The Ladies' Paradise (BBC tie-in) (Oxford World's Classics) (41 page)

‘I think they meet in a different hotel room each time,’ the young man murmured. ‘Not long ago, when he was on a tour of inspection, he wrote to his wife every other day from Blois, Libourne, and Tarbes;
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and yet I’m positive I saw him going into a family boarding-house near the Batignolles …
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Just look at him! Isn’t he handsome, standing there in front of her with all the decorum of a true official! That’s the old France for you, my friend, the old France!’

‘What about your marriage?’ asked Mouret.

Without taking his eyes off the Count, Paul replied that they were still waiting for his aunt to die. Then, with a triumphant air, he said:

‘There, did you see? He bent down, and slipped her an address. There, she’s taking it, with her most virtuous expression: she’s a terrible woman, that dainty redhead is, with her unconcerned air … Well, there are some fine goings-on in your shop!’

‘Oh!’ said Mouret smiling, ‘these ladies aren’t in my shop, they’re at home here!’

He went on to joke about it. Love, like swallows, brought luck to houses. Of course he knew all about the tarts who had their beat along the counters, and the ladies who accidentally met a friend there; but if they did not buy anything, they at least swelled the numbers; they warmed up the shop. While he was talking, he led his old schoolfellow along and made him stand on the threshold of the room, facing the great central gallery, its successive halls stretching out below them. Behind them, the reading-room retained its atmosphere of meditation, disturbed only by the scratching of pens and the rustling of newspapers. An old gentleman had fallen asleep over the
Moniteur.
Monsieur de Boves was studying the pictures, with the obvious intention of losing his future son-in-law in the crowd. And, alone in the midst of the calm, Madame Bourdelais was amusing her children in a loud voice, as if in conquered territory.

‘You see, they’re at home here,’ repeated Mouret with a grand gesture towards the crowds of women with which the departments were almost bursting.

Just then Madame Desforges, who had nearly lost her coat in the crowd, at last came in and walked through the first hall. When she reached the main gallery, she looked up. It was like the concourse of a station, surrounded by the balustrades of the two upper storeys, intersected by hanging staircases, and with suspension bridges built across it. The iron staircases, with double spirals, opened out in bold curves, multiplying the landings; the iron bridges, thrown across the void, ran straight along, very high up; and beneath the pale light from the windows all this metal formed a delicate piece of architecture, a complicated lacework through which the daylight passed, the modern realization of a dream-palace, of a Babel-like accumulation of storeys in which halls opened out, offering glimpses of other storeys and other halls without end. In fact, iron was dominant everywhere; the young architect had had the honesty and courage not to disguise it under a coating of whitewash imitating stone or wood. Down below, so as not to outshine the merchandise, the decoration was sober, with large sections in one colour, in a neutral tint; then, as the metal framework ascended, the capitals of the columns became richer, the rivets formed rosettes, the corbels and brackets were loaded with sculpture; finally, at the top, there was a brilliant burst of green and red paint, in the midst of a wealth of gold, cascades of gold, a whole crop of gold, right up to the windows, the panes of which were enamelled and inlaid in gold. Under the covered galleries, the exposed brickwork of the counter-arches was also enamelled in bright colours. Mosaics and ceramics formed part of the decorations, brightening up the friezes, lighting up with their fresh tones the austerity of the whole; while the staircases, their banisters covered with red velvet, were decorated with a strip of carved, polished iron, which shone like a piece of steel armour.

