The Ladies' Paradise (BBC tie-in) (Oxford World's Classics) (40 page)

‘I think I might lose my petticoat in this crowd,’ Madame de Boves was repeating.

Silent, her face still fresh from the air outside, Madame Marty was craning her neck above the heads to see, before the others, the depths of the shop stretching into the distance. The pupils of her grey eyes were as small as those of a cat coming in out of the daylight; and she had the fresh complexion and clear gaze of someone who had just woken up.

‘Ah! At last!’ she said, letting out a sigh.

The ladies had just extricated themselves. They were in the Saint-Augustin Hall, and were most surprised to find it almost empty. But a feeling of well-being was stealing over them; they felt they were entering spring after leaving the winter of the street. Whereas outside the icy wind of sleet storms was blowing, in the galleries of the Paradise the warm summer months had already arrived, with the light materials, the flowery brilliance of soft shades, and the rustic gaiety of summer dresses and parasols.

‘Just look!’ cried Madame de Boves, brought to a standstill and gazing upwards.

It was the display of parasols. Wide open and rounded like shields, they covered the hall from the glazed ceiling to the varnished oak mouldings. They formed festoons round the arcades of the upper storeys; they hung down in garlands along the pillars; they ran in close lines along the balustrades of the galleries, and even on the banisters of the staircases; symmetrically
arranged everywhere, speckling the walls with red, green, and yellow, they seemed like great Venetian lanterns, lit for some colossal entertainment. In the corners there were complicated patterns, stars made of parasols at ninety-five centimes, and their light shades—pale blue, creamy white, soft pink—were burning with the gentleness of a night-light; while above, huge Japanese sunshades covered with golden cranes flying across a purple sky were blazing with glints of fire.

Madame Marty tried to think of a phrase to express her delight, and could only exclaim:

‘It’s enchanting!’

Then, trying to find her way, she said:

‘Now, let’s see, the braid is in the haberdashery … I’ll just buy my braid, and then I’ll be off.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ said Madame de Boves. ‘We’ll just walk through the shop, and nothing more, won’t we, Blanche?’

But the ladies had hardly stepped away from the door before they were lost. They turned to the left; and, as the haberdashery had been moved, they found themselves surrounded by ruches, then by head-dresses. It was very warm under the covered galleries; the heat was that of a hothouse, moist and close, laden with the insipid smell of the materials; it muffled the trampling feet of the crowd. Then they went back to the entrance, where a stream of people on their way out was beginning to form, an interminable procession of women and children, above whom there floated a cloud of red balloons. Forty thousand balloons had been prepared; there were boys specially detailed to distribute them. To see the customers who were leaving, one would have thought that in the air above them there was a flight of enormous soap bubbles, on the end of invisible strings, reflecting the fire of the sunshades. The whole shop was lit up by them.

‘What a crowd,’ declared Madame de Boves. ‘You don’t know where you are any more.’

However, the ladies could not stay in the eddy by the doorway, right in the crush of the entrance and exit. Fortunately, Jouve came to their assistance. He was standing in the entrance hall, solemn-looking and attentive, staring at every woman who passed. Specially charged with responsibility for internal security, he was on the look-out for thieves, and in particular
would follow pregnant women, when the feverish look in their eyes made him suspicious.

‘The haberdashery, ladies?’ he said obligingly. ‘Turn to the left, look, over there, behind the hosiery.’

Madame de Boves thanked him. But Madame Marty, on turning round, had found that her daughter Valentine was no longer with her. She was beginning to be alarmed when she caught sight of her, already in the distance at the end of the Saint-Augustin Hall, deeply absorbed in front of an auction table, on which there were piles of women’s scarves at ninety-five centimes. Mouret employed the auctioneering method of selling goods, by which customers were caught and robbed of their money as they passed; for he used any kind of advertisement, laughing at the discretion of some of his colleagues, who thought that the goods should speak for themselves. Special salesmen, idle Parisians with the gift of the gab, got rid of considerable quantities of small, trashy articles in this way.

‘Oh! Mamma!’ murmured Valentine. ‘Just look at these scarves. They’ve got an embroidered bird on the corner.’

The salesman was going through his patter, swearing that the scarf was all silk, that the manufacturer had gone bankrupt, and that they would never come across such a bargain again.

