One evening Denise did not even have any bread for Pépé’s soup, when a gentleman wearing a medal started to follow her. Outside the passageway he became brutal, and she, revolted and disgusted, slammed the door in his face. Then, upstairs, she sat down, her hands shaking. The little boy was asleep. What should she say if he woke up and asked for something to eat? And yet she had only to consent and she would no longer be poor, she would have money, dresses, and a fine room. It was easy; they said everyone did it in the end because in Paris a woman could not live on what she earned. But her whole being revolted against it; she felt no indignation against others for giving in, but simply an aversion to anything dirty or senseless. She considered life a matter of logic, good conduct, and courage.
She would often examine her thoughts in this way. An old ballad kept coming back to her, about a sailor’s fiancée whose love protected her from the perils of waiting for him. At Valognes she used to hum the sentimental refrain while gazing at the empty street. Was she able to be so brave because she, too, felt love in her heart? She still dreamed uneasily of Hutin. Every day she saw him pass under her window. Now that he was assistant buyer he walked by himself, surrounded by the respect of the ordinary salesmen. He never raised his head, and she thought that it was the young man’s vanity that made her suffer, and would watch him without fear of being caught. As soon as she caught sight of Mouret, who also went by every evening, she would begin to tremble, and would quickly hide, her heart pounding. There was no need for him to know where she was living; and then, she was ashamed of the house, and was tormented by the idea of what he thought of her, even though they might never meet again.
In any case, Denise was still living within the orbit of the Ladies’ Paradise. A thin wall was all that separated her room from her old department; and, from the early morning, she would relive her days there, sensing the crowd growing with the increasing hum of activity in the shop. The slightest sounds would shake the old hovel clinging to the giant’s side; it beat with that enormous pulse. Besides, Denise could not avoid meeting people from time to time. Twice she found herself face to face with Pauline, who, grieved to know that she was so badly off, offered to help her. She had even been obliged to lie to avoid having her friend come to see her and to get out of paying her a visit one Sunday at Baugé’s place. But it was more difficult to keep Deloche’s hopeless affection at bay; he was always on the look-out for her, was aware of all her troubles, waited for her in doorways; one evening he wanted to lend her thirty francs—his brother’s savings, so he said, blushing. And these meetings made her miss the shop all the time, made her take part in the life going on inside it as if she had never left it.
No one ever came up to Denise’s room. One afternoon she was surprised to hear a knock on the door. It was Colomban. She stood up to receive him. In great embarrassment, he asked her stammeringly how she was getting on, and talked about the Vieil Elbeuf. Perhaps her uncle Baudu, regretting his hardness, had sent him; for Baudu still did not greet his niece when he saw her, although he could not have been unaware of the poverty in which she was living. But when she asked the shop assistant outright, he seemed even more embarrassed; no, no, it was not his employer who had sent him; and in the end he mentioned Clara, he just wanted to talk about Clara. Little by little he became bolder, and asked for advice, thinking that Denise could further his cause with her former colleague. She vainly tried to discourage him, reproaching him for making Geneviève unhappy just for a heartless trollop. He came back another day, and got into the habit of coming to see her. This was enough to satisfy his timid passion; he would endlessly begin the same conversation, trembling with joy at being with a woman who had been in close contact with Clara. As a result Denise participated more than ever in life at the Ladies’ Paradise. Towards the end of September she experienced really dire poverty. Pépé had fallen ill, having caught a heavy cold. He should have been fed on good broth, but she did not even have any bread. One day when, in despair, she was sobbing in one of those fits of depression which make girls take to the streets or throw themselves into the Seine, old Bourras gently knocked at the door. He had brought a loaf and a milk-can full of broth.
‘Here, this is for the little boy!’ he said in his gruff way. ‘Don’t cry so loud, it bothers my tenants.’
And as she was thanking him in a fresh bout of tears, he added:
‘Be quiet! Come and see me tomorrow. I’ve got some work for you.’
