The Ladies' Paradise (BBC tie-in) (Oxford World's Classics) (53 page)

‘Keep your eyes peeled, Monsieur Jouve,’ Bourdoncle would repeat to the shopwalker. ‘I’ll reward you personally.’

But Jouve went about his task with little enthusiasm, for he knew something about women, and was thinking of taking the side of this child who might become the sovereign mistress of the future. Even if he no longer dared touch her, he considered her infernally pretty. His colonel had killed himself for a kid like that with an innocent face, refined and modest, a single glance from whom played havoc with men’s hearts.

‘I am, I am,’ he would reply. ‘But I can’t discover a thing, I really can’t!’

Yet there were stories circulating; there was an undercurrent of foul gossip beneath the flattery and respect which Denise could feel rising around her. Now the whole shop was recounting how Hutin had been her lover; no one dared claim that the relationship still continued, but they were suspected of seeing each other from time to time. And Deloche slept with her, too: they were always meeting in dark corners, and talking together for hours. It was a real scandal!

‘So, you’ve got nothing on the buyer in the silk department, nothing on the young man in the lace department?’ Bourdoncle would repeat.

‘No, sir, nothing so far,’ the inspector would reply.

It was with Deloche above all that Bourdoncle reckoned on catching Denise. One morning he himself had caught sight of them laughing together in the basement. In the mean time, he treated the girl as one power treats another, for he no longer looked down his nose at her, sensing that she was sufficiently
powerful to overthrow him, in spite of his ten years’ service, if he should lose the game.

‘Keep your eye on the young man in the lace department,’ he would conclude each time. ‘They’re always together. If you catch them, call me, and I’ll deal with the rest.’

Mouret, meanwhile, was living in a state of agony. How could that child torture him to such an extent? He could still see her arriving at the Paradise with her clogs, her thin black dress, and her timid look. She had stumbled over her words; everyone had laughed at her; he himself had thought her ugly at first. Ugly! And now with a glance she could have made him go down on his knees; he saw her surrounded with radiance! Then, she had been the lowest of the low in the shop, rebuffed, teased, treated by him like a strange animal. For months he had wanted to see how a girl develops, he had amused himself with this experiment, without understanding that in doing so he was risking his heart. Little by little she had grown, becoming formidable. Perhaps he had loved her from the very first minute, even when he thought he felt only pity. Yet it had only been on the evening of their walk beneath the chestnut trees in the Tuileries that he had felt he belonged to her. His life had started at that moment; he could still hear the laughter of a group of little girls, the distant trickle of a fountain, while in the shade she walked beside him in silence. From then on he was lost; his fever had increased hour by hour, his life-blood, his whole being was given over to her. A child like that—could it be true? Nowadays when she passed by the slight wind from her dress seemed to him so strong that it made him reel.

For a long time he had struggled against it, and sometimes it still made him furious; he wanted to break free from this idiotic obsession. What was it about her that enslaved him in this way? Hadn’t he seen her in clogs? Hadn’t she been taken on almost out of charity? If it had even been one of those superb creatures who excite the crowd! But that little girl, that nobody! She had, in short, one of those blank faces about which there is nothing to be said. She was probably not even very intelligent, for he could remember what a bad start she had made as a salesgirl. Then, after each bout of anger, he would be repossessed by his passion, as if filled with superstitious fear at having insulted his idol. She
possessed all the good to be found in women—courage, gaiety, simplicity—and her gentleness exuded charm with the penetrating subtlety of perfume. One could ignore her, elbow her aside as if she was like any other girl; but soon the charm would begin to take effect with a slow but invincible force; if she deigned to smile, one was hers for life. Then the whole of her pale face—her periwinkle eyes, her cheeks and her chin full of dimples—would smile; while her heavy blonde hair seemed to light up too, with a regal, all-conquering beauty. He acknowledged himself vanquished; she was as intelligent as she was beautiful, her intelligence came from all that was best in her. Whereas the other salesgirls in his shop had only a smattering of education, the peeling varnish of girls who have come down in the world, she, without any false elegance, retained the charm and savour of her origins. Behind her narrow forehead, the pure lines of which were signs of a strong will and a love of order, the most liberal commercial ideas were being formed by her experience. He was on the point of begging her to forgive him for blaspheming in his moments of rebellion.

