The Ladies' Paradise (BBC tie-in) (Oxford World's Classics) (62 page)

The crowd had been growing throughout the morning. No shop had ever stirred up the city with such a mass of publicity. The Paradise was now spending nearly six hundred thousand francs a year on posters, advertisements, and appeals of every kind; the number of catalogues sent out was reaching four hundred thousand, and more than a hundred thousand francs’ worth of materials was being cut up into patterns. Newspapers and walls were plastered with advertisements, and the public was assailed as if by a monstrous brass trumpet relentlessly amplifying the noise of the great sales to the four corners of the globe. And from now on the shop-front itself, which constantly attracted a milling crowd, would be a living advertisement, with its variegated and gilded luxury making it seem like a bazaar, its windows wide enough to display the entire range of women’s clothes, its shop signs lavishly distributed everywhere, from the marble slabs on the ground floor to the sheets of iron arched over the roofs—signs which were painted, engraved, carved, unfolding the gold of their streamers on which the name of the shop could be read in sky-blue letters, cut out of the blue of the air. In order to celebrate the opening, banners and flags had been added as well: each storey was decked with banners and standards bearing the arms of the principal towns of France; while right at
the top the flags of foreign nations, hoisted on flag-poles, were flapping in the wind. Finally, downstairs in the shop-windows, the display of household linen was blindingly intense. It was a strain on the eyes; everything was white: a complete trousseau and a mountain of sheets on the left, and curtains forming chapels and pyramids of handkerchiefs on the right; and, between the ‘hangings’ at the door—lengths of linen, calico, and muslin, hanging in sheets, like falls of snow—there were clothed figures made of sheets of bluish cardboard, a young bride and a lady in evening dress, both life-size and dressed in real lace and silk, smiling with their painted faces. A circle of gapers was constantly forming and reforming; desire and fascination were mingled in the excitement of the crowd.

The Ladies’ Paradise was also arousing curiosity because of a calamity which was the talk of Paris, a fire which had burnt down the Quatre Saisons, the big shop Bouthemont had opened near the Opéra barely three weeks earlier. The newspapers were full of it: how the fire had been started by a gas explosion during the night, how the terrified salesgirls had fled in their night-dresses, the heroism of Bouthemont who had carried five of them to safety on his shoulders. The enormous losses were covered by insurance, and the public was beginning to shrug its shoulders, saying that it had been a splendid advertisement.
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For the moment public attention, excited by the stories going round and preoccupied to the point of obsession by these emporiums which were acquiring such importance in public life, was flowing back to the Paradise. That man Mouret had nothing but luck! Paris was hailing his star and rushing to see him standing there erect, for the very flames of the fire seemed to raze all competition to the ground; people were already calculating the season’s profits, estimating how much the forced closure of the rival shop would swell the tide of customers flowing through the doors of the Paradise. For a moment he had been anxious, worried at feeling that he had against him a woman—Madame Desforges, to whom he partly owed his fortune. The financial dilettantism of Baron Hartmann, who had put money into both businesses, also annoyed him. And he was especially exasperated at not having had the same inspired idea as Bouthemont, for that pleasure-lover had just had his shop blessed by the vicar of the Madeleine,
accompanied by all his clergy. It had been an astonishing ceremony: all the pomp of the Church was paraded through the silk and glove departments, God circulated among women’s knickers and corsets; it is true that this had not prevented the whole shop from being burnt down, but such had been its effect on society customers that it had been worth a million advertisements. Ever since then Mouret had been dreaming of getting hold of the Archbishop.

Meanwhile, the clock over the door was striking three. It was the afternoon crush: nearly a hundred thousand customers were suffocating in the galleries and halls. Outside, from one end of the Rue du Dix-Décembre to the other, carriages were waiting; and, near the Opéra, another mass of vehicles was occupying the blind alley where the new avenue was to start. Ordinary cabs were mingled with gentlemen’s broughams, coachmen were waiting among the wheels, rows of horses were neighing and shaking their glinting curbs, which were sparkling in the sun. The ranks were endlessly reforming amidst the cries of the ostlers and the jostling of the animals which closed in of their own accord as fresh vehicles constantly arrived. Pedestrians were fleeing to street-islands in startled bands and, in the vanishing perspective of the broad, straight thoroughfare, the pavements were black with people. The clamour was mounting between the white buildings, and the soul of Paris seemed to rise from this rolling human river, an enormous, gentle breath, like the kiss of a giant.

