‘You’re right, I’ve been bad,’ he exclaimed. ‘But it isn’t disgusting; really. On the contrary, and that’s why I keep on doing it… This one, you see, is already twenty. She thought it would be fun because I’m only seventeen … Really! I’m furious with myself! I could hit myself!’
He had taken her hands and was kissing them, wetting them with his tears.
‘Give me the fifteen francs, it’ll be the last time, I swear … Or else, no! Don’t give me anything, I’d rather die. If the husband murders me it’ll be good riddance for you.’
And as she was crying as well, he had a twinge of remorse.
‘I say that, but I don’t know. Perhaps he doesn’t want to kill anyone … We’ll manage, I promise, Sis. Goodbye, I’m off.’
But a sound of footsteps at the end of the corridor alarmed them. She pulled him over by the stores again, into a dark corner. For a moment they could hear nothing but the hiss of a gas jet near them. Then the footsteps drew nearer; and, craning her neck, she recognized Jouve, who had just entered the corridor, with his stiff military walk. Was he there by chance? Or had some other supervisor, on duty at the door, tipped him off? She was so overwhelmed with fear that she lost her head; and she pushed Jean out of the dark hole where they were hiding, and drove him in front of her, stammering as she did so:
‘Get out! Get out!’
They both raced along, hearing old Jouve panting behind them, for he had also started to run. They went back through the dispatch department and arrived at the foot of the stairs whose glazed well-hole led out into the Rue de la Michodière.
‘Get out!’ repeated Denise. ‘Get out! If I can I’ll send you the fifteen francs all the same.’
Jean, dazed, scampered away. The shopwalker, who was just reaching the top of the stairs, out of breath, caught sight only of a bit of white overall and some fair curls blowing in the wind. He stood for a moment to catch his breath and to regain his correct bearing. He had a brand new white necktie, which he had taken from the lingerie department, and its knot, which was very wide, was shining like a big snowflake.
‘Well, this is nice behaviour, miss,’ he said, his lips trembling. ‘Yes, it’s nice, very nice … If you think I’m going to tolerate nice things like that in the basement, you’re mistaken.’
And he pursued her with this word while she went upstairs again to the shop, overcome with emotion, unable to think of anything to say in her own defence. She was sorry now that she had run away. Why hadn’t she explained everything and introduced Jean as her brother? Again they would all suppose the worst; and no matter how much she might swear that it was untrue, they would not believe her. Once more she forgot Robineau, and went straight back to the department.
Jouve went immediately to the manager’s office to report the matter. But the porter on duty told him that the governor was with Monsieur Bourdoncle and Monsieur Robineau; the three of them had been talking for a quarter of an hour. The door was half open; Mouret could be heard gaily asking Robineau if he had had a good holiday; there was not the slightest question of a dismissal—on the contrary, the conversation was about certain measures to be taken in the department.
‘Do you want something, Monsieur Jouve?’ shouted Mouret. ‘Do come in!’
But some instinct forewarned the shopwalker. As Bourdoncle had come out, Jouve preferred to tell him the whole story. They walked slowly through the shawl gallery, side by side, one leaning forward and speaking in a very low voice, the other listening, not a line of his hard face betraying his impressions.
‘Very well,’ Bourdoncle said at last.
And as they had arrived outside the ladieswear department, he went in. At that moment Madame Aurélie was scolding Denise. Where had she been now? She couldn’t say that she had gone up to the work-room this time. Really, these continual disappearances could not be tolerated any longer.
‘Madame Aurélie,’ called Bourdoncle.
He had decided to force the issue; he did not want to consult Mouret, for fear that he might be weak. The buyer advanced, and once more the story was related in hushed tones. The whole department was waiting, scenting a catastrophe.
Finally Madame Aurélie turned round with a grave air.
‘Mademoiselle Baudu …’
Her bloated imperial mask had the inexorable immobility of omnipotence.
‘Go and collect your wages!’