But why did she refuse so obstinately to yield? Twenty times he had implored her, increasing his offers, offering money, a great deal of money. Then, thinking that she must be very ambitious, he had promised to make her buyer as soon as a department became vacant. And still she refused! It amazed him, and the struggle inflamed his desire. The whole thing seemed impossible to him: she would capitulate in the end, for he had always considered a woman’s virtue as a relative thing. He no longer had any other objective; everything else disappeared in his desire to have her in his house at last, to take her on his knee, kissing her on the lips; and, at this vision, his heart would pound, and he would find himself trembling, distressed at his powerlessness.

From then on his days passed in the same painful obsession. The image of Denise rose with him in the morning. He had dreamed of her during the night; she followed him to the big desk in his office where, from nine till ten, he signed bills and money orders—a task he performed mechanically, without ceasing to feel that she was there, still saying no in her composed way. Then at ten o’clock there was the board meeting, a real
cabinet meeting, which gathered together the twelve people with a financial interest in the shop, and at which he had to preside: questions of internal organization were discussed, purchases were inspected, displays were decided; and she was still there, he could hear her soft voice amidst the figures, he could see her bright smile through the most complicated financial discussions. After the board meeting she still accompanied him, she made the daily inspection of the departments with him, and in the afternoon she came back with him to his office and stood near his chair from two to four, when he saw a whole crowd of people—manufacturers from all over France, important business men, bankers, inventors: a continuous coming and going of money and brains, a crazy dance of millions of francs, rapid interviews at which the biggest deals on the Paris market were hatched. If he forgot her for a moment while deciding on the ruin or the prosperity of an industry, a twinge in his heart would remind him that she was still standing there; his voice would die away, and he would ask himself what was the point of this great fortune if she would not yield. Finally, when five o’clock struck, he had to sign the mail, and his hand again began to work mechanically, while she would rise up more dominating than ever, taking him over completely so that she alone might possess him during the solitary, passionate hours of the night. And the following day was the same day all over again, another of those days which were so busy, so full of immense labour, and which the slender shadow of a girl could sear with anguish.

But it was during his daily tour of inspection of the shop that he felt his misery most. To have built this gigantic machine, to reign over so many people, and to be in agonies of suffering because a little girl rejected him! He despised himself; he was pursued by the fever and shame of his affliction. On some days he felt disgusted with his own power, feeling nothing but nausea as he went from one end of the galleries to the other. At other times he would have liked to extend his empire, to make it so vast that she might perhaps yield out of sheer admiration and fear.

First of all, downstairs in the basement, he would stop by the chute. It was still in the Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin; but it had had to be enlarged, and was now as wide as a river-bed along which a continual flow of goods rolled with the resounding noise
of a flood tide; there were deliveries from every part of the world, queues of wagons from all the railway stations of Paris ceaselessly unloading boxes and bales which, flowing underground, were swallowed by the insatiable shop. He watched this torrent falling into his shop; he reflected that he was one of the masters of public wealth, that he held the fate of the French textile industry in his hands, and yet he could not buy a kiss from one of his salesgirls.

Then he moved on to the receiving department, which now occupied that part of the basement which ran along the Rue Monsigny. Twenty tables were laid out there, in the pale light from the ventilators; an army of assistants was bustling about, emptying the boxes, checking the goods, and marking the prices on them, while the roar of the nearby chute continued unabated, drowning their voices. Section-managers would stop him; he had to resolve disputes, confirm orders. The depths of the cellar were filling up with the delicate radiance of satins and the whiteness of linen, with a tremendous unpacking in which furs were mixed with lace, fancy goods with oriental door-curtains. Slowly he walked amongst these riches strewn in disorder, piled up in their raw state. They would be taken upstairs and take fire from the displays, unleashing a flood of money through the departments; and no sooner were they taken upstairs than they were carried away on the tumultuous tide of buying and selling which swept through the shop. And he thought of how he had offered the girl silks, velvets, whatever she wanted to take, in any quantity, from those enormous heaps, and how she had refused with a little shake of her fair head.