Although she had already visited the new building, Madame Desforges stopped, struck by the tempestuous life which, that day, was animating the immense nave. Downstairs, all round her, the eddy of the crowd continued endlessly, its dual stream of entry and exit making itself felt as far as the silk department; the crowd was still very mixed, though the afternoon was adding a greater number of ladies to the shopkeepers and housewives; there were many women in mourning, wearing long veils; and the inevitable contingent of wet-nurses, shielding their babies
with their arms. This sea of multi-coloured hats, of bare heads, both fair and dark, was flowing from one end of the gallery to the other, looking blurred and faded against the stunning brilliance of the materials. Wherever she looked Madame Desforges could see nothing but large price tickets with huge figures on them, garish spots standing out against the bright prints, the glossy silks, and the sombre woollens. Heads were half cut off from sight by piles of ribbons; a wall of flannel stood out like a promontory; on all sides the mirrors made the departments recede further into the distance, reflecting the displays together with patches of the public—faces in reverse, bits of shoulders and arms—while to the left and right sides galleries opened up further vistas, the snowy drifts of household linen, the dappled depths of the hosiery—lost in the distance, illuminated by a ray of light from some bay window, and where the crowd had become nothing but specks of human dust. Then, when Madame Desforges looked up, she saw, along the staircases, on the suspension bridges, round the balustrades of each storey, an unbroken, murmuring stream of people ascending, a whole multitude of people in the air, travelling through the fretwork of the enormous metal frame, silhouetted in black against the diffused light of the enamelled windows. Great gilded chandeliers hung from the ceiling; an awning of rugs, embroidered silks, and materials worked with gold was hanging down, draping the balustrades with brilliant banners; from one end to the other there were flights of lace, quivering muslin, triumphal wreaths of silk, apotheoses of half-dressed dummies; and above all this confusion, at the very top, the bedding department, as if suspended in the air, displayed little iron bedsteads with their mattresses, hung with white curtains, like a dormitory of schoolgirls sleeping in the midst of the trampling customers, who became rarer as the departments rose higher.

‘Does madam require some cheap garters?’ said a salesman to Madame Desforges, seeing her standing there. ‘All silk, one franc forty-five.’

She did not deign to reply. Around her the salesmen were yelping, becoming more and more animated. She wanted, however, to know where she was. Albert Lhomme’s cash-desk was on her left; he knew her by sight and, completely unhurried in
the midst of the stream of invoices with which he was besieged, he took the liberty of giving her a pleasant smile; behind him, Joseph was struggling with the string-box, unable to parcel up the articles fast enough. Then she realized where she was; the silk department must be ahead of her. But it took her ten minutes to get there, for the crowd was growing all the time. Above her the red balloons at the end of their invisible strings had become even more numerous; they were piling up into crimson clouds, moving gently towards the doors, continuing to pour out into Paris; and when they were held by very small children with the string wound tightly round their little hands, she had to bend her head down beneath the flight of balloons.

‘What! It’s very bold of you to come here, madam,’ exclaimed Bouthemont gaily, as soon as he caught sight of Madame Desforges.

The manager of the silk department, who had been taken to her house by Mouret himself, now called on her occasionally for tea. She thought him common, but very pleasant, with a fine full-blooded temperament which she found surprising and amusing. What is more, two days earlier he had told her straight out about Mouret’s affair with Clara, without thinking, with the stupidity of a crude lad who loves a good laugh; and, stung with jealousy, hiding her wounded feelings under an air of disdain, she had come to seek out this girl, for he had simply said it was a young lady from the ladieswear department, refusing to name her.

‘Can we help you in any way?’ he resumed.

‘Of course, otherwise I wouldn’t have come … Do you have any silk for a matinée jacket?’

She hoped to extract the name of the girl from him, for she had been seized with an urge to see her. He immediately summoned Favier; and he started to chat with her again while waiting for the salesman, who was just finishing serving a customer, the ‘pretty lady’ as it happened, that beautiful blonde woman whom the whole department occasionally talked about, without knowing anything about her life or even her name. This time the pretty lady was in deep mourning. Ah, whom had she lost, her husband or her father? Certainly not her father, or she would have looked sadder. So she was not a tart then, she had a real
husband. Unless, of course, she was in mourning for her mother? For a few minutes, despite the pressure of work, the department exchanged these various conjectures.

‘Hurry up! It’s intolerable!’ shouted Hutin to Favier, who was coming back from escorting his customer to the cash-desk. ‘When that lady’s here you take ages … As if she cared for you!’

‘I bet she couldn’t care as little for me as I care for her,’ replied the irritated salesman.

But Hutin threatened to report him to the management if he did not show more respect for the customers. He had become insufferable, peevishly severe, ever since the department had banded together to get him Robineau’s place. In fact, he was so unbearable, after all the promises of good comradeship with which he had previously curried favour with his colleagues, that they now secretly supported Favier against him.

