Now that she was in favour, one of Denise’s joys was to be able to help Pauline. The latter was pregnant, and was very anxious, because two salesgirls in a fortnight had been forced to leave in the seventh month of their pregnancy. The management did not tolerate accidents of that kind; maternity was not allowed since it was considered cumbersome and indecent—marriage was occasionally allowed, but children were forbidden. Pauline’s husband worked in the shop, of course; but she was very nervous all the same, for it did not make it any easier for her to appear in the department; and in order to delay her probable dismissal, she laced herself in till she could hardly breathe, determined to hide her condition as long as she could. One of the two salesgirls who had been dismissed had just had a stillborn child from having tortured her waist in this way; and there was little hope that she herself would recover. Meanwhile Bourdoncle was observing Pauline’s complexion turning leaden, and thought he could see a painful stiffness in her gait. One morning he was standing near her in the trousseau department when a porter who was taking away a parcel bumped into her so hard that she gave a cry and put both hands on her stomach. He immediately led her away and made her confess, and then recommended to the board that she be dismissed, under the pretext that she needed some country air; the story of the blow she had received would get around, and if she had a miscarriage the effect on the public would be disastrous, as had occurred the year before with a girl from the babywear department. Mouret, who was not present at the board meeting, could only give his opinion in the evening. But Denise had had time to intervene, and he told Bourdoncle to keep quiet in the shop’s own interest. Did they want to stir up the mothers against them, and offend all the young customers who had recently had babies? It was pompously decided that any married salesgirl who became pregnant would be entrusted to a special midwife as soon as her presence in the department became an offence to morality.
The next day, when Denise went up to the sick-room to see Pauline, who had had to go to bed as a result of the blow she had received, the latter kissed her violently on both cheeks.
‘You’re so kind! If it hadn’t been for you they’d have thrown me out… Don’t worry about me, the doctor says everything will be all right.’
Baugé, who had slipped away from his department, was also there, on the other side of the bed. He too stammered out his thanks, embarrassed in the presence of Denise, whom he now treated as someone who had made good and was in a superior class. Ah! If he heard any more nasty remarks about her he’d make sure that the jealous ones had their mouths shut for them! But Pauline sent him away with a friendly shrug of her shoulders.
‘My poor darling, you’re just talking nonsense … Off with you, leave us to have a chat.’
The sick-room was long and light, with twelve beds with white curtains. The assistants who lived in the shop were nursed there if they did not wish to go back to their families. But that day Pauline was the only person there, in a bed near one of the big windows which overlooked the Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin. And they immediately began to exchange confidences, and fond, whispered phrases, in the midst of all that innocent linen, in the sleepy air perfumed with a vague smell of lavender.
‘So he does everything you want? How cruel you are to make him so unhappy! Come on, explain, since I’ve dared to broach the subject. Can’t you bear him?’
Pauline had kept Denise’s hand in hers, for she was sitting by the bed, with her elbows on the bolster; and overcome with emotion at this blunt and unexpected question, she had a momentary weakness. She let out her secret, hiding her face in the pillow as she murmured:
‘I love him!’
Pauline was dumbfounded.
‘What! You love him? Then it’s very simple: say yes.’
Denise, her face still hidden, shook her head vigorously. And she was refusing to say yes precisely because she loved him, although she did not say so. No doubt it was ridiculous, but that was how she felt, she couldn’t change her nature. Her friend’s surprise was increasing and she finally asked:
‘So it’s all to make him marry you?’
At that Denise sat up again. She was stunned.
‘Marry me! Oh, no! Oh, I never wanted anything of the kind! No, the idea never entered my head, and you know how I hate any form of lying!’
‘Well, my dear,’ Pauline went on gently, ‘if you had thought of making him marry you, you couldn’t have gone about it better … It’ll have to finish somehow, and there’s nothing else except marriage, since you won’t accept any other arrangement … I must tell you that everyone thinks the same thing: yes, they’re all convinced that you’re treating him like this so as to get him to the altar … You are a funny girl!’
She had to console Denise, who had let her head fall on the bolster again and was sobbing, declaring that she’d leave the shop in the end, since they were always attributing ideas to her which had never even crossed her mind. There was no doubt that when a man loved a woman he ought to marry her. But she did not want anything, she had no schemes, all she wanted was to be allowed to live in peace, with her sorrows and her joys, like everyone else. She would leave.
At that moment, downstairs, Mouret was walking through the shop. He had wanted to forget his thoughts by visiting the building work once again. Months had passed, and the monumental new façade now rose up behind the vast wooden hoardings which hid it from the public. A whole army of decorators was at work: marble-masons and specialists in ceramics and mosaics; the central group of figures above the door was being gilded, while on the acroterium* the pedestals which were to hold statues depicting the manufacturing towns of France were already being fixed in position. From morning till night, all along the newly opened Rue du Dix-Décembre, an inquisitive crowd stood looking up, seeing nothing, but imagining and talking to each other about this wondrous façade which was going to revolutionize Paris when it was opened. And it was precisely on that building site, with its feverish activity, among the artists who were putting the finishing touches to his dream which had been started by the builders, that Mouret had just felt more bitterly than ever the vanity of his fortune. The thought of Denise had suddenly troubled him, that thought which would shoot through him without respite like a flame, like the pain of an incurable disease. He had fled, unable to utter a word of satisfaction, afraid of showing his tears, turning his back on his triumph, which merely wearied him. The façade, built at last, seemed small to him, like a child’s sand-castle, and even if it had extended from one end of the city to the other, or been as high as the stars, it would not have filled the emptiness of his heart, which only the ‘yes’ of a mere child could fill.