Next he would proceed to the other end of the basement in order to pay his usual visit to the dispatch department. Endless corridors stretched out, lit by gas; to the right and left the stockrooms, shut off by wooden gates, were sleeping in the shadows like subterranean shops, a whole commercial district selling haberdashery, underwear, gloves, and knick-knacks. Further on there was one of the three heating installations; further on still a firemen’s post was guarding the central gas meter, enclosed in its metal cage. In the dispatch department he found the sorting tables already loaded with parcels, cardboard boxes, and bandboxes, which were continually being brought down in baskets;
and Campion, the department manager, gave him details about the work in hand, while the twenty men under his command distributed the parcels into compartments, each bearing the name of a district of Paris, from which porters took them up to the vans drawn up along the pavement. People were calling out, names of streets were tossed about, instructions were shouted, there was all the din and bustle of a steamer about to weigh anchor. He stood there for a moment, motionless, watching the goods; he had just seen the shop gorging itself on them at the opposite end of the basement and now they were being disgorged in front of him: the enormous stream came to an end there and then went out into the street, after having filled the tills with gold. His eyes were becoming blurred; this colossal dispatch of goods no longer had any importance, and he was left with nothing but the idea of travelling, going away to distant countries, abandoning everything if she persisted in saying no.

Then he went upstairs again and continued his rounds, talking and getting more and more excited without being able to take his mind off his troubles. On the second floor he went into the forwarding department, picking quarrels and secretly getting exasperated by the perfect running of the machine which he had himself regulated. This was the department which was daily assuming the greatest importance: it already needed a staff of two hundred, some of whom were opening, reading, and sorting letters from the provinces and abroad, while others were putting on shelves the goods ordered in the letters. And the number of letters was increasing to such an extent that they were no longer counted; they were weighed, and up to a hundred pounds of them arrived every day. Mouret went feverishly through the three rooms occupied by the department, questioning Levasseur, who was in charge, about the weight of the mail: eighty pounds, ninety pounds, sometimes a hundred on Mondays. The figure was still rising; he should have been delighted. But he stood shuddering in the din made by a nearby team of packers nailing up cases. He was tramping the shop in vain: his obsession pursued him everywhere, and as his power unfolded before him, as the mechanism of the departments and the army of employees passed before his gaze, he felt the indignity of his powerlessness more keenly than ever. Orders from the
whole of Europe were flowing in, a special mail van was required for his correspondence, and yet she said no, she still said no.

He went downstairs again, and inspected the main counting-house, where four cashiers were guarding the two giant safes, through which, in the previous year, eighty-eight million francs had passed. He glanced at the office where the invoices were checked, which kept twenty-five specially selected employees busy. He went into the accounts office, where thirty-five apprentice accountants were occupied in checking the debit notes and calculating the salesmen’s commissions. He returned to the main counting-house, and became irritated at the sight of the safes as he walked amidst these useless millions which were driving him mad. She still said no, always no.

Always no, in every department, in the galleries, in the halls, in every part of the shop! He would go from the silks to the drapery, from the household linens to the lace; he would go upstairs, and stop on the suspension bridges, prolonging his inspection with a painful, maniacal attention to detail. The shop had grown beyond measure, he had created department after department, he governed this new domain and was forever extending his empire to some fresh industry; and still it was no, always no. His staff would now have peopled a small town: there were fifteen hundred salesmen, and a thousand other employees of every kind, including forty shopwalkers and seventy cashiers; the kitchens alone kept thirty-six men busy; ten clerks had been assigned to publicity; there were three hundred and fifty porters all wearing livery, and twenty-four resident firemen.
*
And in the stables, truly regal stables opposite the shop in the Rue Monsigny, there were a hundred and forty-five horses, magnificent teams which had already become famous in Paris. The four original vehicles which had so upset the local tradesmen in the past, when the shop still only occupied one corner of the Place Gaillon, had gradually increased in number to sixty-two: there were small hand-carts, one-horse cabs, and heavy wagons drawn by two horses. They were continually ploughing through Paris, driven with great decorum by coachmen dressed in black, and bearing on their sides the gold and purple emblem of the Ladies’ Paradise. They would even go outside the city walls, into the suburbs; they would be seen in the sunken lanes of Bicètre, along
the banks of the Marne, even beneath the shady trees of the forest of Saint-Germain; sometimes, from the depths of some sunny avenue, utterly deserted and silent, one of them would loom into sight, passing by with its superb animals at the trot, throwing the violent advertisement of its varnished panels over the mysterious peace of nature. He dreamed of sending them even further afield into neighbouring
départements;
he would have liked to hear them rattling along all the roads of France, from one frontier to the other. But he no longer even went to visit his horses, which he adored. What was the good of conquering the world, since it was no, still no?