The terrible sentence rang out very loudly through the department, which was empty of customers. Denise had remained erect and white, holding her breath. Then she stammered:
‘Me! Me! But why? What have I done?’
Bourdoncle replied harshly that she knew very well what she had done and would do well not to press for an explanation: and he spoke of the neckties, and said that it would be a fine thing if all the girls went to meet men in the basement.
‘But it was my brother!’ she cried, with the heartfelt anger of an outraged virgin.
Marguerite and Clara started to laugh, while Madame Frédéric, usually so discreet, shook her head with an air of incredulity. Always saying it was her brother! It really was very silly! Then Denise looked at them all: at Bourdoncle who, from the first day, had not wanted her; at Jouve, who had stayed there to give evidence, and from whom she could expect no justice; and then at the girls, whom she had been unable to soften in spite of nine months of smiling courage, who were happy to push her out at last. What was the point of struggling? Why try to impose herself on them when no one liked her? And she went away without a word, not even casting a last glance at this room where she had struggled for so long.
But, as soon as she was alone by the hall balustrade, her heart was filled with a deeper sense of suffering. No one liked her, and the sudden thought of Mouret had just filled her with resolve. No! she couldn’t accept a dismissal like that. Perhaps he would believe that foul story about an assignation with a man down in the cellars. This thought tortured her with shame, with an anguish such as she had never experienced before. She wanted to go and find him; she would explain things to him, simply to let him know the truth; for she was ready to leave once he knew it. And her old fear, the chill which froze her in his presence, suddenly developed into a passionate need to see him and not to leave the shop without swearing to him that she had never belonged to another man.
It was almost five o’clock; the shop was coming slowly to life again in the cool evening air. She hurried off towards Mouret’s office. But when she arrived at the door she was once more overwhelmed with a hopeless feeling of sadness. She was tongue-tied; the crushing weight of existence once more fell upon her. He would not believe her, he would laugh like the others; and this fear destroyed her resolve. It was all over; she would be better off alone, out of the way, dead. And so, without even letting Deloche and Pauline know, she went at once to the pay-desk.
‘You’ve got twenty-two days, miss,’ said the clerk, ‘that makes eighteen francs seventy, to which must be added seven francs percentage and bonus … That’s right, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, sir … Thank you.’
And Denise was going away with her money when, at last, she met Robineau. He had already heard of her dismissal, and promised to try to find the necktie dealer. He tried to console her in a whisper, but got carried away with anger. What an existence! To be at the continual mercy of a whim! To be thrown out at an hour’s notice, without even being able to claim a full month’s wages! Denise went upstairs to inform Madame Cabin that she would try to send someone for her trunk that evening. Five o’clock was striking when she found herself on the pavement in the Place Gaillon, dazed in the midst of the cabs and the crowd.
That same evening, as Robineau arrived home, he received a letter from the management informing him in four lines that, for administrative reasons, they were obliged to dispense with his services. He had been in the shop for seven years; that very afternoon he had been talking to those gentlemen; it was a stunning blow. Hutin and Favier were celebrating victory in the silk department as
noisily as Marguerite and Clara were exulting in the ladieswear department. Good riddance! A clean sweep makes room for others! Deloche and Pauline, when they met among the crowd in the shop, were the only ones to lament Denise’s departure, exchanging bitter words of regret at losing her, for she was so gentle and honest.
‘Ah,’ said the young man, ‘if ever she makes good somewhere else, I wish she’d come back here to show all those good-for-nothings a thing or two!’
It was Bourdoncle who bore the brunt of Mouret’s violent reaction to the affair. When the latter heard of Denise’s dismissal he became extremely angry. Usually he had very little to do with the staff; but this time he affected to see an encroachment on his power, an attempt to ignore his authority. Was he no longer the master, that they presumed to give orders? Everything must pass through his hands, absolutely everything; and he would crush anyone who resisted him, like a straw. Then, in a nervous torment which he could not conceal, he made certain personal inquiries, and lost his temper again. The poor girl hadn’t been lying; it really was her brother; Campion had fully recognized him. So why was she dismissed? He even talked of taking her back.