Since the terrible blow which the Ladies’ Paradise had dealt him by creating an umbrella and sunshade department, Bourras no longer employed any staff. In order to reduce costs he did everything himself—cleaning, mending, and sewing. In any case, he had fewer and fewer customers, to such an extent that sometimes he had no work at all; so when he installed Denise in a corner of his shop the next day he had to invent something for her to do. After all, he could not let people die in his house.
‘You’ll have two francs a day,’ he said. ‘When you find something better you can leave.’
She was afraid of him, and finished the work so quickly that he did not know what else to give her to do. He had given her some silk to stitch, and some lace to mend. For the first few days she did not dare raise her head, embarrassed to feel him near her, with his old lion’s mane and hooked nose, and his piercing eyes under his thick bushy eyebrows. His voice was harsh, his gestures seemed crazy, and the mothers of the neighbourhood would frighten their children by threatening to send for him, as one sends for the police. Yet urchins would never go past his door without shouting some kind of abuse, which he did not even seem to hear. All his maniacal fury was directed against the wretches who were dishonouring his trade by selling cheap goods, trash, goods which, as he would say, even dogs wouldn’t want to use.
Denise would tremble when he shouted furiously:
‘Art is done for! You can’t find a decent handle anywhere. They make sticks, but handles, they’re finished! Find me a proper handle, and I’ll give you twenty francs!’
He had the pride of an artist; there was not a workman in Paris capable of making a handle like his, both light and strong. Above all he carved the knobs with delightful inventiveness, always finding fresh subjects, flowers, fruit, animals, heads, executed in a lifelike but distinctive style. A penknife was all he needed, and he could be seen for whole days at a stretch, his spectacles on the end of his nose, carving pieces of boxwood or ebony.
‘A load of ignoramuses,’ he would say, ‘satisfied with sticking silk on whalebone! They buy their handles by the gross, ready-made … And they can sell however many they like! Art’s done for, that’s for sure!’
After a while Denise lost her misgivings. He had wanted Pépé to come down and play in the shop, for he adored children. When the little boy was crawling about on all fours there was no room to turn round, she in her corner doing some mending, and Bourras by the window carving with his penknife. Each day now brought the same tasks and the same conversation. As he worked he would always come back to the Ladies’ Paradise; he was never tired of explaining the stage his terrible duel with it had reached. He had been in that house since 1845, and he had a thirty years’ lease at a rent of eighteen hundred francs a year; as he made a thousand francs out of his four furnished rooms, he only paid eight hundred for the shop. It was not much, he had no expenses, he could hold out for a long time yet. To listen to him, there was no doubt of his victory; he would certainly devour the monster.
Suddenly he would break off.
‘Have they got any dogs’ heads like this?’
And he would blink behind his glasses the better to judge the mastiff’s head he was carving with its lips drawn back and its fangs showing in a lifelike growl. Pépé, full of admiration for the dog, would raise himself up to look at it, putting his two little arms on the old man’s knees.
‘As long as I can make both ends meet, I don’t care about anything else,’ Bourras would resume, delicately shaping the tongue with the point of his knife. ‘Those sco
undrels have killed my profits; but, if I’m not making anything these days, I’m not losing anything so far, or at least very little. You see, I’d rather die here than give in.’
He would brandish his knife, and his white hair would blow about in a gust of anger.
‘Yes,’ Denise would venture to say gently, without looking up from her mending. ‘But if they made you a reasonable offer, it would be wiser to accept.’
At that his fierce obstinacy would flare up.
‘Never! Even if they held a knife to my throat, I’d still say no, by God! I’ve got ten years’ lease left, they won’t get the shop before then, even if I have to starve between four bare walls … Twice already they’ve been here, trying to get round me. They offered me twelve thousand francs for the business and eighteen thousand for the lease, thirty thousand altogether … I wouldn’t sell, not for fifty thousand! I’ve got them, I want to see them lick the dust in front of me!’
