The Ladies' Paradise (BBC tie-in) (Oxford World's Classics) (45 page)

‘Shh! It’s Madame Aurélie!’ she murmured. ‘I’m off… And you, wipe your eyes. You don’t want her to know.’

When Denise was alone she stood up and forced back her tears; and, her hands still trembling for fear of being caught like that, she closed the piano which her friend had left open. But she heard Madame Aurélie knock at the door of her room, and left the common-room.

‘What’s this! You’re up!’ exclaimed the buyer. ‘That’s very silly of you, my dear child; I was just coming up to see how you were, and to tell you we don’t need you downstairs.’

Denise assured her that she was better, and that it would do her good to do some work, for it would take her mind off things.

‘I won’t get too tired, madam. If you give me a chair to sit on, I’ll do the accounts.’

They both went downstairs. Madame Aurélie, full of attentions, insisted that she should lean on her shoulder. She must have noticed that her eyes were red, for she was studying her surreptitiously. No doubt there was little she did not know.

Denise had won an unexpected victory: she had at last conquered the department. After having struggled in the past for nearly ten months, subjected to the tortures of a drudge, without exhausting the ill will of her fellow workers, she had now overcome them in just a few weeks, and found them docile and respectful towards her. Madame Aurélie’s sudden affection had been of great assistance to her in the ungrateful task of softening their hearts; it was whispered that the buyer would oblige Mouret by rendering him certain services of a delicate nature; and she had taken Denise under her wing with such enthusiasm that the girl must, indeed, have been specially commended to her. But Denise, too, had used all the charm she had in order to disarm her enemies. The task was all the more difficult because she had to make them forget her appointment as assistant buyer. The girls complained vociferously about what they saw as an injustice, accusing her of having won the job over dessert with the governor; they even added various salacious details. Yet, in spite of their hostility, the title of assistant buyer had an effect on them, and Denise came to assume an authority which astonished and pacified even the most rebellious among them. Soon she found flatterers among the newcomers, and her gentleness and modesty completed the conquest. Marguerite came over to her side. Only Clara carried on being hostile, and would still venture
to use the insulting reference to her ‘unkempt’ appearance, which no longer amused anyone. She had taken advantage of Mouret’s brief infatuation with her to avoid work, for she had a lazy, gossipy nature; and although he had tired of her very quickly, she had not even made any recriminations, for her amorous life was so confused that she was incapable of jealousy, and was content merely to have obtained the advantage of having her idleness tolerated. However, she considered that Denise had robbed her of Madame Frédéric’s job. She would never have accepted it because of the stress it involved; but she was annoyed by this lack of courtesy, for she had the same claim to it as Denise, and a prior claim too.

‘Look! Here comes the young mother!’ she murmured when she saw Madame Aurélie leading Denise in on her arm.

Marguerite shrugged her shoulders, saying:

‘If you think that’s funny …’

Nine o’clock was striking. Outside, a blazing blue sky was warming the streets; cabs were travelling along towards the stations; the whole population, dressed in its Sunday best, was streaming out towards the woods and suburbs. Inside the shop, which was flooded with sunshine from the big open bay windows, the staff, completely shut in, had just begun the stocktaking. The door knobs had been removed, and people on the pavement were stopping to look through the windows, surprised to see the shop closed when there was such extraordinary activity going on inside. From one end of the galleries to the other, from the top floor to the basement, there was an endless scurrying of employees, their arms in the air, parcels flying above their heads; and all this was taking place in a storm of shouting, figures being called out, confusion growing and exploding in a tremendous din. Each of the thirty-nine departments was carrying out its task on its own, without taking any notice of the adjacent departments. In any case, they had hardly started to tackle the shelves; there were so far only a few lengths of material on the ground. The machine would have to get up more steam if they were to finish that evening.

‘Why did you come down?’ Marguerite went on kindly, speaking to Denise. ‘You’ll only make your foot worse, and there are enough of us to do the work.’

‘That’s what I told her,’ declared Madame Aurélie. ‘But she insisted on coming down to help us.’

