The Ladies' Paradise (BBC tie-in) (Oxford World's Classics) (50 page)

‘You don’t look well, Monsieur Mouret,’ Madame de Boves observed.

‘Overwork!’ Vallagnosc repeated, in his ironical, phlegmatic way.

Mouret quickly stood up, sorry at having forgotten himself in this way. He took his usual place in the midst of the ladies, regaining all his charm. He was now occupied with the winter fashions, and he spoke of a large consignment of lace; Madame de Boves asked him about the price of Alençon point: she felt
inclined to buy some. She was now reduced to saving the one franc fifty it cost for a cab, and would arrive home ill from having stopped to look at the shop-windows. Wearing a coat which was already two years old, in her imagination she would drape over her regal shoulders all the expensive materials she saw; it was like tearing her flesh off when she awoke and found herself dressed in her patched-up dresses, without hope of ever satisfying her passion.

‘Baron Hartmann,’ the servant announced.

Henriette noticed how warmly Mouret shook the newcomer’s hand.

The latter greeted the ladies and glanced at the young man with the subtle expression which sometimes lit up his coarse Alsatian face.

‘Always talking about clothes!’ he murmured with a smile.

Then, being a friend of Madame Desforges, he ventured to add:

‘There’s a very charming girl in the hall… Who is she?’

‘Oh! No one,’ replied Madame Desforges in her unpleasant voice. ‘Just a shopgirl waiting to see me.’

The door remained half open, as the servant was serving the tea. He was going out and coming back again, putting the china service, then plates of sandwiches and biscuits, on the pedestal table. In the vast drawing-room, a bright light, softened by the green plants, illuminated the brasswork, bathing the silk of the furniture in a warm glow, and each time the door opened a dim corner of the hall, lit only by frosted glass windows, could be seen. There, in the dark, a sombre form could be discerned, motionless and patient. Denise had remained standing: there was a leather-covered seat, but pride prevented her from sitting on it. She was conscious of the insult. She had been there for half an hour, without a movement, without a word; those ladies and the Baron had stared at her in passing; she could now hear scraps of conversation from the drawing-room, and she was hurt by the indifference of all that pleasant luxury; but still she did not move. Suddenly, through the half-open door, she recognized Mouret. He had guessed at last that it was she who was waiting.

‘Is it one of your salesgirls?’ Baron Hartmann asked.

Mouret had succeeded in hiding his great agitation. But his emotion made his voice shake.

‘I’m sure it is, but I don’t know which.’

‘It’s the little fair-haired one from the ladieswear department,’ Madame Marty quickly interjected. ‘The one who’s assistant buyer, I believe.’

Henriette looked at Mouret in her turn.

‘Ah!’ he said, simply.

And he tried to turn the conversation towards the festivities that had been organized in honour of the King of Prussia,
*
who had arrived in Paris the day before. But the Baron mischievously went back to the subject of the girls who worked in the big stores. He was pretending that he wanted information, and was asking questions: What sort of background did they have? Were their morals really as bad as people said? This sparked off quite a discussion.

‘Really,’ he repeated, ‘you think they’re decent girls?’

Mouret defended their virtue with a conviction that made Vallagnosc laugh. Then Bouthemont intervened, in order to save his master. My goodness! There were all sorts, hussies as well as decent girls. What is more, their moral standard was rising. In the past they had had nothing but the dregs of the trade, poor, distracted girls who just drifted into the drapery business; whereas nowadays families in the Rue de Sèvres, for example, were definitely bringing up their little girls for the Bon Marché. In short, when they wanted to behave properly, they could; for unlike the working girls of the Paris streets, they were not obliged to pay for their board and lodging: they were lodged and fed, and their existence was assured, though doubtless it was a very hard existence. The worst thing of all was their neutral, ill-defined position, somewhere between shopkeepers and ladies. Plunged into the midst of luxury, often without any previous education, they formed an anonymous class apart. All their troubles and vices sprang from that.

‘I certainly don’t know any creatures so disagreeable,’ said Madame de Boves. ‘One could slap them sometimes.’