‘Thirty thousand francs, that’s not bad,’ Denise would resume. ‘You could go and set up shop somewhere else … And what if they bought the house?’
Bourras, who was putting the finishing touches to his mastiff’s tongue, would seem absorbed in his task for a moment, a childish smile spread vaguely over his snowy face, like God the Father. Then he would start off again.
‘The house is absolutely safe! They were talking of buying it last year, and offered eighty thousand francs, double what it’s worth today. But the landlord, a retired fruiterer, a scoundrel like them, wanted to blackmail them. And in any case they don’t trust me; they know I’d be even less likely to give in … No! No! Here I am, here I stay! The Emperor with all his cannon wouldn’t be able to get me out!’
Denise never dared say another word. She went on sewing, while between two notches with his knife the old man would continue to mutter broken phrases: this was just the beginning, later on they’d see amazing things happen, he’d got plans which would sweep away their umbrella department; and in his obstinacy was the muttered rebellion of the small individual manufacturer against the invasion of cheap goods sold by the big stores.
Pépé, meanwhile, had finally succeeded in climbing on to Bourras’s lap. He was stretching his hands out impatiently towards the mastiff’s head.
‘Give me, sir.’
‘In a minute, dear,’ the old man would reply in a voice that suddenly became tender. ‘He hasn’t got any eyes, I must make his eyes now.’
And while he was working on one of the eyes, he would continue talking to Denise.
‘Can you hear them? What a roar they make, next door! That’s what exasperates me most of all! Having them on top of you all the time like that, with that damned steam-engine sound.’
It made his little table vibrate, he said. The whole shop was shaken by it; he would spend his afternoons without a single customer, being jarred by the vibration of the crowd packed into the Ladies’ Paradise. He was constantly harping on this subject. They’d had another good day, he would say, there was a din on the other side of the wall, the silk department must have made ten thousand francs; or else he was really pleased because the wall had remained silent, a shower of rain had killed the takings. The slightest sounds, the merest whispers would thus provide him with endless occasions for comment.
‘There! Someone slipped! Oh! If only they’d all fall and break their necks! And that, my dear, is some ladies quarrelling. So much the better! So much the better! Can you hear the parcels going down into the basement, eh? It’s disgusting!’
It was pointless for Denise to argue with him about it, for he would bitterly remind her of the shameful manner in which she had been dismissed. Then she would have to describe for the hundredth time her life in the ladieswear department, the hardships she had endured at the beginning, the small, unhealthy bedrooms, the bad food, the endless battle between the salesmen; and thus, from morning till evening, the two of them would talk of nothing but the shop, drinking it in all the time in the very air they breathed.
‘Give me, sir,’ Pépé was eagerly repeating, still holding out his hands.
The mastiff’s head was finished; Bourras was holding it at a distance and then examining it closely with boisterous pleasure.
‘Look out, he’s going to bite you … There you are, play with it, and try not to break it.’
Then, once more overtaken by his obsession, he would shake his fist at the wall.
‘You can push as hard as you like to make the house fall down … But you won’t have it, even if you take over the whole street!’
Now Denise always had something to eat. She felt extremely grateful to the old shopkeeper, whose kind heart she could sense beneath his violent eccentricities. She had a strong desire, however, to find work elsewhere, for she saw him inventing little jobs, and realized that since his business was collapsing he did not need any staff, and that he employed her out of pure charity. Six months had passed, and the winter slack season had just started again. She was losing hope of finding a job before March when, one evening in January, Deloche, who was watching out for her in a doorway, gave her some advice. Why didn’t she go and apply at Robineau’s, for perhaps they needed staff there?
