The Ladies' Paradise (BBC tie-in) (Oxford World's Classics) (64 page)

In spite of her troubles, Denise was smiling. She handed Madame Bourdelais over to one of her salesgirls, then came back to them in a corner of the department which was fortunately becoming less crowded. The children, as she still called them, had become great strapping fellows. Pépé, who was now twelve, was already taller than she was; he was still very quiet, and craved affection, and in his school uniform he had a sweet gentleness about him; whereas Jean was broad-shouldered, and was a full head taller than his sister; and with his blond hair swept back in the windswept style of artisans, he still had the beauty of a woman. And she, as slim as ever, no fatter than a sparrow as she said, had retained her authority over them like an anxious mother, treated them like little boys who needed looking after, and would re-button Jean’s coat so that he would not look like a tramp, and make sure that Pépé had a clean handkerchief. When she saw Pépé looking at her with his big, reproachful eyes, she gently lectured him.

‘You must be reasonable, my darling. You can’t interrupt your studies. I’ll take you there in the holidays … Is there anything you’d like to have now? Perhaps you’d rather I gave you some money?’

She turned back to Jean again.

‘You know, you get him excited by making him think we’re going to have a good time. Do try to be more sensible.’

She had given Jean four thousand francs, half of her savings, to enable him to set up house. Her younger brother’s schooling was costing her a good deal and, as in the past, all her money was spent on them. They were her only reason
for living and working, for she had again sworn that she would never marry.

‘Well,’ Jean resumed, ‘first of all in this parcel there’s the tan coat which Thérèse …’

But he stopped short, and on turning round to see what was intimidating him, Denise caught sight of Mouret standing behind them. For a few moments he had been watching her standing in her motherly way between the two big lads, scolding them and kissing them, turning them round like babies having their clothes changed. Bourdoncle had remained in the background, apparently more interested in the sale; but he lost nothing of the scene.

‘They’re your brothers, aren’t they?’ asked Mouret after a silence.

He spoke in his icy voice, with the stiff manner he used with her nowadays. Denise herself was making an effort to remain cold. Her smile disappeared, she replied:

‘Yes, sir … I’ve married off the eldest, and his wife has sent him to buy a few things.’

Mouret continued looking at the three of them. Finally he said:

‘The younger one has grown a lot. I recognize him, I remember seeing him in the Tuileries one evening, with you.’

His voice, which was growing more hesitant, shook slightly. Denise, very nervous, bent down, pretending to adjust Pépé’s belt. The two brothers, red in the face, stood smiling at their sister’s employer.

‘They’re like you,’ Mouret added.

‘Oh!’ she exclaimed, ‘they’re better-looking than I am!’

For a moment he seemed to be comparing their faces. But he was at the end of his tether. How she loved them! He walked a few steps away; then he came back and said in her ear:

‘Come to my office after the sale. I want to talk to you before you leave.’

This time Mouret did walk away and resumed his tour of inspection. The battle within him was starting again, for now he was annoyed that he had arranged a meeting. To what feeling had he yielded on seeing her with her brothers? It was crazy; he no longer had the strength to have a will of his own. However, he
could put an end to it by saying a word of farewell to her. Bourdoncle, who had rejoined him, seemed less anxious, though he was still studying him with sly glances.

Meanwhile Denise had gone back to Madame Bourdelais.

‘How is the coat?’

‘Oh, it’s excellent… Well, that’s enough for today. These little ones are ruining me!’

Denise was able to slip away and listen to Jean’s explanations, and then accompanied him through the departments, where he would certainly have lost his head without her. First there was the tan coat which Thérèse, after thinking it over, wanted to change for a white cloth coat of the same size and shape. Having taken the parcel, Denise proceeded to the ladieswear department, followed by her two brothers.

The department had laid out all its light-coloured garments, summer jackets and mantillas made of fine silk and fancy woollens. But the sale had moved elsewhere, and most of the customers had left. Almost all the salesgirls were new. Clara had disappeared a month ago; according to some, she had run off with the husband of a customer, and according to others, she had gone on the streets. As for Marguerite, she was at last going back to run the little shop in Grenoble, where her cousin was waiting for her. Madame Aurélie alone remained there, unchanging in the rounded armour of her silk dress, and with her imperial mask which had the yellowish fleshiness of antique marble. Nevertheless, her son Albert’s bad behaviour still troubled her greatly, and she would have retired to the country but for the holes made in the family savings by that good-for-nothing, whose terrible extravagance was threatening to eat away little by little their estate at Les Rignolles. It was like a punishment for their broken home, for the mother had started giving tasteful parties for women only again, while the father continued to play the horn. Bourdoncle was already beginning to look disapprovingly at Madame Aurélie, surprised that she had not had the tact to retire: too old for selling! That knell would soon be tolling, sweeping away the Lhomme dynasty.

