The Ladies' Paradise
‘What are you going to do with your building sites and land?’ he asked insistently. ‘You must have an idea. But I’m quite certain it isn’t as good as mine … Just think about it. We’ll build a shopping arcade on the sites, we’ll demolish or convert the houses, and we’ll open the most enormous shops in Paris, a bazaar which will make millions.’
Then he allowed this heartfelt cry to escape him:
‘Oh! If only I could manage without you! But you hold the aces now. In any case, I’d never get the necessary loans … We really must come to an agreement; it would be a crime not to.’
‘You do get carried away, my dear sir,’ Baron Hartmann contented himself with replying. ‘What imagination!’
He shook his head, and continued to smile, determined not to repay confidences with confidences. The Crédit Immobilier’s plan was to create in the Rue du Dix-Décembre a rival to the Grand Hotel,* a luxurious establishment whose central position would attract foreigners. In any case, since the hotel would only occupy the sites bordering the street, the Baron might very well have welcomed Mouret’s idea, and negotiated for the remaining block of houses, which was still a vast area. But he had financed two of Henriette’s friends already, and he was getting rather tired of playing the part of complacent protector. Besides, despite his passion for activity, which made him open his purse to every intelligent and courageous young man, Mouret’s commercial genius surprised him more than it attracted him. Wasn’t it a fantastic, rash speculation, this gigantic shop? Wouldn’t he risk certain ruin in wishing to expand the drapery trade beyond all bounds? In short, he didn’t believe in it; he refused.
‘No doubt the idea’s attractive,’ he said, ‘but it’s the idea of a poet… Where would you find the customers to fill a cathedral like that?’
Mouret looked at him for a moment in silence, as if stunned by his refusal. Was it possible? A man of such flair, who could smell money at any level! And suddenly, with a gesture of great eloquence, he pointed to the ladies in the drawing-room, exclaiming:
‘There are the customers!’
The sun was fading, the reddish-gold dust had become nothing but a pale light, dying away in a farewell gleam on the silk of the hangings and the panels of the furniture. With the approach of dusk a sense of intimacy filled the large room with a mellow warmth. While Monsieur de Boves and Paul de Vallagnosc were chatting at one of the windows, gazing far into the distance of the garden, the ladies had drawn closer together, forming a tight circle of skirts in the middle of the room, from which laughter was ascending, and whispered remarks, eager questions and answers, all the passion felt by women for spending and for clothes. They were discussing fashions; Madame de Boves was describing a costume she had seen at a ball.
‘First of all, a mauve silk underskirt, and then, over it, flounces of old Alençon lace, thirty centimetres deep …’
‘Oh! Really!’ Madame Marty interrupted. ‘Some women have all the luck!’
Baron Hartmann, who had followed Mouret’s gesture, was looking at the ladies through the open door. He was only half listening to them, for the younger man, inflamed with the desire to convince him, was talking away, explaining how the new type of drapery business worked. It was now based on the rapid and continuous turnover of capital, which had to be converted into goods as many times as possible within twelve months. Thus, in the present year, his initial capital of only five hundred thousand francs had been turned over four times and had produced business worth two million francs. And that was a mere trifle, which could be increased tenfold, for he felt sure that in some departments he could eventually turn his capital over fifteen or twenty times.
‘You see, that’s the essence of it. It’s very simple, once you’ve thought of it. We don’t need a large amount of working capital. All we want is to get rid of our stock very quickly, in order to replace it and make the capital earn interest each time. In this way we can be content with a small profit; as our general expenses reach the enormous figure of sixteen per cent and we seldom deduct more than twenty per cent profit on stock, it means there’s a net profit of four per cent at most; but if we operate with a large stock and continually renew it we’ll end up making millions … Do you follow me? It’s quite obvious.’
The Baron shook his head again. He, who had in his time welcomed the most audacious schemes, and whose boldness at the time when gas lighting was a novelty was still talked about, remained apprehensive and obstinate.