In September Robineau had made up his mind to buy Vinçard’s business, although he feared that this might endanger his wife’s sixty thousand francs. He had paid forty thousand francs for the silk shop, and he was trying to establish his own business with the other twenty thousand. It wasn’t much, but he had the support of Gaujean, who had undertaken to give him long-term credit. Since his break with the Ladies’ Paradise Gaujean had been longing to create competition for the colossus; he believed that victory would be certain if several specialized shops where customers could find a very varied choice of goods could be created in the neighbourhood. It was only the rich manufacturers in Lyons, like Dumonteil, who could meet the requirements of the big shops; they were content to keep their looms busy for them, while looking to make profits by selling to less important shops. But Gaujean was far from having Dumonteil’s capacity in business. For many years a simple commission-agent, he had only had his own looms for five or six years, and he still had a lot of work done by home-workers, whom he provided with raw materials and paid so much per metre. In fact, it was this system which, by increasing his manufacturing costs, prevented him from competing with Dumonteil for the supply of the Paris-Paradise. He was resentful of this, and saw in Robineau an instrument for a decisive battle against the cheap drapery stores, which he accused of ruining French manufacturers.
When Denise called she found Madame Robineau alone. The daughter of a foreman platelayer in the Department of High-ways, she was totally ignorant about business matters, and still had the charming awkwardness of a girl brought up in a convent in Blois. She was very dark, and very pretty, with a gentle, cheerful manner which gave her great charm. Moreover, she adored her husband, and lived only for this love. Denise was about to leave her name when Robineau came in and engaged her on the spot, as one of his two salesgirls had left him the day before to go to the Ladies’ Paradise.
‘They don’t leave us a single good worker,’ he said. ‘But with you there’s no need to worry; you’re like me, you can’t be very fond of them … Come tomorrow.’
That evening Denise hardly knew how to tell Bourras that she was leaving him, and in fact he did say she was ungrateful and lost his temper; then, when she defended herself with tears in her eyes, giving him to understand that she had not been taken in by his acts of charity, he became quite emotional as well, stammering that he had plenty of work, that she was abandoning him just when he was going to bring out an umbrella of his own invention.
‘What about Pépé?’ he asked.
The child was Denise’s great worry. She did not dare take him back to Madame Gras, and at the same time could not leave him alone in her room, shut up all day.
‘Look, I’ll keep him,’ the old man went on. ‘He’s all right in my shop, the little fellow … We’ll do the cooking together!??
?
Then, as she refused, afraid of being a nuisance to him, he said:
‘Good heavens! You do distrust me … I’m not going to eat him, you know!’
Denise was happier at Robineau’s. He paid her very little, sixty francs a month, and gave her nothing but her meals, no commission on sales, just as in the old-fashioned shops. But she was treated with great kindness, especially by Madame Robineau, who was always smiling behind the counter. He himself, nervous and worried, was sometimes rather abrupt. Within a month Denise was one of the family, as was the other salesgirl, a silent, consumptive little woman. The Robineaus no longer stood on ceremony with the girls, but talked business during meals in the room at the back of the shop, which opened on to a big courtyard. And it was there, one evening, that it was decided to start a campaign against the Ladies’ Paradise.
Gaujean had come to dinner. As soon as the joint, a homely leg of mutton, was served, he had broached the question in the toneless voice, thickened by the Rhône mists, of a man from Lyons.
‘It’s becoming intolerable,’ he repeated. ‘They go to Dumonteil’s, reserve the exclusive rights of a design, and carry off three hundred lengths straight away, while insisting on a rebate of fifty centimes a metre; and, as they pay with ready cash, they also get the eighteen per cent discount… Often Dumonteil doesn’t even make twenty centimes. He works to keep his looms busy, because if they’re not used they die … So how can you expect us, with our more limited equipment and especially with our home-workers, to keep up the struggle?’
Robineau, pensive, was forgetting to eat.
‘Three hundred lengths!’ he murmured. ‘It makes me really nervous when I take twelve, and with ninety days to pay … They can price it at a franc or two francs cheaper than us; I’ve worked out that their list prices are at least fifteen per cent lower compared to ours … That’s what’s killing small businesses.’