‘What! The food isn’t good?’ asked Mouret innocently, opening his mouth at last.
He only gave one franc fifty a head per day to the chef, a real terror from Auvergne,* who still managed to make a profit for himself; and the food really was awful. But Bourdoncle shrugged his shoulders: a chef who had to serve four hundred lunches and four hundred dinners, even in three sittings, could scarcely linger over the refinements of his art.
‘Never mind,’ said the chief good-naturedly, ‘I want all our employees to have good food and plenty of it… I’ll have a word with the chef.’
Mignot’s complaint was shelved. Then, back at their point of departure, standing near the door among the umbrellas and ties, Mouret and Bourdoncle received the report of one of the four shopwalkers who supervised the shop. Old Jouve, a retired captain who had been decorated at Constantine,* a handsome man still, majestically bald, and with a big sensual nose, told them of a salesman who, at a simple remonstrance from him, had called him ‘an old fool’; the salesman was immediately dismissed.
The shop was still empty of customers, except for a few local housewives who were going through the deserted galleries. At the door the inspector who clocked in the staff had just closed his book and was making a separate list of those who were late. This was the moment when the salesmen took up their positions in their departments, which porters had been sweeping and dusting since five o’clock. They all put their hats and overcoats away, stifling yawns as they did so, still half asleep. Some exchanged a few words and gazed about the shop, as though to be preparing themselves for another day’s work; others were leisurely removing the green baize with which they had covered the goods the evening before, after they’d been folded up. The piles of material were beginning to appear, symmetrically arranged, and the whole shop was clean and tidy, sparkling in the gay early morning light, waiting for the rush of business once more to choke it and dwarf it beneath an avalanche of linen, cloth, silk, and lace.
In the bright light of the central hall, at the silk counter, two young men were talking in a low voice. One of them, small and handsome, sturdy-looking and with a pink complexion, was trying to blend different coloured silks for an indoor display. His name was Hutin and he was the son of a café owner in Yvetot; in eighteen months he had succeeded in becoming one of the principal salesmen, thanks to a natural flexibility of character and a continual flow of flattery, which concealed a ravenous appetite, a desire to eat up everything, to devour the world without even being hungry, for the sheer pleasure of it.
‘Listen, Favier, I’d have hit him if I’d been you, honestly!’ he was saying to the other, a tall, morose-looking lad with dry, sallow skin, who came from a family of weavers in Besançon and who, though lacking in charm, possessed a disquieting strength of will beneath his reserved manner.
‘Hitting people doesn’t get you anywhere,’ he murmured phlegmatically. ‘It’s better to wait.’
They were talking about Robineau, who was in charge of the assistants while the head of the department was in the basement. Hutin was secretly undermining the assistant buyer, whose job he coveted. Already, to hurt his feelings and make him leave, he had brought Bouthemont in from outside to fill the vacant job of first salesman which had been promised to Robineau. However, Robineau was holding his own, and there was now an unending battle between them. Hutin dreamed of setting the whole department against him, of hounding him out by means of ill will and little humiliations. He was conducting his campaign, moreover, with his pleasant manner, inciting Favier especially, for he was the salesman next to him in seniority, and seemed to let himself be led on, although he would suddenly express reservations through which a whole, silently waged private campaign could be felt.
‘Ssh! Seventeen!’ he said sharply to his colleague, to warn him with this customary exclamation of the approach of Mouret and Bourdoncle.
These two were going through the hall, continuing their inspection. They stopped Robineau about a stock of velvet piled up in boxes which were cluttering up a table. And when the latter replied that there wasn’t enough room, Mouret exclaimed with a smile:
‘I told you so, Bourdoncle, the shop’s already too small! One day we’ll have to knock down the walls as far as the Rue de Choiseul! You’ll see what a crush there’ll be next Monday!’
And with regard to the sale, the object of preparations at every counter, he again questioned Robineau and gave him various orders. But for several minutes, while continuing to talk, he had been watching Hutin, who was lingering behind in order to put some blue silks next to grey and yellow ones, then stepping back to see how the colours blended. Suddenly Mouret intervened.
‘But why are you trying to make it easy on the eye?’ he said. ‘Don’t be afraid, blind them … Here! Some red! Some green! Some yellow!’
He had taken the pieces of material, throwing them together, crumpling them, making dazzling combinations with them. Everyone agreed that the governor was the best window-dresser in Paris, a revolutionary window-dresser in fact, who had founded the school of the brutal and gigantic in the art of display. He wanted avalanches, as if they had fallen at random from gaping shelves, and he wanted them blazing with the most flamboyant colours, making each other seem even brighter. He used to say that the customers should have sore eyes by the time they left the shop. Hutin, on the contrary, belonged to the classic school of symmetry and harmony achieved by shading, and watched Mouret lighting this conflagration of materials in the middle of a table without venturing the slightest criticism, but his lips pursing like an artist whose convictions were hurt by such an orgy.
‘There!’ exclaimed Mouret when he had finished. ‘Leave it like that… Let me know if it doesn’t attract the women on Monday!’