Outside one of the windows Madame de Boves, accompanied by her daughter Blanche and Madame Guibal, was looking at a display of semi-made-up costumes.

‘Oh, do look!’ she said, ‘those linen costumes, at nineteen francs seventy-five!’

In their square cardboard boxes, the costumes, tied up with a ribbon, were folded so as to show only the trimmings, embroidered with blue and red; and, across the corner of each box, a picture showed the garment made up, being worn by a young lady looking like a princess.

‘I must say it isn’t worth any more,’ murmured Madame Guibal. ‘As soon as you pick it up you can see it’s just made of rags!’ The two women had been on intimate terms ever since
Monsieur de Boves had become tied to an armchair by attacks of gout. The wife tolerated the mistress, preferring that the affair should take place in her own house, since this allowed her to make a little pocket-money by picking up sums of which her husband allowed himself to be robbed, for he knew that he needed indulgence.

‘Well, let’s go in,’ Madame Guibal resumed. ‘We must have a look at their exhibition … Didn’t your son-in-law say he’d meet you inside?’

Madame de Boves did not reply; she was looking with fascination at the line of carriages which, one by one, were opening their doors and releasing more and more customers.

‘Yes,’ said Blanche at last, in her lifeless voice. ‘Paul’s going to pick us up at about four in the reading-room, when he leaves the Ministry.’

They had been married for a month, and Vallagnosc, following three weeks’ leave in the Midi, had just returned to his post. The young woman already had her mother’s heavy build; her flesh had become puffier and somehow coarsened by marriage.

‘Look, there’s Madame Desforges over there!’ the Countess exclaimed, her eyes on a brougham which was just drawing up.

‘Oh, do you think so?’ murmured Madame Guibal. ‘After that terrible business … She must still be mourning the fire at the Quatre Saisons.’

But it was indeed Henriette. She caught sight of the ladies, and went up to them gaily, hiding her defeat beneath the polished ease of her manners.

‘Yes! Of course, I wanted to get an idea … It’s better to see for oneself, isn’t it? Oh! Monsieur Mouret and I are still good friends, although they say he’s furious since I started to take an interest in the rival shop … As far as I’m concerned, there’s only one thing I can’t forgive him, and that’s pushing, you know, that man Joseph and my protégée, Mademoiselle de Fontenailles, to get married …’

‘What! Has it already happened?’ interrupted Madame de Boves. ‘How awful!’

‘Yes, my dear, and just to assert his authority. I know him, he wanted to show that our society girls are only good for marrying his porters.’

She was becoming quite animated. All four of them were still standing on the pavement, in the middle of the great crush at the entrance. Little by little, however, they were being caught up in the stream, and they could do nothing but abandon themselves to the current; they went through the door as if they had been lifted up, without even realizing that they had done so, talking louder to make themselves heard. Now they were asking each other for news of Madame Marty. It was said that poor Monsieur Marty, following some violent family scenes, had been struck down with megalomania; he would extract treasures by the handful from the earth; he would empty gold-mines and load up tumbrels with diamonds and precious stones.

‘Poor fellow!’ said Madame Guibal. ‘And he was always so shabby and humble, like the poor tutor he was! What about his wife?’

‘She’s living off an uncle at the moment,’ Henriette replied. ‘A nice old man who went to live in her house when he lost his wife … In any case, she should be here; we’ll see her.’