‘It’s you!’ she said to Denise with exaggerated friendliness. ‘You want this coat changed, do you? Of course, straight away… Ah! So there are your brothers. They’ve really grown up!’

In spite of her pride, she would have gone down on her knees to do homage to Denise. In the ladieswear department, as in the other departments, they were talking of nothing but Denise’s departure; and the buyer was quite ill over it, for she had counted on the protection of her former salesgirl. She lowered her voice.

‘They say you’re leaving us … It can’t be true, surely?’

‘Yes, it is,’ replied the girl.

Marguerite was listening. Since the date of her marriage had been fixed, she had been going about with a more disdainful expression than ever on her pasty face. She came up to them, saying:

‘You’re quite right. Self-respect is the most important thing, isn’t it? I bid you farewell, my dear.’

Some customers were arriving. Madame Aurélie sternly asked her to attend to the sale. Then, seeing Denise take the coat so as to make the ‘return’ herself, she protested, and called an assistant. It so happened that this was an innovation which Denise had suggested to Mouret: the use of female employees whose duty was to carry the goods so that the salesgirls would be less tired.

‘Please accompany this young lady,’ said the buyer, handing the coat over to her.

And, returning to Denise, she said:

‘Do think it over, won’t you? We’re all really sorry that you’re leaving.’

Jean and Pépé, who were waiting, smiling in the midst of the overflowing stream of women, once more followed their sister. They now had to go to the trousseau department to get six chemises just like the half-dozen Thérèse had bought on Saturday. But in the lingerie department, where a display of white was snowing from every shelf, there was a tremendous crush, and it was becoming very difficult to get through.

First of all, in the corsets, a slight disturbance was making a crowd collect. Madame Boutarel, who had arrived from the Midi this time with her husband and daughter, had been scouring the galleries since the morning in quest of a trousseau for the girl, who was getting married. The father had to be consulted all the time, and it seemed as if they would never be able to choose anything. They had just found themselves in the lingerie department;
and, while the young lady was engrossed in a close study of knickers, the mother, having taken a fancy to some corsets, had disappeared. When Monsieur Boutarel, a big red-faced man, abandoned his daughter in order to go and look for his wife, he finally found her in a fitting-room at the door of which he was politely asked to sit down. These rooms were narrow cells shut off with frosted glass doors; because of the exaggerated prudery of the management, men, even husbands, were not allowed to enter. Salesgirls were going in and out of them quickly, and each time they slammed the door those outside were given a rapid glimpse of ladies in their chemises and petticoats, with bare necks and arms, of fat women whose flesh was fading, and of thin women the colour of old ivory. A row of men sat waiting on chairs, looking bored: Monsieur Boutarel, when he grasped the situation, lost his temper, and shouted that he wanted his wife, he insisted on knowing what they were doing to her, and he would certainly not allow her to undress without him. Vainly they tried to calm him down: he seemed to believe that something improper was going on inside. While the crowd discussed the matter and laughed about it, Madame Boutarel was forced to reappear.

Denise and her brothers were now able to get through. Every type of women’s linen, all the white things which are hidden underneath, were displayed in a succession of rooms divided into different departments. The corsets and bustles occupied one counter; there were stitched corsets, long-waisted corsets, armour-like boned corsets, above all white silk corsets with coloured fan-stitching on them, of which a special display had been arranged that day; there was an army of mannequins without heads or legs, nothing but torsos lined up, their dolls’ breasts flattened under the silk; they had the disturbing lewdness of the disabled. Close by, on neighbouring stands, there were bustles of horsehair and jaconet, their enormous taut rumps forming extensions to the long rods and their outlines appearing grotesquely indecent. But beyond them the luxury
déshabillé
began, a
déshabillé
strewn across the vast galleries, as if an army of pretty girls had undressed as they went from department to department, down to their satiny skin. On one side there were fine linen goods, white cuffs and scarves, fichus and white collars, an infinite
variety of frills and flounces, a white froth escaping from the boxes and rising like so much snow. On the other side there were jackets, little bodices, tea-gowns, dressing-gowns, made of linen, nainsook, and lace, and long white garments, loose and diaphanous, which evoked visions of languorous, lazy mornings after nights of love. And the underclothes appeared, falling one by one: white petticoats of every length, petticoats tight across the knees, and petticoats with a train that swept on the ground, a rising tide of petticoats in which legs were drowning; bloomers in cambric, linen, and piqué; broad white bloomers in which a man’s hips would be lost; finally, the chemises, buttoned up to the neck for the night, and leaving the bosom bare during the day, held up only by narrow shoulder-straps, and made of plain calico, Irish linen, and cambric, the last veil slipping from the breasts and down the hips. In the trousseau department all discretion was abandoned: women were turned round and viewed from below, from the ordinary housewife with her common calicoes to the rich lady smothered in lace; it was an alcove open to the public, whose hidden luxury, its plaitings and embroideries and Valenciennes lace, depraved the senses as it overflowed in costly fantasies. Woman dressed herself again, and the white waves of this flood of linen again became hidden beneath the quivering mystery of skirts; the chemise stiffened by the dressmaker’s fingers, the frigid bloomers retaining the creases from the box, and all that dead cambric and muslin lying dishevelled, strewn about, and piled up on the counters were soon to become alive with the life of the flesh, scented and warm with the fragrance of love, a cloud of white which would become sacred, steeped in night, and of which the slightest flutter, the pink of a knee glimpsed in the depths of the whiteness, played havoc with the world. There was still one more room, devoted to baby linen, where the voluptuous white of Woman led to the guileless white of children: innocence, joy, the young wife who wakes up a mother, infants’ vests made of fluffy quilting, flannel hoods, chemises, and bonnets no bigger than toys, and christening robes, and cashmere shawls, the white down of birth like a shower of fine white feathers.