Just as he was rejoining Bourdoncle and Robineau, a woman appeared; she remained for a few seconds rooted to the spot, entranced by the display. It was Denise. She had waited for nearly an hour in the street, paralysed by a terrible attack of shyness, and had at last made up her mind to come in. But she was still so beside herself with shyness that she could not follow even the simplest directions; the assistants, when she stammeringly enquired for Madame Aurélie, pointed out the mezzanine staircase to her in vain; she would thank them, and then turn left if she had been told to turn right; so that for ten minutes she had been wandering round the ground floor, going from one department to another, surrounded by the ill-natured curiosity and sullen indifference of the salesmen. She felt a desire to run away and, at the same time, a need to stop and admire. She was so lost and small inside the monster, inside the machine, and although it was still idle, she was terrified that she would be caught up in its motion, which was already beginning to make the walls shake. And the thought of the shop at the Vieil Elbeuf, dark and cramped, made this vast shop appear even bigger to her; it seemed bathed in light, like a town, with monuments, squares, streets, in which it seemed she would never find her way.
She had not dared before to venture into the silk hall; its high glazed ceiling, sumptuous counters, and church-like atmosphere frightened her. Then, when she had at last gone in, to escape the grinning salesmen in the linen department, she had stumbled straight into Mouret’s display; and though she was scared, the woman in her was aroused, her cheeks suddenly flushed, and she forgot herself as she gazed at the blazing conflagration of silks.
‘Hey!’ said Hutin crudely in Favier’s ear, ‘It’s that tart we saw in the Place Gaillon.’
Mouret, while pretending to listen to Bourdoncle and Robineau, was secretly flattered by this poor girl’s sudden fascination with his display, as a duchess might be by a brutal look of desire from a passing drayman. But Denise had raised her eyes, and she was even more confused when she recognized the young man she took to be the head of a department. She thought he was looking at her sternly. Then, not knowing how to get away, quite distraught, she once again approached the nearest assistant, who happened to be Favier.
‘Could you tell me where I can find Madame Au
rélie, please?’
Favier gave her an unpleasant look and replied curtly:
‘On the mezzanine floor.’
Denise, anxious to escape from all these men who were staring at her, thanked him and was once more walking away from the staircase she should have climbed, when Hutin yielded to his natural instinct for gallantry. He had called her a tart, but it was with his most amiable salesman’s smile that he stopped her.
‘No, this way, miss … If you would be so good as to …’
He even went with her a little way to the foot of the staircase in the left-hand corner of the hall.
There he bowed slightly, and smiled at her with the smile he gave to all women.
‘Upstairs, turn left… The ladieswear department is straight ahead.’
This tender politeness moved Denise deeply. It was like a brotherly hand extended to her. She had raised her eyes, she was gazing at Hutin, and everything about him touched her, his handsome face, his smiling look which allayed her fear, his voice which seemed to her sweet and consoling. Her heart swelling with gratitude, she expressed her friendship in the few disjointed words her emotion allowed her to stammer out.
‘You’re too kind … Please don’t trouble … Thank you so much, sir …’
Hutin had already rejoined Favier, to whom he said under his breath, in a crude tone:
‘She’s skinny, eh!’
Upstairs the girl found the ladieswear department straight away. It was a vast room with high cupboards of carved oak all round, and plate-glass windows facing the Rue de la Michodière. Five or six women in silk dresses, looking very smart with their chignons curled and their crinolines* sweeping behind them, were moving about, talking to each another. One of them, tall and thin, with an elongated head which made her look like a runaway horse, was leaning against a cupboard, as if she was already tired out.
‘Madame Aurélie?’ Denise repeated.
The saleswoman looked at her without replying, with an air of disdain for her shabby dress; then, turning to one of her companions, a short girl with a pasty complexion, she asked in an artless, wearied manner:
‘Mademoiselle Vadon, do you know where Madame Aurélie is?’
The girl, who was in the process of arranging long cloaks in order of size, did not even take the trouble to look up.
‘No, Mademoiselle Prunaire, I don’t know,’ she said rather primly.
A silence ensued. Denise stood there, and no one took any further notice of her. However, after waiting a moment she plucked up enough courage to ask another question.
‘Do you think Madame Aurélie will be back soon?’
Then the assistant buyer of the department, a thin, ugly woman whom she had not noticed, a widow with a prominent chin and coarse hair, called to her from a cupboard where she was checking price tickets:
‘You’ll have to wait if you want to talk to Madame Aurélie personally.’
And, addressing another saleswoman, she added:
‘Isn’t she in the reception office?’
‘No, Madame Frédéric, I don’t think so,’ the girl replied. ‘She didn’t say anything; she can’t be far away.’
Denise remained standing. There were a few chairs for customers, but as no one told her to sit down she did not dare to take one, although she felt that her legs might drop off with fatigue. These young ladies had clearly sensed that she was a salesgirl coming to apply for a job, and they were staring at her, stripping her naked, out of the corners of their eyes, with the veiled, ill-natured hostility of people seated at table who do not like moving up to make room for those outside who are hungry. Her embarrassment grew; she crossed the room very quietly and looked out into the street, just for something to do. Just opposite, the Vieil Elbeuf with its rusty frontage and lifeless windows seemed to her so ugly, so wretched, seen thus from the luxury and life of her present vantage-point, that her heart was wrung with something akin to remorse.