Work was interrupted as all the girls flocked round Denise. They complimented her, listening with exclamations to the story of her sprained ankle. In the end Madame Aurélie made her sit down at a table; it was agreed that she would merely enter the goods as they were called out. In any case, on the stock-taking Sunday, every employee who was capable of holding a pen was commandeered: the shopwalkers, the cashiers, the bookkeepers, even the porters; the various departments shared these one-day assistants between them, in order to get the job done as quickly as possible. Thus, Denise found herself installed near Lhomme the cashier and Joseph the porter, who were both bent over large sheets of paper.

‘Five coats, cloth, fur trimming, size three, at two hundred and forty!’ Marguerite was shouting. ‘Four ditto, size one, at two hundred and twenty!’

The work began again. Behind Marguerite three salesgirls were emptying the cupboards, sorting the goods, giving them to her in bundles; and, when she had called them out, she threw them on to the tables, where they gradually piled up in enormous heaps. Lhomme wrote down the articles, while Joseph compiled another list as a cross-check. In the mean time Madame Aurélie herself, helped by three other salesgirls, counted the silk garments, which Denise entered on a sheet of paper. Clara was charged with looking after the heaps, with arranging them and piling them up so that they took up as little room as possible. But her mind was not on her job, and some piles were already falling down.

‘I say,’ she asked a little salesgirl who had joined the shop that winter, ‘are they going to give you a rise? Did you know that they’re going to give the assistant buyer two thousand francs, which means that, with the commission, she’ll be earning almost seven thousand.’

The little salesgirl, while continuing to pass some cloaks down, replied that if they did not put her salary up to eight hundred francs she would leave. The rises were always given on the day after the stock-taking; it was also the time of the year when, the turnover for the year being known, the heads of
departments received their commission on the increase in this figure compared with the preceding year. Therefore, in spite of the uproar and bustle of the job in hand, impassioned gossip went on everywhere. Between calling out two articles they talked of nothing but money. There was a rumour that Madame Aurélie would get over twenty-five thousand francs; such a huge sum made the girls very excited. Marguerite, the best salesgirl after Denise, had made four thousand five hundred francs, of which fifteen hundred was her salary, and about three thousand her percentage; whereas Clara had not made two thousand five hundred altogether.

‘I couldn’t care about those rises of theirs!’ Clara went on, still talking to the little salesgirl. ‘If Papa was dead, I’d drop the lot of them! But what gets my goat is to see that skinny little thing earning seven thousand francs. Don’t you agree?’

Madame Aurélie sharply interrupted the conversation. Turning round majestically, she said:

‘Be quiet, young ladies! Upon my word, we can’t hear ourselves speak!’

Then she started shouting again:

‘Seven cloaks, old style, Sicilian silk, size one, a hundred and twenty! Three pelisses, surah, size two, a hundred and fifty! Have you got that down, Mademoiselle Baudu?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

Clara was forced to turn her attention to the armfuls of clothes piled up on the tables. She pushed them together to make more room. But she soon left them again to reply to a salesman who was looking for her. It was the glover, Mignot, who had escaped from his department. He whispered a request for twenty francs; he already owed her thirty, which he had borrowed the day after the races, after losing his week’s salary on a horse; this time he had already squandered the commission he had been paid the day before, and had not got fifty centimes left for his Sunday. Clara had only ten francs on her, which she lent him with fairly good grace. Then they chatted, talking of how a party of six of them had gone to a restaurant in Bougival, and how the women had paid their share: it was better like that, everyone felt at ease. Then Mignot, wanting his twenty francs, went and bent down to Lhomme’s ear. The latter, who suddenly stopped writing,
seemed greatly troubled. However, he did not dare refuse, and was looking for a ten-franc piece in his purse when Madame Aurélie, surprised at no longer hearing the voice of Marguerite, who had had to break off, noticed Mignot and understood at once. She brusquely sent him back to his department, for she did not want people coming to distract her girls! The truth of the matter was that the young man made her very nervous, for he was a great friend of her son Albert, and his accomplice in the shady pranks which she was terrified would get him one day. Therefore, when Mignot had taken the ten francs and made off, she could not help saying to her husband:

‘Really! How could you let yourself be taken advantage of like that!’