The ladies vented their spite. They devoured each other at the counters: woman ate woman there, in a bitter rivalry of money
and beauty. The salesgirls were jealous of well-dressed customers, ladies whose style they tried to imitate; and poorly dressed customers, lower middle-class women, felt even more sourly jealous of the salesgirls, the girls dressed in silk whom they wanted to treat like servants each time they made a purchase costing a few pence.

‘Well, in any case,’ Henriette concluded, ‘the poor wretches are all for sale, like their goods!’

Mouret had the strength to smile. The Baron was studying him, touched by his remarkable self-control. Therefore he changed the conversation by mentioning again the festivities in honour of the King of Prussia: they were superb, the whole business world of Paris would profit from them. Henriette remained silent, and seemed lost in her thoughts; she was divided between her desire to go on forgetting Denise in the hall, and her fear that Mouret, now forewarned, might leave. In the end she got up from her chair.

‘Will you excuse me?’

‘Of course, my dear!’ said Madame Marty. ‘Look! I’ll do the honours of your house!’

She stood up, took the teapot and filled the cups. Henriettte turned towards Baron Hartmann, saying:

‘You’ll stay a few minutes longer, won’t you?’

‘Yes, I want to talk to Monsieur Mouret. We’re going to invade your small drawing-room.’

Then she went out, and her black silk dress rustled against the door like a snake disappearing into the undergrowth.

The Baron immediately manœuvred so as to lead Mouret away, abandoning the ladies to Bouthemont and Vallagnosc. Standing by the window of the other drawing-room, they chatted in low voices, discussing a whole new scheme. For a long time Mouret had been cherishing the dream of realizing his old plan—the invasion of the entire block by the Ladies’s Paradise, from the Rue Monsigny to the Rue de la Michodière, and from the Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin to the Rue du Dix-Décembre. In this enormous block there was still a vast frontage on the Rue du Dix-Décembre which he did not own; and this was enough to spoil his triumph: he was tortured by the desire to complete his conquest by erecting a monumental façade there, as an
apotheosis. As long as the main entrance remained in the Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin, in a dark street of old Paris, his work would be incomplete; it would lack logic. He wanted to flaunt it before the new Paris, on one of those recently built avenues where, in full sunlight, all the figures of the modern crowd passed by; he could see it towering above everything, imposing itself as the giant palace of commerce, casting a bigger shadow over the city than the old Louvre did. But, so far, he had come up against the obstinacy of the Crédit Immobilier, which was still clinging to its original idea of using the frontage site to build a rival to the Grand Hotel. The plans were ready; they were only waiting for the Rue du Dix-Décembre to be opened up in order to dig the foundations. Mouret, making a final effort, had at last almost succeeded in winning over Baron Hartmann.

‘Well!’ the latter began, ‘we had a meeting yesterday, and I came here, thinking I’d see you, to tell you what happened … They still won’t agree.’

The young man allowed himself a gesture of irritation.

‘That’s very unreasonable of them … What did they say?’

‘They said what I said to you myself, and what I’m still inclined to think … Your façade is only a decoration; the new buildings would only increase the shop area by a tenth, and that means throwing away huge sums on a mere advertisement.’

At this Mouret burst out:

‘An advertisement! An advertisement! This one will be in stone, and it’ll outlast us all. Can’t you see that it would increase our business tenfold! We’d get our money back in two years. What does it matter, what you call this lost ground, if it creates enormous interest! You’ll see the crowds we’ll have when our customers are no longer crammed into the Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin, and can simply charge down a street wide enough for six carriages to travel abreast quite easily.’

‘No doubt,’ resumed the Baron, laughing. ‘But, I must repeat, you’re a poet in your own way. These gentlemen think it would be dangerous to expand your business any more. They want to be prudent on your behalf.’

‘What! Prudence? I don’t understand … Don’t the figures speak for themselves, don’t they show the constant increase in our sales? In the beginning, with a capital of five hundred
thousand francs, I had a turnover of two million. The capital was used four times over. Then it became four million, turned over ten times, and produced forty million. Finally, after successive increases, I’ve just ascertained from the last stock-taking that the turnover has now reached a total of eighty million; and the capital, which has increased very little, for it’s only six million, has therefore passed over our counters in the form of goods more than twelve times.’
*

He was raising his voice, tapping the fingers of his right hand on his left palm, knocking off millions as if he was cracking nuts. The Baron interrupted him.