‘I quite understand,’ he replied. ‘You sell cheaply in order to sell a lot and you sell a lot in order to sell cheaply … But you must sell, and I repeat my question: whom will you sell to? How do you hope to keep up such colossal sales?’
A sudden burst of voices coming from the drawing-room cut short Mouret’s explanations. Madame Guibal was saying she would have preferred the flounces of old Alençon lace at the front of the dress only.
‘But, my dear,’ Madame de Boves was saying, ‘the front was covered with it as well. I’ve never seen anything finer.’
‘You’ve given me an idea!’ Madame Desforges went on. ‘I’ve got a few metres of Alençon somewhere … I must look for some more to make a trimming.’
And the voices dropped again, becoming only a murmur. Prices were quoted, a regular haggling was going on and was arousing desires, the ladies were buying lace by the handful.
‘Ah!’ said Mouret, when he could speak, ‘you can sell as much as you like when you know how to sell! There lies our success.’
Then, with his Provençal zest, he described the new kind of business at work in warm, glowing phrases which conjured up whole pictures. First, its strength was multiplied tenfold by accumulation, by all the goods being gathered together at one point, supporting and boosting each other; there was never a slack period, seasonal goods were always available; and, as she went from counter to counter, the customer found herself snared, buying some material here, some thread further on, a coat somewhere else; she bought a whole set of clothes, then got caught by unforeseen attractions, yielding to the need for all that is useless and pretty. He then extolled the system of marked prices. The great revolution in drapery had started from this new idea. If the old-fashioned small shops were in their death throes, it was because they could not keep up in the struggle to offer low prices, which had been set in motion by the system of marking prices on goods. Now competition was taking place before the public’s very eyes, people had only to walk past the shop-windows to ascertain the prices, and every shop was reducing them, content with the smallest possible profit; there was no cheating, no attempts planned well in advance at making money on a material sold at double its value, there was just continuous business, a regular profit of so much per cent on all goods, a fortune put into the smooth running of a sale, which was all the larger because it took place in full view of the public. Wasn’t this an astonishing creation? It was revolutionizing the market, it was transforming Paris, for it was based on the flesh and blood of Woman.
‘I’ve got the women, I don’t care about anything else!’ he said, in a brutal admission wrung from him by passion.
Baron Hartmann seemed moved by this exclamation. His smile lost its touch of irony, and as he looked at the young man, gradually won over by his confidence, he began to feel growing affection for him.
‘Shh!’ he murmured paternally, ‘they’ll hear you.’
But the ladies were now all talking at once, so excited that they were no longer even listening to each other. Madame de Boves was concluding her description of the evening dress: a mauve silk tunic, draped and caught back by bows of lace; the bodice cut very low, with more bows of lace on the shoulders.
‘You’ll see,’ she was saying, ‘I’m having a bodice like that made with a satin …’
‘And I,’ Madame Bourdelais interrupted, ‘I wanted some velvet. Oh! it was such a bargain!’
Madame Marty was asking:
‘Well, how much was the silk?’
And off they went again, all talking at
the same time. Madame Guibal, Henriette, Blanche were measuring, cutting, discarding. Materials were being looted, shops ransacked, the women’s lust for luxury running riot as they dreamed of dresses, coveted them, feeling so happy in the world of clothes that they lived immersed in it, as they did in the warm air necessary to their existence.