‘Now then, don’t answer back,’ Hutin went on severely. ‘Monsieur Bouthemont’s asking for some foulard, the palest designs.’

In the middle of the department an exhibition of summer silks was illuminating the hall with the brilliancy of dawn, like the rising of a star amidst the most delicate shades of daylight—pale pink, soft yellow, clear blue, a shimmering scarf of all the colours of the rainbow. There were foulards as fine as a cloud, surahs lighter than the down blown from trees, satiny Peking fabrics as soft as the skin of a Chinese virgin. And there were also pongees from Japan, tussores and corahs from India, not to mention light French silks—fine stripes, tiny checks, floral patterns, every design imaginable—which conjured up visions of ladies in furbelows walking on May mornings beneath great trees in a park.

‘I’ll take this one, the Louis XIV design with the bouquets of roses,’ said Madame Desforges at last.

While Favier was measuring it, she made a last attempt to get some information out of Bouthemont, who had remained near her.

‘I’m going up to the ladieswear department to look at the travel coats … Is she fair, the girl you were telling me about?’

The section-manager, who was becoming alarmed by her insistence, merely smiled. But, just at that moment, Denise happened to pass by. She had just handed over to Liénard, in the
merinos, Madame Boutarel, the provincial lady who came to Paris twice a year to throw away at the Paradise the money she scraped together out of her housekeeping. And as Favier had already taken Madame Desforges’s foulard, Hutin, thinking to annoy him, stopped the girl as she went by.

‘There’s no need, this young lady will be very pleased to accompany madam.’

Denise, confused, naturally consented to take charge of the parcel and the invoice. She could not meet this young man face to face without feeling ashamed, as if he reminded her of some past indiscretion. Yet the sin had only been in her dreams.

‘Tell me,’ Madame Desforges asked Bouthemont in a very low voice, ‘isn’t this the girl who was so clumsy? He’s taken her back then? So she must be the heroine of the adventure!’

‘Perhaps,’ replied the section-manager, still smiling and determined not to tell the truth.

Then, preceded by Denise, Madame Desforges slowly ascended the staircase. She had to stop every two or three seconds to avoid being carried away by the stream of people coming down. In the living vibration of the whole shop, the iron supports were perceptibly moving underfoot, as if trembling at the breath of the crowd. On each step, fixed to the floor, was a dummy displaying a motionless garment, a suit, or an overcoat, or a dressing-gown; they looked like a double row of soldiers lined up for some triumphal procession, and each one had a little wooden handle, like the handle of a dagger, stuck in the red flannel, which seemed to be bleeding where the neck had been severed.

Madame Desforges was at last reaching the first floor when a particularly violent surge of the crowd forced her to stop for a moment. The ground-floor departments, and the scattered crowd of customers she had just gone through, were now spread out below her. A fresh spectacle greeted her, an ocean of heads foreshortened, hiding the bodices beneath them, swarming with ant-like activity. The white price tickets had become nothing but thin lines, the piles of ribbon were crushed, the headland of flannel was a narrow wall cutting across the gallery; whilst the carpets and embroidered silks which decked the balustrades hung at her feet like processional banners attached to the rood-screen
of a church. In the distance she could pick out the corners of the side-galleries, just as, from the eaves of a steeple, one can pick out the corners of neighbouring streets from the black spots of passers-by as they move about. But what surprised her most, exhausted as she was and her eyes blinded by the brilliant mixture of colours, was when she closed her eyelids: she found herself even more conscious of the crowd because of the muffled sound of a rising tide it was making, and the human warmth it gave off. A fine dust was rising from the floor, laden with the odour of Woman, the odour of her underlinen and the nape of her neck, of her skirts and her hair, a penetrating, all-pervading odour which seemed to be the incense of this temple dedicated to the worship of her body.

Mouret, still standing outside the reading-room with Vallagnosc, was breathing in this odour, intoxicating himself with it, repeating:

‘They’re at home. I know some women who pass the whole day here, eating cakes and writing their letters. It only remains for me to put them to bed.’