a smart girl, in spite of all his experience with women; he would even laugh about it, he condescended to tease her, without admitting to himself how much this little salesgirl, with her funny hair, troubled him. Faced with his silent smile, Denise trembled as if she had done something wrong. Did he know why she was going through the silk department, when she herself could not have explained what made her go out of her way like that?

Hutin, however, did not seem to notice the girl’s grateful glances at all. The shopgirls were not his type; he affected to despise them, while at the same time boasting more than ever about the extraordinary adventures he had with customers: at his counter a baroness had fallen in love with him at first sight, and an architect’s wife had fallen into his arms one day when he had gone to her house about an error in measuring some material. This Norman bragging merely disguised the fact that he picked up girls in bars and music-halls. Like all the young gentlemen in the drapery business, he had a mania for spending, and would go
through the whole week in his department struggling like a miser for money, with the sole desire of throwing it away on Sunday at the races, in restaurants and dance-halls. He never saved a penny, never put anything by; his salary was squandered as soon as he drew it, he cared nothing for the future. Favier did not join him in these parties. He and Hutin, so friendly in the shop, would say goodbye to each other at the door and not exchange another word; many of the salesmen, in continual contact while at work, became strangers, ignorant of each other’s lives as soon as they set foot in the street. Liénard, however, was a close friend of Hutin’s. They both lived in the same hotel, the Hôtel de Smyrne in the Rue Sainte-Anne, a gloomy building inhabited entirely by shop assistants. In the morning they arrived together; then, in the evening, the first to finish tidying up his counter would go and wait for the other at the Café Saint-Roch in the Rue Saint-Roch, a little café in which the shop assistants from the Ladies’ Paradise usually congregated, and where they brawled and drank, and played cards in the pipe smoke. They often remained there till almost one in the morning, when the exhausted owner of the establishment threw them out. For the last month they had been spending three evenings a week at a low music-hall in Montmartre; they took their friends there, and were making quite a reputation for Mademoiselle Laure, the singer who worked there and who was Hutin’s latest conquest, and whose talents they applauded with such violent hangings of their canes and with such a din that the police had already had to intervene on two occasions.

Thus the winter passed, and at last Denise obtained a fixed salary of three hundred francs. It was high time; her heavy shoes were falling to pieces. In the last month she even avoided going out, for fear of finishing them off at one go.

‘My goodness, Mademoiselle Baudu, you do make a noise with your shoes!’ Madame Aurélie frequently remarked in an irritated way. ‘It’s unbearable … What’s the matter with your feet?’

The day when Denise came down wearing a pair of fabric boots for which she had paid five francs, Marguerite and Clara voiced their surprise under their breath, but loud enough to be heard:

‘Look! That unkempt girl has given up her clogs!’ said one of them.

‘Ah! Well,’ said the other, ‘that must have been hard for her … They were her mother’s.’

There was, in fact, a general uprising against Denise. The department had finally discovered her friendship with Pauline, and thought they saw a certain defiance in her liking for a salesgirl from an enemy department. The girls spoke of treason, accusing her of going next door and repeating everything they said. The war between the lingerie and ladieswear departments became more violent than ever; never had it been waged with such passion. The words exchanged were as hard as bullets, and one evening someone even slapped someone else, behind some boxes of chemises. Perhaps this long-standing quarrel had originated because the girls in the lingerie department wore woollen dresses, whereas the girls in the ladieswear department wore silk; in any case, the lingerie girls spoke of their neighbours with the shocked air of respectable girls; and the facts proved them right, the silk seemed to have a noticeable influence on the dissolute behaviour of the ladieswear department girls. Clara was condemned because of her flock of lovers; even Marguerite had, so to speak, had her child thrown in her face; while Madame Frédéric was accused of hidden passions. And all on account of Denise!

‘Young ladies, no ugly words, please control yourselves!’ Madame Aurélie would say gravely, amidst the angry passions of her little world. ‘Show them who you are!’

She preferred to remain neutral. As she confessed one day to Mouret, none of the girls was worth much; there was nothing to choose between them. But she suddenly began to take a passionate interest when she learned from Bourdoncle that he had just caught her son in the basement kissing a girl from the lingerie department, the salesgirl to whom the young man had been passing letters. She was shocked, and immediately accused the lingerie department of having laid a trap for Albert; yes, a plot had been hatched against her; having seen that her department was above reproach, they were trying to disgrace her by ruining a poor innocent child. She only made such a fuss in order to confuse the issue, for she had no illusions about her son; she
knew he was capable of anything. At one point the affair nearly became really serious, for Mignot, the glove salesman, became involved; he was a friend of Albert’s, and it was rumoured that he gave preferential treatment to the mistresses Albert sent him, hatless girls who spent hours rummaging through the boxes; there was also a story, which was never cleared up, about some suede gloves given to the girl in the lingerie department. In the end the scandal was hushed up out of consideration for Madame Aurélie, whom even Mouret treated with respect. A week later Bourdoncle simply found some pretext for dismissing the salesgirl guilty of having allowed herself to be kissed. The management might turn a blind eye to the terrible goings-on outside, but it would not tolerate the slightest bawdiness inside the shop.

It was Denise who suffered from all this. Madame Aurélie, although she knew perfectly well what was going on, harboured a secret grudge against her; she had seen her laughing with Pauline, and took it as a sign of insolence, concluding that they were gossiping about her son’s love-affairs. And so she made the girl even more isolated in the department than she had been before. For some time she had been planning to take the girls to spend a Sunday at Rignolles, near Rambouillet, where she had bought a property with the first hundred thousand francs she had saved; and suddenly she decided to do so: it would be a way of punishing Denise, of openly cold-shouldering her. She was the only one not invited. For two weeks, the department talked of nothing but this excursion; the girls would look at the sky, warm with May sunshine, and were already planning how they would spend every moment of the day, looking forward to all sorts of pleasures, such as donkey-riding, milk, and brown bread. And there would only be women, which made it even more amusing! Madame Aurélie usually killed time on her days off like this, by going for walks with other ladies; for she was so unaccustomed to being at home with her family, and felt so ill at ease, so out of place on the rare evenings when she could dine at home with her husband and son, that she preferred, even on these occasions, to abandon her family and go and dine at a restaurant. Lhomme would go his own way too, delighted to resume his bachelor existence, and Albert, relieved, would go whoring; they were so unused to being at home, and got so much
on each other’s nerves and so bored with each other on Sundays, that all three seemed to inhabit their flat only fleetingly, as if it was a cheap hotel where one just sleeps at night. As for the excursion to Rambouillet, Madame Aurélie simply declared that propriety prevented Albert from joining them, and that it would be tactful of his father if he refused to come; both men were delighted by this announcement. Meanwhile, the happy day was approaching, the girls could not stop talking about it, discussing the clothes they were preparing, as if they were going on a six months’ journey; while Denise, pale and silent at being left out, had to listen to them.