Mouret glanced towards the drawing-room, and in a few phrases whispered in Baron Hartmann’s ear, as if he were confiding to him one of those amorous secrets men sometimes venture to reveal when they are alone, he finished explaining the techniques of modern big business. Of supreme importance, more important than the facts he had already given, was the exploitation of Woman. Everything else led up to it, the ceaseless renewal of capital, the system of piling up goods, the low prices which attracted people, the marked prices which reassured them. It was Woman the shops were competing for so fiercely, it was Woman they were continually snaring with their bargains, after dazing her with their displays. They had awoken new desires in her weak flesh; they were an immense temptation to which she inevitably yielded, succumbing in the first place to purchases for the house, then seduced by coquetry, finally consumed by desire. By increasing sales tenfold, by making luxury democratic, shops were becoming a terrible agency for spending, ravaging households, working hand in hand with the latest extravagances in fashion, growing ever more expensive. And if, in the shops, Woman was queen, adulated and humoured in her weaknesses, surrounded with attentions, she reigned there as an amorous queen whose subjects trade on her, and who pays for every whim with a drop of her own blood. Beneath the very charm of his gallantry, Mouret thus allowed the brutality of a Jew selling Woman by the pound to show through; he was building a temple to Woman, making a legion of shop assistants burn incense before her, creating the rites of a new cult; he thought only of her, ceaselessly trying to imagine even greater enticements; and, behind her back, when he had emptied her purse and wrecked her nerves, he was full of the secret scorn of a man to whom a mistress had just been stupid enough to yield.
‘Get the women,’ he whispered to the Baron, laughing impudently as he did so, ‘and you’ll sell the world!’
Now the Baron understood. A few sentences had sufficed, he guessed the rest, and such gallant exploitation excited him, stirring memories of his dissolute past. His eyes twinkled knowingly; he was overtaken by admiration for the inventor of this machine for devouring women. It was very clever. He made the same remark as Bourdoncle, a remark prompted by his long experience:
‘You know, they’ll have their revenge.’
But Mouret shrugged his shoulders in a gesture of crushing disdain. They all belonged to him, they were his property, and he belonged to none of them. When he had extracted his fortune and his pleasure from them, he would throw them on the rubbish heap for those who could still make a living out of them. He had the calculated disdain of a southerner and a speculator.
‘Well, sir,’ he asked in conclusion, ‘will you join me? Does my proposal for the building sites seem possible to you?’
The Baron, half won over, did not wish to commit himself yet. He still felt some doubt about the charm which was gradually having an effect on him. He was about to give an evasive answer, when an urgent summons from the ladies saved him the trouble. In the midst of laughter voices were calling:
‘Monsieur Mouret!’
And since the latter, annoyed at being interrupted, was pretending not to hear, Madame de Boves, who had been standing up for a moment, came to the door of the small drawing-room.
‘They’re asking for you, Monsieur Mouret… It’s not very chivalrous of you to hide in a corner to talk business.’
At this, he decided immediately to join the ladies, and with such apparent good grace and air of delight that the Baron was quite amazed. They both stood up and went into the large drawing-room.
‘I am entirely at your service, ladies,’ he said as he went in, a smile on his lips.
A hubbub of triumph greeted him. He had to go further in, and the ladies made room for him in their midst. The sun had just set behind the trees in the garden; the light was fading, and a soft shadow was gradually filling the vast room. It was the tender hour of twilight, that minute of discreet voluptuousness in Parisian apartments when the light in the street is dying and the lamps are still being lit in the pantry downstairs. Monsieur de Boves and Vallagnosc, still standing at the window, cast a pool of shadow on the carpet; while Monsieur Marty, who had entered discreetly a few minutes earlier, stood motionless in the last ray of light coming from the other window, displaying his thin profile, his skimpy, clean frock-coat, and his face grown pale from teaching. The ladies’ conversation about dresses made him look even more distressed.
‘That sale is going to be next Monday, isn’t it?’ Madame Marty was asking.
‘Indeed it is, madam,’ Mouret replied in a flute-like voice, an actor’s voice which he affected when speaking to women.
Then Henriette interposed.
‘We’re all coming, you know … They say you’re preparing wonders.’
‘Oh! Wonders!’ he murmured with an air of modest self-complacency. ‘I simply try to be worthy of your patronage.’
They pressed him with questions. Madame Bourdelais, Madame Guibal, even Blanche, wanted to know all about it.
‘Come on, give us some details,’ Madame de Boves repeated insistently. ‘You’re making us die of curiosity!’