Meanwhile Bourdoncle, strong in his passive resistance, bent before the storm. He was studying Mouret. Finally, one day when he saw that he was calmer, he ventured to say in a special tone of voice:
‘It’s better for everyone that she’s gone.’
Mouret became embarrassed, his face flushed.
‘Well!’ he answered, laughing, ‘perhaps you’re right… Let’s go down and have a look at the sale. It’s picking up; we made nearly a hundred thousand francs yesterday.’
CHAPTER 7
FOR a moment Denise stood dazed on the pavement in the sunshine, which was still scorching at five o’clock. The July heat was warming the gutters, and Paris was bathed in the chalky summer light with its blinding reflections. The catastrophe had been so sudden, she had been pushed out so roughly, that she kept mechanically turning over the twenty-five francs and seventy centimes in her pocket, wondering where to go and what to do.
A long line of cabs prevented her from leaving the pavement in front of the Ladies’ Paradise. When she was able to venture between the wheels, she crossed the Place Gaillon as if she wanted to go down the Rue Louis-le-Grand; then she changed her mind and walked towards the Rue Saint-Roch. But she still had no plan, for she stopped at the corner of the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs which, after looking about her hesitantly, she finally took. When she saw the Passage Choiseul she went down it, found herself in the Rue Monsigny without knowing how she had got there, and ended up again in the Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin. Her head was swimming, and the thought of her trunk came back to her at the sight of a street-porter; but where could she have it taken to, and why all this trouble when an hour earlier she still had a bed to go to?
Then, looking up at the houses, she began to examine the windows. They displayed a whole series of placards. She saw them confusedly, dazed by her inner turmoil. Was it possible? Suddenly alone, lost in this huge, unknown city, unprotected, penniless! Yet somehow she had to eat and sleep. She passed along the streets, the Rue des Moulins, the Rue Sainte-Anne. She wandered about the neighbourhood, retracing her steps, always coming back to the only spot she knew well. Suddenly she came to a stop, amazed, for she was once more outside the Ladies’ Paradise; and, to escape from this obsession, she plunged into the Rue de la Michodière.
Fortunately Baudu was not at his door; the Vieil Elbeuf seemed dead behind its dark windows. She would never have dared to go to her uncle’s, for he affected not to recognize her any more and, in the misfortune he had predicted for her, she did not want to be a burden to him. But on the other side of the street a yellow placard caught her eye: FURNISHED ROOM TO LET. It was the first notice that did not intimidate her, so poor did the house appear. Then she recognized it, with its two low storeys and rust-coloured front, squeezed between the Ladies’ Paradise and what had once been the Hôtel Duvillard.* On the threshold of the umbrella shop old Bourras, long-haired and bearded like a prophet, with his spectacles on his nose, was examining the ivory of a walking-stick knob. He rented the whole house, and sublet the two upper storeys furnished to help pay his rent.
‘You have a room to let, sir?’ asked Denise, obeying an instinctive urge.
He raised his large eyes under bushy eyebrows, surprised to see her. He knew all the girls at the Ladies’ Paradise. And after looking at her clean little dress and decent appearance, he replied:
‘It wouldn’t suit you.’
‘How much is it, then?’ Denise went on.
‘Fifteen francs a month.’
She asked to see it. In the narrow shop, seeing that he was still staring at her with a look of surprise, she told him that she had left the Paradise and did not wish to be an embarrassment to her uncle. Finally the old man went to fetch a key hanging in the room at the back of the shop, a dark room where he did his cooking and had his bed; beyond it, behind a dusty window-pane, the greenish light of an inner courtyard, barely two yards wide, could be seen.
‘I’ll go first so you won’t fall,’ said Bourras in the damp passageway which ran along the side of the shop.
