The Ladies' Paradise (BBC tie-in) (Oxford World's Classics) (63 page)

The shop was full of life: people were besieging the lifts, there was a tremendous crush in the buffet and the reading-room; it was as if the whole nation was travelling through those snow-covered spaces. The crowd seemed black, like skaters on a Polish lake in December. On the ground floor there was a dark swell ebbing back, in which nothing but the delicate, enraptured faces of the women could be seen. Along the fretwork of the iron frames, all up the staircases, and on the suspension bridges, there
was an endless procession of little figures, as if lost among snowy mountain peaks. The suffocating hothouse heat which confronted them on those glacial heights came as a surprise. The buzz of voices made a deafening noise like a swiftly flowing river. On the ceiling the elaborate gilding, the glass inlaid with gold, and the golden roses were like a burst of sunshine shining on the Alps of the great exhibition of white.

‘Well,’ said Madame de Boves, ‘we must move on. We can’t stay here for ever.’

Jouve, standing near the door, had not taken his eyes off her since she had entered the shop. When she turned round their glances met. Then, as she started to walk off again, he let her get a little ahead, and followed her at a distance, without appearing to take any further notice of her.

‘Look!’ said Madame Guibal, stopping again at the first cash-desk. ‘Those violets are a nice idea!’

She was referring to the Paradise’s new free gift, little bunches of white violets, bought by the thousand in Nice, and distributed to every customer who made even the smallest purchase; it was one of Mouret’s ideas which he was advertising in all the newspapers. Near each cash-desk messenger-boys in livery were handing out these free gifts, under the supervision of a shopwalker. Gradually the customers were becoming decked with flowers; the shop was filling with these white bridal bouquets; all the women were carrying around with them a penetrating perfume of flowers.

‘Yes,’ murmured Madame Desforges in a jealous voice, ‘it’s not a bad idea.’

But, just as they were about to move away, they heard two salesmen joking about the violets. One of them, tall and thin, was expressing his surprise: it was coming off then, was it, the boss’s marriage with the buyer in the children’s department? The other one, short and fat, was replying that no one knew for certain, but that they’d bought the flowers all the same.

‘What!’ said Madame de Boves, ‘Monsieur Mouret is getting married?’

‘It’s the first I’ve heard of it,’ Henriette replied, feigning indifference. ‘But that’s how we all end up.’

The Countess threw a sharp glance at her new friend. Now they both understood why Madame Desforges had come
to the Ladies’ Paradise, despite her rupture with Mouret. She was obviously giving way to an irresistible urge to see and to suffer.

‘I’ll stay with you,’ said Madame Guibal, her curiosity aroused. ‘We’ll meet Madame de Boves in the reading-room.’

‘Very well, let’s do that!’ the latter declared. ‘There’s something I want to do on the first floor … Are you coming Blanche?’

And she went upstairs, followed by her daughter, while Jouve, still following her, took a neighbouring staircase, in order not to attract her attention. The other two were soon lost in the dense crowd on the ground floor.

In the midst of the bustle of business all the departments were talking of nothing but the governor’s love-affairs. The intrigue which for months had been giving the assistants, delighted by Denise’s long resistance, something to talk about had suddenly come to a head: it had become known the day before that the girl wanted to leave the Paradise, in spite of Mouret’s entreaties, on the pretext that she needed a long rest. Opinion was divided: would she or wouldn’t she leave? From department to department bets of five francs were being laid that she would marry him the following Sunday. The crafty ones were staking a lunch on her marrying him in the end; yet the others, those who believed that she would leave, were not risking their money without good reason. Certainly, the young lady was in the strong position of an adored woman who refuses to yield; but the governor, on his side, was strong because of his wealth, his happiness as a widower, and his pride, which a final unreasonable demand might provoke beyond measure. In any case, they all agreed that the little salesgirl had conducted the affair with the skill of a courtesan of genius, and that she was playing her final card by offering him a deal; marry me, or I leave.