‘Ninety-five centimes, can it be true?’ said Madame Marty, captivated like her daughter. ‘Well, I could take two of them, that won’t ruin us!’

Madame de Boves remained disdainful. She detested this type of selling; a salesman who called out to her put her to flight. Madame Marty was surprised; she did not understand this nervous horror of the salesman’s patter, for her temperament was quite different; she was one of those women who are happy to be taken by force, to bathe in the caress of a public proposition, and have the pleasure of feeling everything with their hands, wasting their time in useless words.

‘Now,’ she resumed, ‘let’s hurry and get my braid … I don’t even want to see anything else.’

However, as she was going through the silk scarves and glove departments, her will weakened once more. There, in the diffused light, stood a bright, gaily coloured display which made a delightful effect. The counters, symmetrically arranged, looked like flower-beds, transforming the hall into a formal garden,
smiling with a range of soft flower tones. Spread out on the wooden counter, falling from overflowing shelves, and in boxes which had been torn open, a harvest of silk scarves displayed the brilliant red of geraniums, the milky white of petunias, the golden yellow of chrysanthemums, the sky blue of verbena; and higher up, entwined on brass stems, there was another mass of blossom—fichus strewn about, ribbons unrolled, a dazzling strand extending and twisting up round the pillars, and multiplying in the mirrors. But what most attracted the crowd was a Swiss chalet in the glove department, made entirely of gloves: it was Mignot’s masterpiece, and had taken two days to arrange. First of all, black gloves formed the ground floor; then came straw-coloured, greyish-green, and burgundy gloves, forming part of the decoration, bordering the windows, sketching in the balconies, replacing tiles.

‘What does madam require?’ asked Mignot, seeing Madame Marty rooted in front of the chalet. ‘Here are some suede gloves at one franc seventy-five, the finest quality …’

He was an extremely persistent salesman, calling out to passing customers from the far end of his counter, pestering them with his politeness. As she shook her head in refusal, he went on:

‘Tyrolean gloves at one franc twenty-five … Children’s gloves from Turin, embroidered gloves in all colours …’

‘No, thank you, I don’t want anything,’ Madame Marty declared.

But, feeling that her voice was softening, he attacked her even more vigorously by holding the embroidered gloves in front of her; she was helpless to resist, and bought a pair. Then, as Madame de Boves was watching her with a smile, she blushed.

‘I am a child, aren’t I? If I don’t hurry up and get my braid and leave, I’m lost!’

Unfortunately, there was such a crush in the haberdashery department that she could not get served. They had both been waiting for ten minutes and were beginning to get annoyed, when an encounter with Madame Bourdelais and her three children took up their attention. Madame Bourdelais explained, with the calm manner of a pretty but practical woman, that she had wanted to show the shop to the children. Madeleine was ten,
Edmond eight, and Lucien four. They were laughing with delight; it was a cheap outing they had been promised for a long time.

‘I’m going to buy a red parasol, they’re such fun,’ said Madame Marty suddenly, stamping with impatience at waiting there doing nothing.

She chose one at fourteen francs fifty. Madame Bourdelais, who watched the purchase with a look of disapproval, said to her in a friendly way:

‘You shouldn’t be in such a hurry. In a month’s time you could have got it for ten francs … They won’t catch me like that!’

And she explained the theory of good housekeeping she had developed. As the shops were lowering their prices, one only had to wait. She did not want to be exploited by them; it was she who took advantage of their real bargains. There was even a touch of malice in her battle with the shops; she boasted that she had never let them make a penny’s profit.

‘Well,’ she ended by saying, ‘I’ve promised to show my little ones some pictures, upstairs in the lounge … Come up with me, you’ve got plenty of time.’