When Mouret returned to his office he was choking with tears. What did she want? He no longer dared to offer her money; the confused idea of marriage was beginning to dawn on him, although, as a young widower, he rebelled against it. His powerlessness made him weep with frustration. He was unhappy.
CHAPTER 13
ONE morning in November Denise was giving her first orders in the department when the Baudus’ maidservant came to tell her that Mademoiselle Geneviève had had a very bad night, and that she wanted to see her cousin immediately. For some time the young girl had been getting weaker and weaker, and she had been obliged to take to her bed two days earlier.
‘Tell her I’ll come straight away,’ Denise replied, very worried. It was the sudden disappearance of Colomban which was killing Geneviève. At first, because Clara had teased him, he had not returned home for several nights; then, yielding to the mad desire which can take possession of shifty, chaste young men, he had become her obedient slave, and one Monday had not returned, but had simply left a farewell letter for his employer, written in the studied terms of a man about to commit suicide. Perhaps one could also have read into this sudden passion the shrewd calculation of a young man delighted to escape from a disastrous marriage; the drapery shop was just as sick as his future wife and it was the right moment to break it all off by doing something foolish. Everyone cit
ed him as a fatal victim of love.
When Denise arrived at the Vieil Elbeuf, Madame Baudu was there alone. She sat motionless behind the cash-desk, watching over the silent, empty shop, her little white face pallid with anaemia. There was no shop assistant now, so the maidservant would give the shelves an occasional whisk with a feather duster, and they were even thinking of replacing her with a charwoman. A dismal chill fell from the ceiling; hours passed without a customer coming to disturb the gloom, and the goods, which were no longer touched, were getting slowly covered with the saltpetre from the walls.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Denise anxiously. ‘Is it serious?’
Madame Baudu did not reply at first. She began to cry. Then she stammered:
‘I don’t know, they don’t tell me anything … Oh! It’s all over, it’s all over …’
Her eyes were full of tears. She gazed round the dark shop as if she felt her daughter and the shop departing together. The seventy thousand francs produced by the sale of the estate at Rambouillet had melted away in less than two years in the abyss of competition. In order to compete with the Paradise, which now stocked material for men’s clothes, hunting velvets, and liveries, the draper had made considerable sacrifices. He had just been finally crushed by his rival’s duffels and flannels, the most remarkable range ever to appear on the market. Little by little the debt had grown and, as a last resort, he had decided to mortgage the old building in the Rue de la Michodière, where old Finet, their ancestor, had founded the business. Now it was only a matter of days before everything finally crumbled; the very ceilings looked ready to collapse and be blown away as dust, like some barbarous, worm-eaten construction being carried away by the wind.
‘Your uncle’s upstairs,’ Madame Baudu went on in her broken voice. ‘We each spend two hours with her; someone has to keep an eye on the shop. Just as a precaution, because to be honest…’
Her gesture completed the sentence. They would have put up the shutters if it had not been for their ancient business pride, which made them still put a brave face on it for the neighbourhood.
‘I’ll go up then, Auntie,’ said Denise, whose heart was aching at the resigned despair which even the lengths of cloth were exuding.
‘Yes, go up, go up quickly, my dear … She’s waiting for you, she was asking for you all night. There’s something she wants to tell you.’
But just at that moment Baudu came downstairs. His bilious condition gave a greenish tinge to his sallow face, and his eyes were bloodshot. Still walking very softly, as he had done on leaving the sick-room, he murmured, as if he could have been heard upstairs:
‘She’s sleeping.’
And, his legs aching with tiredness, he sat down on a chair. With a mechanical gesture he wiped his brow, puffing like a man who has just finished some arduous task. Silence reigned. Finally he said to Denise:
‘You can see her later … When she’s asleep she looks as if she’s recovered.’
Again there was a silence. The mother and father sat face to face, gazing at each other. Then, in undertones, he went over his troubles once more, without naming anyone or speaking to anyone in particular.
‘I swear I wouldn’t have believed it! He was the last person to do such a thing; I brought him up like my own son. If someone had come and said to me: “They’ll take him away from you as well, you’ll see him go over to the other side,” I would have replied: “Well that would mean there’s no longer any God!” And he’s done it, he’s gone over to the other side. Oh! The wretch, he knew so much about real business, he had the same ideas as me! And all for a dreadful woman like that, for one of those mannequins who flaunt themselves in the windows of houses of ill repute! No, really, it’s beyond all reason!’