The ladies stood rooted to the spot in surprise. Before them stretched the shop, the biggest shop in the world, as the advertisements said. The great central gallery now ran from one end to the other, opening into the Rue du Dix-Décembre and the Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin; while to the right and left, like the side aisles in a church, the Monsigny Gallery and the Michodière Gallery, which were narrower, also ran the whole length of the two streets. Here and there, among the metal framework of the hanging staircases and suspension bridges, the halls widened out into squares. The interior plan had been changed round: now, the remnants were on the Rue du Dix-Décembre side, the silks were in the middle, the gloves occupied the Saint-Augustin Hall at the back; and when one looked up from the new main entrance hall one could still see the bedding, moved from one end of the second floor to the other. The number of departments had risen to fifty; several of them, brand new, were being opened that day; others, which had become too big, had simply had to be split up in order to facilitate selling; and, because of the continuous increase in business, the staff had just been brought up to three thousand and forty-five employees for the new season.

It was the stupendous sight of the great exhibition of household linen which had caused the ladies to stop. First of all, surrounding them, there was the entrance hall, with bright mirrors, and paved with mosaics, in which displays of inexpensive goods were drawing the voracious crowd. Then there were the galleries, dazzling in their whiteness like a polar vista, a snowy expanse unfolding with the endlessness of steppes draped with ermine, a mass of glaciers lit up beneath the sun. It was the same whiteness as that displayed in the outside windows, but heightened and on a colossal scale, burning from one end of the enormous nave to the other with the white blaze of a conflagration at its height. There was nothing but white, all the white goods from every department, an orgy of white, a white star whose radiance was blinding at first, and made it impossible to distinguish any details in the midst of this total whiteness. Soon the eye grew accustomed to it: to the left in the Monsigny Gallery there stretched out white promontories of linens and calicoes, white rocks of sheets, table-napkins, and handkerchiefs; while in the Michodière Gallery on the right, occupied by the haberdashery, hosiery, and woollens, white edifices were displayed made of pearl buttons, together with a huge construction of white socks, and a whole hall covered with white swansdown and illuminated by a distant shaft of light. But the light was especially bright in the central gallery, where the ribbons and fichus, gloves and silks were situated. The counters disappeared beneath the white of silks and ribbons, of gloves and fichus. Around the iron pillars were twined flounces of white muslin, knotted here and there with white scarves. The staircases were decked with white draperies, draperies of piqué alternating with dimity, running the whole length of the banisters and encircling the halls right up to the second floor; and the ascending whiteness appeared to take wing, merging together and disappearing like a flight of swans. The whiteness then fell back again from the domes in a rain of eiderdown, a sheet of huge snowflakes: white blankets and white coverlets were waving in the air, hung up like banners in a church; long streams of pillow-lace seemed suspended like swarms of white butterflies, humming there motionless; other types of lace were fluttering everywhere, floating like gossamer against a summer sky, filling the air with their white
breath. And over the silk counter in the main hall there was the miracle, the altar of this cult of white—a tent made of white curtains hanging down from the glass roof. Muslins, gauzes, and guipures flowed in light ripples, while richly embroidered tulles and lengths of oriental silk and silver lamé served as a background to this gigantic decoration, which was evocative both of the tabernacle and of the bedroom. It looked like a great white bed, its virginal whiteness waiting, as in legends, for the white princess, for she who would one day come, all powerful, in her white bridal veil.

‘Oh! It’s fantastic!’ the ladies kept repeating. ‘Amazing!’

They did not tire of this hymn of praise to white, which all the materials in the shop were singing. It was the most immense exhibition Mouret had mounted so far, the stroke of his genius for display. Through the flow of all this white, and the apparent disorder of the materials, there ran a harmonic phrase, white maintained and developed in all its tones, which were introduced and then grew and expanded with the complicated orchestration of some masterly fugue, the continued development of which carries the soul away in an ever-widening flight. There was nothing but white, yet it was never the same white, but all the different tones of white, competing together, contrasting with and complementing each other, achieving the brilliance of light itself. First came the mat whites of calico and linen, the dull whites of flannel and cloth; next came the velvets, the silks, the satins, a rising scale, the white gradually lighting up, finishing in little flames around the breaks of the folds; and in the transparency of the curtains the white took wing, in the muslins and laces it attained the freedom of light, and the tulles were so fine that they seemed to be the ultimate note, dying away into nothing; while at the back of the gigantic alcove the silver in the lengths of oriental silk sang out above everything else.