At that the braid was forgotten; Madame Marty gave in at once, whereas Madame de Boves refused, preferring to walk round the ground floor first. In any case, the ladies hoped that they would meet again upstairs. Madame Bourdelais was looking for a staircase when she caught sight of one of the lifts; and she pushed the children into it, to make the outing complete. Madame Marty and Valentine also entered the narrow cage, in which people were squeezed tightly together; but the mirrors, the velvet seats, and the decorated brass door took up their attention to such an extent that they arrived on the first floor without even having felt the gentle gliding of the machine. In any case, another treat was awaiting them, as soon as they went into the lace gallery. As they passed the buffet, Madame Bourdelais did not neglect to gorge her little family on fruit cordial. The room was square, with a large marble counter; at either end silver-plated fountains flowed with a thin trickle of water; behind, on small shelves, rows of bottles were lined up. Three waiters were continually wiping and filling glasses. To
control the thirsty customers it had been necessary to form a queue, as at theatre doors, by erecting a barrier covered with velvet. There was a tremendous crush. Some people, losing all shame before the free refreshments, were making themselves ill.

‘Well! Where are they?’ exclaimed Madame Bourdelais when she had extricated herself from the crowd, after wiping the children’s faces with her handkerchief.

Then she caught sight of Madame Marty and Valentine at the end of another gallery, a long way off. They were both still buying, drowned beneath an overflow of petticoats. It was hopeless; mother and daughter disappeared, swept away by a fever of spending.

When she finally arrived in the reading- and writing-room, Madame Bourdelais installed Madeleine, Edmond, and Lucien at the large table; then she helped herself to some photograph albums from a bookcase and took them over to them. The dome of the long room was laden with gilding; at either end monumental fireplaces faced each other; mediocre pictures, very ornately framed, covered the walls; and, between the pillars, in front of each of the arched bays opening on to the shop, were tall green plants in majolica pots. A crowd of silent people surrounded the table, which was littered with magazines and newspapers, and furnished with stationery and ink-pots. Ladies were removing their gloves, and writing letters on paper stamped with the name of the shop, which they crossed out with a stroke of the pen. A few men, lolling back in the armchairs, were reading newspapers. But many people were simply doing nothing: husbands waiting for wives who were wandering freely through the departments, young ladies discreetly looking out for their lovers, elderly parents deposited there as if in a cloakroom, to be picked up again when it was time to leave. This crowd, comfortably seated, was resting, glancing through the open bays into the depths of the galleries and halls, from which the distant murmur could be heard above the scratching of pens and the rustling of newspapers.

‘What! You’re here!’ said Madame Bourdelais. ‘I didn’t recognize you.’

Near the children, a lady was half hidden behind the pages of a magazine. It was Madame Guibal. She seemed annoyed by the
encounter. But she recovered immediately, and said that she had come upstairs to sit down for a while in order to escape the crush. And when Madame Bourdelais asked her if she had come to make some purchases, she replied in her languid way, hiding behind her eyelids the ruthless egoism of her gaze:

‘Oh, no! On the contrary, I’ve come to return something. Yes, some door-curtains I’m not satisfied with … but there are so many people that I’m waiting until I can get near the department.’

She carried on talking, saying how convenient the ‘return’ system was; previously, she never used to buy anything, whereas now she occasionally yielded to temptation. In fact, she returned four articles out of five, and was beginning to be known in all the departments for the strange dealings which were suspected to lie behind the constant dissatisfaction which made her bring articles back one by one, after having kept them for several days. While she was speaking, she did not take her eyes off the doors of the reading-room; and she seemed relieved when Madame Bourdelais rejoined her children so as to explain the photographs to them. Almost at the same moment Monsieur de Boves and Paul de Vallagnosc came in. The Count, who was pretending to show the young man round the new parts of the shop, exchanged a quick glance with her; then she buried herself in her magazine again, as if she had not noticed him.

‘Hello, Paul!’ exclaimed a voice from behind the gentlemen.

It was Mouret, who was walking round in order to keep an eye on the various departments. They shook hands, and he asked at once:

‘Has Madame de Boves done us the honour of coming?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ the Count replied, ‘and she’s terribly sorry. She’s not well… But it’s nothing serious.’

Suddenly he pretended to catch sight of Madame Guibal. He made his escape and went up to her, holding his hat in his hand; the other two were content to greet her from a distance. She, too, pretended to be surprised. Paul had given a smile; he understood, at last, and he told Mouret in a low voice how he had met the Count in the Rue Richelieu and how the latter, having tried to shake him off, had in the end dragged him off to the Paradise under the pretext that one simply had to see it. For a year the
lady had been extracting from the Count all the money and pleasure she could, never writing to him, but meeting him in public places, in churches, museums, or shops, to arrange further, private meetings.