‘But, my dear, I really couldn’t refuse the lad …’

She shut him up with a shrug of her great shoulders. Then, as the salesgirls were slyly grinning at this family argument, she carried on severely:

‘Come on, Mademoiselle Vadon, don’t let’s fall asleep!’

‘Twenty overcoats, double cashmere, size four, eighteen francs fifty!’ Marguerite cried out in her sing-song voice.

Lhomme, his head bowed, had resumed writing. Little by little his salary had been raised to nine thousand francs; but he remained humble towards Madame Aurélie, who earned nearly three times as much as that for the family.

For a little while the work went ahead. Figures flew about, parcels of clothes rained thick and fast on to the table. But Clara had thought of another amusement: she was teasing Joseph the porter about the crush he was supposed to have on a young lady who worked in the sample department. This girl, already twenty-eight years old, thin and pale, was a protégée of Madame Desforges, who had tried to make Mouret take her on as a salesgirl by telling him a touching story: she was an orphan, the last of the Fontenailles, an old aristocratic family from Poitou.
*
She had been dragged to Paris by a drunken father, and had remained virtuous in spite of her misfortune; but her education had unfortunately been too rudimentary for her to become a teacher or to give piano lessons. Usually Mouret became quite angry when people recommended poor society girls to him; there was no one, he would say, more inefficient, more unbearable,
more insincere than a creature like that; and in any case you could not suddenly become a salesgirl, you had to serve an apprenticeship, it was a complex and difficult profession. However, he took Madame Desforges’s protégée, but put her in the sample department, just as he had obliged some friends by finding jobs for two countesses and a baroness in the publicity department, where they folded envelopes and wrappers. Mademoiselle de Fontenailles earned three francs a day, which just enabled her to live in a little room in the Rue d’Argenteuil. Joseph, who had a soft heart under his dour soldier’s manner, had been touched on seeing her so sad-looking and poorly dressed. He did not admit it, but he would blush when the girls from the ladieswear department teased him; the sample department was in a nearby room, and they had often noticed him hanging about outside the door.

‘Joseph’s easily distracted,’ Clara murmured. ‘His head keeps turning towards the lingerie.’

Mademoiselle de Fontenailles had been conscripted to help with the stock-taking at the trousseau counter. As the lad was, in fact, continually casting glances at the counter, the salesgirls began to laugh. He became very confused and buried his nose in his papers; while Marguerite, in order to smother the flood of mirth which was tickling her throat, began to shout even louder:

‘Fourteen jackets, English cloth, size two, fifteen francs.’

For once the voice of Madame Aurélie, who was in the process of calling out the cloaks, was drowned. With an offended air and majestic deliberation she said:

‘A little quieter, Mademoiselle Vadon. We’re not at the market… And you’re all very silly to amuse yourselves in this childish way when our time is so precious.’

Just then, as Clara was no longer watching the piles of clothes, a catastrophe occurred. Some coats tumbled down and all the other piles on the tables were pulled after them and fell down one after another. The carpet was littered with them.

‘There, what did I say!’ cried the buyer, beside herself. ‘Do take a little care, Mademoiselle Prunaire; this is becoming intolerable!’

But a tremor had suddenly run round the room: Mouret and Bourdoncle had just appeared, making their tour of inspection.
Voices started calling out again, pens scratched, while Clara hastened to pick up the clothes. The director did not interrupt the work. He stood there for a few minutes, silent and smiling; his face was happy and triumphant, as it always was on stocktaking days, and his lips alone betrayed a nervous quiver. When he caught sight of Denise he almost made a gesture of astonishment. So she had come down? His eyes met Madame Aurélie’s. Then, after a short hesitation, he walked away and went into the trousseau department.

Meanwhile Denise, distracted by the slight murmur, had raised her head. Having recognized Mouret, she had simply bent over her papers again. A feeling of calm had stolen over her since she had begun writing in this mechanical way to the rhythmic sound of the articles being called out. She always gave way to her sensitive nature’s initial flood of feeling like that: tears would choke her, uncontrollable emotion doubled her suffering; then she would come to her senses again, and she would regain her splendid, calm courage, and her gentle but inexorable strength of will. Now, her eyes clear and her face pale, she was totally calm, absorbed in her work, resolved to ignore her heart and follow only her head.