‘You know, they’re like chemises in the theatre,’ said Jean, who was delighted at this unrobing, this rising tide of clothes into which he was sinking.

In the trousseau department Pauline ran up immediately when she saw Denise. And before she even asked what the latter wanted, she spoke to her in an undertone, showing her agitation at the rumours which were circulating throughout the shop. In her department, two salesgirls had even quarrelled, one insisting that Denise would leave, the other denying it.

‘You’re staying with us, I’ve staked everything on it… What would become of me if you left?’

And when Denise replied that she was leaving the next day, she said;

‘No, no, you think you will, but I know you won’t… Now I’ve got a baby, you must get me promoted assistant buyer. Baugé’s counting on it, my dear.’

Pauline was smiling with an air of conviction. Then she gave them the six chemises; and as Jean had said that they were now going on to the handkerchiefs, she called another assistant to carry the chemises and the coat left by the assistant from the ladieswear department. The girl who happened to be there was Mademoiselle de Fontenailles, who had recently married Joseph. She had just obtained this menial job as a favour, and was wearing a big black overall marked on the shoulder with a number in yellow wool.

‘Would you please follow this young lady?’ said Pauline.

Then, coming back and again lowering her voice, she said to Denise:

‘I’ll be assistant buyer, won’t I? It’s agreed!’

Joking in her turn, Denise laughingly gave her promise. Then she moved on and went downstairs with Pépé and Jean, the three of them accompanied by the assistant. On the ground floor they suddenly found themselves in the woollens: one corner of a gallery was entirely hung with white duffel and flannel. Liénard, whose father was vainly summoning him back to Angers, was talking with the ‘Handsome’ Mignot, who had become a broker, and who had had the nerve to reappear in the Ladies’ Paradise. No doubt they were talking about Denise, for they both fell silent in order to greet her obsequiously. Indeed, as she advanced through the departments, the salesmen became quite excited and bowed down before her, uncertain as to what she might be the next day. They whispered, saying that she looked triumphant; and there was a fresh wave of betting: people began staking a
bottle of Argenteuil wine and some fried fish on her. She had entered the household linen gallery in order to get to the handkerchief department, which was at the further end. There was an endless array of white: the white of cotton, of dimity, of piqués, of calicoes; the white of madapollam, nainsook, muslin, and tarlatan; then, in enormous piles built of lengths of material alternating like stones hewn in cubes, came the linens, coarse linens and fine linens of every width, white and unbleached, made from pure flax bleached in the meadows; then the whole thing began all over again and departments for every kind of made-up linen succeeded each other; there was household linen, table linen, kitchen linen, an endless avalanche of white, there were sheets and pillow-cases, innumerable different kinds of table-napkins and table-cloths, aprons and dishcloths. And the greetings continued as they fell back while Denise passed by. In the linen department Baugé had dashed forward to give her a smile, as if she was the beloved queen of the shop. Finally, after having gone through the blankets department, a room decked with white banners, she went into the handkerchiefs, where the ingenious decorations were sending the crowd into ecstasies—there were white columns, white pyramids, white castles, complicated architecture built up of nothing but handkerchiefs, handkerchiefs made of lawn, cambric, Irish linen, and Chinese silk, initialled handkerchiefs, handkerchiefs embroidered with satin-stitch, trimmed with lace, hemstitched, and with woven designs, a whole town of white bricks of infinite variety, standing out like a mirage against an oriental sky warmed to white heat.