They were surrounding him, when Henriette noticed that he hadn’t yet had a cup of tea. This provoked consternation; four of them began to serve him, but on condition that he would answer them afterwards. Henriette poured, Madame Marty held the cup, while Madame de Boves and Madame Bourdelais contended for the honour of putting in the sugar. Then, when he had declined to sit down and had started to drink his tea slowly, standing in their midst, they all drew closer, imprisoning him in the closed circle of their skirts. Heads raised and eyes shining, they all sat smiling at him.
‘Your silk, your Paris-Paradise, which all the newspapers are talking about?’ resumed Madame Marty impatiently.
‘Oh!’ he replied, ‘it’s quite exceptional, a coarse faille, supple and strong … You’ll see it, ladies, and you’ll only find it in our shop, for we’ve bought the exclusive rights.’
‘Really! A fine silk at five francs sixty!’ said Madame Bourdelais, quite enraptured. ‘That’s incredible!’
Ever since the advertisements had appeared, this silk had occupied a considerable place in their daily life. They discussed it and promised themselves some of it, tormented by desire and doubt. And, beneath the chattering curiosity with which they overwhelmed the young man, their different temperaments as customers could be seen: Madame Marty, carried away by her mania for spending, taking everything indiscriminately from the Ladies’ Paradise, simply buying at random from the displays; Madame Guibal, walking round the shop for hours without ever making a purchase, happy and satisfied by merely feasting her eyes; Madame de Boves, short of money, constantly tortured by some immoderate desire, bearing a grudge against the goods she could not take away; Madame Bourdelais, with the sharp eye of a careful, practical middle-class woman, making straight for the bargains, using the big shops with such calm housewifely skill that she saved a great deal of money there; and finally Henriette, who, because she dressed with such extreme elegance, only bought certain articles there, such as gloves, hosiery, and all her household linen.
‘We have other materials which are amazingly inexpensive and yet very sumptuous,’ continued Mouret in his melodious voice. ‘For example, I recommend our Cuir-d’Or, a taffeta with an incomparable sheen … Among the fancy silks there are some charming patterns, designs chosen from thousands of others by our buyer; and as for velvets, you’ll find an extremely rich collection of shades … I can tell you that woollen clothes will be very popular this year. You’ll see our quilts and our Cheviots …’
They had stopped interrupting him, and had narrowed the circle even further, their mouths half open in a va
gue smile, their faces close together and leaning forward, as if their whole being was yearning towards their tempter. Their eyes were growing dim, a slight shiver ran over the napes of their necks. And he maintained the composure of a conqueror in the midst of the heady scents rising from their hair. Between each sentence he continued to take little sips of tea, the perfume of which cooled those other, more pungent scents, in which there was a touch of musk. Baron Hartmann, who had not taken his eyes off him, felt his admiration mounting before Mouret’s seductive charm, which reflected such self-possession that he could toy with women like that without being overcome by the intoxicating scents which they exude.
‘So woollen things will be worn,’ resumed Madame Marty, whose haggard face was lit up by coquettish passion. ‘I must go and look.’
Madame Bourdelais, who was keeping a clear head, said in her turn:
‘Your remnant sale is on Thursday, isn’t it? I shall wait, I’ve all my little ones to clothe.’
And turning her delicate fair head towards the mistress of the house, she said:
‘You still get your dresses from Sauveur, don’t you?’
‘Oh, yes!’ Henriette replied, ‘Sauveur’s very expensive, but she’s the only dressmaker in Paris who knows how to make a bodice … And, whatever Monsieur Mouret may say, she has the prettiest designs, designs you don’t see anywhere else. I can’t bear to see my dress on every woman’s back.’
Mouret smiled discreetly at first. Then he intimated that Madame Sauveur bought her material at his shop; no doubt she took certain designs, for which she secured the exclusive rights, direct from the manufacturers; but for black silk goods, for example, she kept an eye open for bargains at the Ladies’ Paradise, and laid in considerable supplies which she later disposed of at two or three times the price.