He shook his head, gazing blankly at the damp tiles which had been worn away by generations of customers.
‘You know,’ he went on in a lower voice, ‘sometimes I feel that I’m the most to blame in our misfortune. Yes, it’s my fault that our poor girl is lying up there, wasting away with fever. Shouldn’t I have married them at once, without giving in to my stupid pride, my stubborn determination not to leave them the shop in a less prosperous state than when I started? She would have had the man she loves, and perhaps their youth would have been able to bring about the miracle I couldn’t achieve … But I’m an old fool, I didn’t understand anything; I didn’t think people could fall ill over things like that… The boy was really extraordinary: a born salesman, and such integrity, such simple manners, such order in everything he did—in short, he was my pupil…’
He raised his head, still defending his own ideas in the assistant who had betrayed him. Denise could not bear to hear him accusing himself and was so carried away by emotion at the sight of this man who in the past had reigned there as absolute master, now so humble, with his eyes full of tears, that she told him everything.
‘Please don’t make excuses for him, Uncle, I beg you … He never loved Geneviève; he’d have run away earlier if you had tried to hasten the marriage. I talked to him about it myself; he knew perfectly well what my poor cousin was suffering on his account, and you can see that that didn’t stop him from leaving … Ask Auntie.’
Without opening her lips, Madame Baudu confirmed these words with a nod. The draper became even paler, his tears now blinding him completely.
‘It must be in the blood,’ he stammered. ‘His father died last summer from too much womanizing.’
He looked round the dark shop again, his eyes wandering from the bare counters to the full shelves, then returning to settle on his wife, still sitting at the cash-desk, waiting in vain for the vanished customers.
‘It’s all over,’ he went on. ‘They’ve killed our business, and now one of their girls is killing our daughter.’
They fell silent. In the stagnant air, stifling under the low ceiling, the rumbling of carriages, which from time to time made the tiles vibrate, sounded like a roll of funeral drums. Then, in the dismal sadness of the old shop in its death throes, muffled knocks could be heard coming from somewhere in the house. It was Geneviève, who had just woken up, and was banging with a stick which had been left near her bed.
‘Quick, let’s go up,’ said Baudu, rising with a start. ‘Try to laugh, she mustn’t know.’
On the staircase he rubbed his eyes hard to remove the traces of his tears. As soon as he opened the door on the first floor, a feeble, distraught voice could be heard calling:
‘I don’t want to be alone … Don’t leave me alone … Oh! I’m afraid to be left alone …’
Then, when she saw Denise, Geneviève became calmer, and gave a smile of joy.
‘Ah! You’ve come! I’ve been longing to see you since yesterday! I was beginning to think you’d abandoned me as well!’
It was pitiful. The girl’s room overlooked the yard, and only a livid glimmer of light penetrated it. At first her parents had put her bed in their own room, at the front of the house; but the sight of the Ladies’ Paradise opposite had upset her so much that they had had to take her back to her own room again. There she lay, so slight that one could no longer sense the form and existence of a body under the blankets. Her thin arms, wasted with the burning fever of consumptives, moved restlessly over the covers, as if in search of something; while her black hair, heavy with passion, seemed to have become even thicker, to have taken on a voracious life of its own, and to be eating away her pathetic face—a face in which the ultimate degeneration of a long line grown in the dark, in that cellar of old commercial Paris, was dying out.
Denise, her heart bursting with pity, stood looking at her. She did not at first speak, for fear of not being able to control her tears. In the end she murmured:
‘I came at once … Is there anything I can do for you? You were asking for me … Would you like me to stay?’
Geneviève, short of breath, her hands still wandering over the folds of the blanket, did not take her eyes off her.
‘No, thank you, I don’t need anyth
ing … I only wanted to embrace you.’
Her eyes filled with tears. At this Denise quickly bent down and kissed her on the cheeks, shuddering as she felt the fire of those hollow cheeks against her lips. But the sick girl had seized her, and was clasping her and holding on to her in a desperate embrace. Then she glanced at her father.
‘Would you like me to stay?’ Denise repeated. ‘Is there nothing I can do for you?’
‘No, no.’
Geneviève was still staring in the direction of her father, who was standing with a dazed look and a lump in his throat. Finally he understood, and withdrew without saying a word; they listened to his heavy footsteps as he went downstairs.
‘Tell me, is he still with that woman?’ the sick girl asked immediately, seizing her cousin’s hand, and making her sit on the edge of the bed. ‘Yes, I wanted to see you. You’re the only person who can tell me … They’re living together, aren’t they?
Denise, taken by surprise by these questions, had to admit the truth and blurted out the rumours which were circulating in the shop. Clara, who had grown tired of this lad who had now become a nuisance to her, had closed her door to him; and Colomban, in despair and with the humility of a beaten dog, was following her about everywhere, trying to obtain an occasional meeting with her. It was said that he was going to get a job at the Louvre.
‘If you love him so much, he may still come back to you,’ Denise continued, trying to lull the dying girl with this last hope. ‘Get better quickly; he’ll admit his mistake and marry you.’