Denise, however, gave no thought to any of these things. She had never been either demanding or calculating. She had decided to leave precisely because of the opinions which, to her continual surprise, were being passed about her conduct. It was not as if she had willed it all, or had shown herself to be artful, flirtatious, or ambitious. She had simply turned up there, and she was the first to be surprised that anyone could love her like
that. And why, even now, did people see cunning in her resolve to leave the Paradise? It was so natural! She was becoming most uncomfortable, she felt unbearable anguish, surrounded as she was by the continual gossip of the shop, by Mouret’s burning obsession, and faced with the struggle she could not avoid within herself; she preferred to go away, fearing that she might give in one day and regret it for the rest of her life. If these were skilful tactics, she was not aware of it, and she would ask herself in despair what she could do to avoid giving the impression that she was trying to catch a husband. The idea of marriage now irritated her; she was resolved to go on saying no, always no, if he persisted in his madness. She alone should suffer. The need for the separation reduced her to tears; but, courageous as she was, she told herself that it was necessary, and that she would have no peace or happiness if she acted in any other way.

When Mouret received her resignation, in his effort to contain himself he remained silent and apparently unmoved. Then he curtly declared that he would give her a week to think it over before allowing her to do anything so silly. At the end of a week, when she brought the subject up again and confirmed her resolve to leave after the big sales, he did not lose his temper, but attempted to appeal to her reason: she would be throwing away all she had achieved, she would never find another position equal to the one she occupied in his shop. Had she got another job in view, then? He was quite ready to offer her the advantages she was hoping to find elsewhere. When she replied that she had not yet looked for another job, but that, thanks to the money she had been able to save, she intended to have a month’s rest at Valognes before looking for something, he asked what would prevent her from coming back to the Paradise after that, if it was only concern for her health which was obliging her to leave. She remained silent, tortured by this interrogation. This made him imagine that she was going to join a lover, perhaps a husband. Hadn’t she confessed to him, one evening, that there was someone she loved? From that moment onwards he had carried the avowal he had dragged from her in a moment of distress deep in his heart, plunged in like a knife. If this man was going to marry her, she was giving up everything in order to follow him: that explained her obstinacy. It was all over, and he simply added in
his icy voice that he would detain her no longer, since she could not tell him the real reasons for her leaving. These crisp words, spoken without anger, upset her more than the violent scene she had expected.

During the week which Denise still had to spend in the shop Mouret remained pale and impassive. When he walked through the departments he pretended not to see her; never had he seemed more detached, more buried in his work; and the bets began again, but only the bravest dared risk a lunch on marriage. Meanwhile, beneath this coldness, which was so unusual for him, Mouret was hiding a terrible crisis of indecision and suffering. Fits of anger made the blood rush to his head: he saw red, he dreamed of taking Denise by force, of keeping her by stifling her cries. Then he would try to reason, he would try to think of practical ways of preventing her from going out of the door; but he was always confronted with his own powerlessness, filled with fury by the uselessness of his power and money. Nevertheless, in the midst of these mad projects, an idea was growing and imposing itself little by little in spite of his resistance. After the death of Madame Hédouin he had sworn not to remarry; having owed his initial good luck to a woman, he was resolved from then on to make his fortune out of all women. It was a superstition with him, as it was with Bourdoncle, that the manager of a big drapery store should be a bachelor if he wished to retain his masculine power over the scattered desires of his nation of customers: once a wife was introduced, the atmosphere would change; her smell would drive the others away. He was resisting the irresistible logic of facts; he would rather have died than give in, overcome with sudden bouts of rage against Denise, sensing that she was the revenge, and afraid that, on the day he married her, he would be broken like a straw by the Eternal Feminine. Then he would gradually become faint-hearted again and would argue his reluctance away: what was there to be afraid of? She was so gentle, so sensible, that he could surrender himself to her without fear. Twenty times an hour the struggle would begin again in his tormented mind. Pride was irritating the wound, and he was finally losing what little reason he had left at the thought that, even after his final surrender, she might say no, still no, if
she loved someone else. On the morning of the big sale he had still not come to a decision, and Denise was leaving the next day.