‘I say,’ whispered tall Mademoiselle Prunaire to little Mademoiselle Vadon, ‘did you see her boots?’
‘And her dress!’ murmured the other.
Her eyes still on the street, Denise felt herself being devoured. But she was not angry; she had not thought either of them beautiful, neither the tall one with her bun of red hair hanging down her horse-like neck, nor the short one with the sour-milk complexion which made her flat and seemingly boneless face look flabby. Clara Prunaire, the daughter of a clog-maker in the forest of Vivet, had been seduced by the footmen at the Château de Mareuil, where the Countess employed her to do the mending; she had worked later on in a shop in Langres, whence she had come to Paris, where she was now avenging herself on men for the kicks she had received in the past from old Prunaire. Marguerite Vadon had been born in Grenoble, where her family owned a cloth business; she had had to be sent off to the Ladies’ Paradise to hush up a slip she had made, a child conceived by accident; if she behaved well she would eventually return home to run her parents’ shop and marry a cousin who was waiting for her.
‘Anyway,’ Clara resumed in a low voice, ‘she certainly won’t get very far here!’
But they stopped talking as a woman of about forty-five came in. It was Madame Aurélie, very stout and tightly laced in a black silk dress; the bodice, stretched over the massive curves of her shoulders and bust, shone like a piece of armour. Beneath dark coils of hair she had large, unwavering eyes, a stern mouth, and broad, rather pendulous cheeks; and in the majesty of her position as chief buyer her face was acquiring the puffiness of the bloated mask of some Caesar.
‘Mademoiselle Vadon,’ she said in an irritated voice, ‘why didn’t you put the model of that close-fitting coat back in the workroom yesterday?’
‘It needed an alteration, ma’am,’ the saleswoman replied, ‘so Madame Frédéric kept it out.’
At that the assistant buyer took the model from a cupboard, and the dispute continued. All opposition was crushed when Madame Aurélie thought she had to assert her authority. Extremely vain—to the point of not wishing to be called by her real name, Lhomme, which annoyed her, and of not admitting that her father, whom she always referred to as a tailor in a shop, was really just a caretaker—she was friendly only to those girls who were pliable and fawning, bowing down in admiration to her. When she had tried to set herself up in the dressmaking business she had become embittered, continually dogged by bad luck, exasperated at the feeling that she was made for affluence and yet encountered nothing but a series of catastrophes; and even now, after her success at the Ladies’ Paradise, where she earned twelve thousand francs a year, she still seemed to have a grudge against the world, and she was very hard on beginners just as, in the beginning, life had been hard to her.
‘That’ll do!’ she said tartly. ‘You’ve got no more sense than the others, Madame Frédéric … Have the alteration done straight away!’
During this discussion Denise had stopped looking at the street. She thought this woman must be Madame Aurélie but, alarmed by the anger in her raised voice, she remained standing, still waiting. The saleswomen, delighted at having set their two superiors against each other, had gone back to their work with an air of complete indifference. Several minutes passed, and no one had the kindness to extricate the girl from her embarrassment. In the end, it was Madame Aurélie herself who noticed her and, surprised at seeing her standing there without moving, asked her what she wanted.
‘Madame Aurélie, please?’
‘I am Madame Aurélie.’
Denise’s mouth was dry and her hands cold; she was as frightened as when, as a child, she’d been terrified of being whipped. She stammered out her request, and then had to repeat it to make herself understood. Madame Aurélie looked at her with her large, unwavering eyes, and not a single fold of her imperial mask deigned to relax.
‘How old are you?’
‘Twenty, ma’am.’
‘What, twenty? You don’t look more than sixteen!’
Once more, the saleswomen were looking up. Deni
se hastened to add:
‘Oh, I’m very strong!’
Madame Aurélie shrugged her broad shoulders. Then she declared:
‘Oh well, I don’t mind putting your name down. We put down the names of all those who apply … Mademoiselle Prunaire, give me the book.’
But the book could not be found: Jouve, one of the shopwalkers, probably had it. Clara, the tall girl, was going to fetch it when Mouret arrived, still followed by Bourdoncle. They were just finishing their tour of the mezzanine floor; they had been through the laces, the shawls, the furs, the furniture, the underwear, and were winding up with the dresses. Madame Aurélie left Denise for a moment to speak to them about an order for some coats she hoped to give to one of the big Parisian contractors; usually she bought direct, and on her own responsibility; but for important purchases she preferred to consult the management. Bourdoncle then told her about her son Albert’s latest lapse, which seemed to fill her with despair: that boy would be the death of her; his father, though not a man of talent, was at least reliable. The whole Lhomme dynasty, of which she was the undisputed head, sometimes gave her a great deal of trouble.
Mouret, surprised at seeing Denise again, bent down to ask Madame Aurélie what the girl was doing there; when the buyer replied that she had come to apply for a job as salesgirl, Bourdoncle, with his contempt for women, was staggered at such pretension.