He stumbled against a step and went up, reiterating his warnings to be careful. The banisters were against the wall, and there was a hole at the corner; sometimes the tenants left their dustbins on the stairs. Denise, in the total darkness, could distinguish nothing, but could only feel the chilliness of the old, damp plaster. On the first floor, however, a small window opening on to the courtyard enabled her to see vaguely, as if from the bottom of a stagnant pond, the warped staircase, the walls black with filth, the cracked and peeling doors.
‘If only one of these rooms was free!’ Bourras said. ‘You’d be all right there … But they’re always occupied by ladies.’
On the second floor the light increased, illuminating the miserable scene with a sickly pallor. A baker’s apprentice occupied the first room; and it was the other, at the back, which was vacant. When Bourras had opened the door he had to remain on the landing so that Denise could inspect the room unimpeded. The bed, in the corner by the door, left just enough room for one person to pass. At the end of the room there was a little walnut chest of drawers, a pine table stained black, and two chairs. The lodgers who did any cooking had to kneel down in front of the fireplace, where there was a clay oven.
‘Well!’ the old man said, ‘it’s not much, but there’s a nice view: you can see the people in the street.’
And, as Denise was looking with surprise at the corner of the ceiling above the bed, where a lady who had made a brief stay there had written her name—‘Ernestine’—with the flame of a candle, he added good-naturedly:
‘If I did repairs, I’d never be able to make ends meet… So, this is all I’ve got.’
‘It’ll suit me very well,’ declared Denise.
She paid a month’s rent in advance, asked for the linen—a pair of sheets and two towels—and made her bed straight away, happy and relieved to know where she would spend the night. An hour later she had sent a street-porter to fetch her trunk, and had settled in.
The first two months were extremely difficult. Being unable to pay for Pépé’s board and lodging any longer, she took him to live with her, and he slept on an old armchair lent by Bourras. She needed exactly one franc fifty a day, including the rent, provided that she lived on dry bread so as to give a little meat to the child. For the first fortnight things did not go too badly: she started off with ten francs for the housekeeping, and then she had the good luck to find the woman who had let her have the ties, who paid her the eighteen francs thirty she owed her. But after that she was completely destitute. She applied in vain to various shops, in the Place Clichy, at the Bon Marché, at the Louvre; the slack season had stopped business everywhere. They told her to try again in the autumn; more than five thousand shop assistants, dismissed like her, were tramping the streets without work. Then she tried to get some odd jobs: bu
t in her ignorance of Paris she did not know where to apply, she accepted ungrateful tasks and sometimes did not even get paid for them. Some evenings she would make Pépé eat alone, just giving him a bowl of soup, telling him that she had already eaten out, and she would go to bed, her head buzzing, fed by nothing but the fever which was making her hands burn. When Jean suddenly turned up in the midst of this poverty he would say he was a scoundrel with such despairing violence that she was obliged to lie to him; often she would still find a way of slipping him a couple of francs to prove that she had a little money left. She never wept in front of the children. On Sundays, when she was able to cook a piece of veal in the fireplace, kneeling on the floor, the narrow room would echo with the heedless laughter of children. Then, when Jean had left and Pépé had fallen asleep, she would spend a dreadful night, racked by anxiety about the following day.
Other fears kept her awake, too. The two ladies on the first floor received visitors very late; and sometimes a man would make a mistake, come upstairs, and bang on her door. As Bourras had quietly told her not to answer, she would bury her head under her pillow to escape from the oaths. Then her neighbour, the baker, started to annoy her; he never returned home until the morning, and he would lie in wait for her when she went to fetch her water; he even made holes in the wall and watched her washing herself, which forced her to hang her clothes along the wall. But she suffered even more from being pestered in the street, from the continual obsession of passers-by. She could not go down to buy a candle in those muddy streets, full of prowlers and the dissolute life-style of the old neighbourhoods, without hearing an eager whistle or a crude remark behind her; and, encouraged by the house’s sordid appearance, men followed her right to the end of the dark passageway. Why didn’t she have a lover? That surprised people; it seemed ridiculous. She would have to succumb one day. She herself could not have explained how she managed to resist under the threat of hunger, and surrounded by the heady desires which pervaded the air about her.