‘I know, I know … But surely you don’t expect to go on expanding like that?’

‘Why not?’ said Mouret naively. ‘There’s no reason why it should stop. The capital can be turned over fifteen times; I’ve been predicting it for a long time. In certain departments it’ll be turned over twenty-five and thirty times … and after that, well, after that we’ll find some way to use it even more.’

‘So you’ll end up drinking the money of Paris as you’d drink a glass of water?’

‘Of course. Doesn’t Paris belong to women, and don’t the women belong to us?’

The Baron placed his hands on Mouret’s shoulders and looked at him in a fatherly way.

‘Look! You’re a good chap, and I’m very fond of you … You really are very charming. We’re going to discuss the idea seriously and I hope I’ll be able to make them see reason. Up till now we’ve nothing but praise for you. The Stock Exchange is amazed at your dividends. You’re probably right, it’s better to put even more money into your business than to risk competition with the Grand Hotel, which would be dangerous.’

Mouret’s excitement subsided, and he thanked the Baron, but without his usual enthusiasm; the latter saw him turn his eyes towards the door of the neighbouring room, once more seized by the secret anxiety he was trying to hide. Meanwhile Vallagnosc, seeing that they were no longer talking business, had approached them. He stood close to them, listening to the Baron, who was murmuring with the knowing air of one who had had many amorous adventures:

‘I say, I believe they’re having their revenge, aren’t they?’

‘Who do you mean?’ asked Mouret, embarrassed.

‘Why, the women … They’re tired of being in your power, now you’re in theirs, my friend: fair exchange!’

He was joking, for he was well aware of the young man’s spectacular love-affairs. The mansion bought for the chorus girl and the enormous sums squandered on girls picked up in the private rooms of restaurants amused him as if they were an excuse for the follies he had himself committed in the past. His long experience was revelling in it.

‘Really, I don’t understand,’ Mouret repeated.

‘Oh! You understand very well. They always have the last word … That’s why I used to think: it’s impossible, he’s just boasting, he’s not as clever as that! And now you see what’s happened! You can take everything you can from women, exploit them as you would a coal-mine, but afterwards they’ll exploit you and make you cough up! Take care, for they’ll extract more blood and money from you than you’ll have sucked from them.’

He was laughing even more, and Vallagnosc, near him, was sniggering too, without saying a word.

‘Ah, well! You’ve got to try everything once,’ Mouret confessed finally, pretending to be amused too. ‘It’s stupid to have money if you don’t spend it.’

‘I couldn’t agree more,’ the Baron went on. ‘You enjoy yourself, my dear fellow. I’m not one to preach to you, nor to worry about the large investments we’ve entrusted to you. One must sow one’s wild oats, one has a clearer head afterwards … In any case, it’s not so bad to ruin yourself when you’re able to rebuild your fortune again … But even if money isn’t everything, there are other ways of suffering …’

He stopped, and his laugh became sad; old sorrows were flitting through his ironical scepticism. He had followed the duel between Henriette and Mouret with the curiosity of one who was still fascinated by other people’s amorous battles, and he now sensed that the crisis had come; he guessed the drama, for he had heard stories about this girl Denise, whom he had seen in the hall.

‘Oh! As for suffering, that’s not my style,’ said Mouret in a tone of bravado. ‘It’s quite enough to have to pay.’

The Baron looked at him for a few seconds in silence. Without wishing to be insistent, he added slowly:

‘Don’t make yourself out to be worse than you are … You’ll lose something more than your money in that game. You’ll lose part of yourself, my friend.’

He broke off, once more joking, in order to ask:

‘It sometimes happens, doesn’t it, Monsieur de Vallagnosc?’

‘So they say, Baron,’ the latter declared simply.

Just at that moment, the door opened. Mouret, who was about to reply, gave a slight start. The three men turned round. It was Madame Desforges, looking very gay; she merely put her head round the door, calling urgently:

‘Monsieur Mouret! Monsieur Mouret!’

Then, when she caught sight of them, she said:

‘Oh! Gentlemen, will you let me take Monsieur Mouret away for a minute? The least he can do is to give me the benefit of his knowledge, because he’s sold me an awful coat! The girl is an absolute idiot, she doesn’t know a thing … Come on, I’m waiting for you.’