On that day, when Bourdoncle went into Mouret’s office at about three o’clock, as was his custom, he caught him with his elbows on the desk, his hands over his eyes, so absorbed that he had to touch him on the shoulder. Mouret looked up, his face wet with tears, and they looked at each other; then these men, who had fought so many commercial battles together, reached out and gripped each other by the hand. For the past month Bourdoncle’s attitude had completely changed: he was giving way to Denise, he was even secretly pushing his chief into marriage. No doubt he was manœuvring in that way to save himself from being swept away by a force which he now recognized to be superior. But, at the root of this change, there could also be found the awakening of an old ambition, the nervous but growing hope that he might devour Mouret, to whom he had been subservient for so long. Such a thought was always in the air, in the struggle for existence, the continual massacres of which boosted the sales around him. He was carried away by the workings of the machine, seized by the same appetite as the others, by the voraciousness which, throughout the shop, drove the thin to exterminate the fat. Only a sort of religious fear, the religion of luck, had so far prevented him from taking his bite. And now the governor was becoming childish again, was slipping into an idiotic marriage, was going to kill his luck, destroy his charm with the customers. Why should he dissuade him from it, when it would then be so easy for him to pick up the inheritance of a man who was finished, who had fallen into the arms of a woman? Thus it was with the emotion of a farewell, the compassion of a long comradeship, that he shook his chief’s hand, repeating as he did so:

‘Come on, cheer up, damn it! Marry her, and have done with it.’

Mouret was already ashamed of his moment of weakness. He stood up, protesting.

‘No, no, it’s really stupid … Come on, we’ll do our tour of the shop. Things are going well, aren’t they? I think we’ll have a magnificent day.’

They went out and began their afternoon inspection, making their way through the crowded departments. Bourdoncle cast sideways glances at him, worried by this last burst of energy, watching his lips in order to catch the slightest sign of suffering.

The sale was indeed roaring away at an infernal pace, making the shop shake like a great ship going at full speed. In Denise’s department was a gaggle of mothers, trailing hordes of little girls and boys who were drowning beneath the garments which were being tried on them. The department had brought out all its white things, and there, as everywhere else, there was an orgy of white, enough white to clothe a whole troupe of cupids feeling the cold: there were overcoats in white cloth, dresses in piqué and nainsook and white cashmere, sailor suits, and even white zouave suits. Although it was not yet the season, in the centre, as a decoration, was a display of first communion dresses and veils in white muslin, white satin shoes, a spectacular florescence, as if an enormous bouquet of innocence and guileless ecstasy had been planted there. Madame Bourdelais, facing her three children who were sitting in order of size—Madeline, Edmond, Lucien—was losing her temper with the smallest because he was struggling while Denise was trying to put a mousseline-de-laine jacket on him.

‘Keep still! Don’t you think it’s a little tight, miss?’

With the sharp look of a woman who cannot be deceived she was examining the material, criticizing the cut, and looking at the stitching.

‘No, it’s fine,’ she went on, ‘it’s quite a job dressing these youngsters … Now, I need a coat for this young lady.’

The department was being taken by storm and Denise had had to lend a hand at the counters. She was looking for the coat she needed, when she gave a little cry of surprise.

‘What! You! What on earth’s the matter?’

Her brother Jean, holding a parcel in his hands, was standing in front of her. He had been married for a week, and on the preceding Saturday his wife—who was small and dark with a charming, anxious little face—had paid a long visit to the Ladies’ Paradise to make some purchases. The young couple were going to accompany Denise to Valognes; it was to be a real
honeymoon, a month’s holiday which would remind them of old times.

‘Just fancy,’ he repeated, ‘Thérèse forgot a lot of things. There are some to be changed and others to be bought… So, since she’s busy, she sent me with this parcel… I’ll explain …’

But, catching sight of Pépé, she interrupted him.

‘What! Pépé too! What about school?’

‘Well,’ said Jean, ‘after dinner on Sunday, yesterday, I didn’t have the heart to take him back. He’ll go back tonight… The poor kid’s very sad at being shut up in Paris while we go back home on a holiday.’