The Ladies' Paradise (BBC tie-in) (Oxford World's Classics) (11 page)

Mouret asked his usual question.

‘How many letters this morning, Levasseur?’

‘Five hundred and thirty-four, sir,’ replied the chief clerk. ‘After Monday’s sale announcement, I was afraid we wouldn’t have enough staff. It was very difficult to manage yesterday.’

Bourdoncle expressed his satisfaction with a nod of the head. He had not expected five hundred and thirty-four letters on Tuesday. Round the table the clerks continued slitting the letters open and reading, with a continuous sound of rustling paper, while in front of the pigeon-holes the coming and going of goods was beginning. This was one of the most complicated and important departments in the shop: its members worked constantly at fever-pitch, for, according to regulations, all the orders received in the morning had to be sent off by the evening. ‘You’ll be given the staff you need, Levasseur,’ Mouret answered finally; he had seen at a glance what a good state the department was in. ‘As you know, when there’s work to be done we never refuse the staff.’

Upstairs, under the roof, were the little attic rooms where the salesgirls slept. But he went downstairs again and entered the central counting-house, which was near his office. It was a room shut off by a glass partition with a brass pay-desk in it, and it contained an enormous safe fixed in the wall. Here two cashiers
sorted out the takings which Lhomme, the chief sales cashier, brought up to them every evening; they then settled current expenses and paid the manufacturers, the staff, and the crowd of people who lived off the shop in one way or another. The counting-house communicated with another room, lined with green files, where ten clerks checked the invoices. Then came yet another office, the clearing-house: there six young men, bent over black desks, with piles of registers behind them, drew up accounts of the salesmen’s commissions by collating the sales bills. This section, which was quite new, was not running well.

Mouret and Bourdoncle had passed through the counting-house and the checking office. When they went into the other office the young men, who were laughing and joking, had a sudden shock. Mouret, without reprimanding them, explained the system of the small bonus he had thought of paying them for every error they discovered in the sales bills; and when he had left the clerks, no longer laughing, and with a cowed air, set to work with a vengeance, hunting for mistakes.

On the ground floor, in the shop, Mouret went straight to cash-desk No. 10, where Albert Lhomme was polishing his nails while waiting for customers. People often spoke of ‘the Lhomme dynasty’, since Madame Aurélie, the buyer in the ladieswear department, after helping her husband to become chief cashier, had managed to get a retail cash-desk for her son, a tall lad, pale and dissolute, who could never stay anywhere, and who caused her a great deal of anxiety. But when confronted with the young man, Mouret stood aside, not wishing to make himself unpopular by acting like a policeman; from both policy and taste he kept to his role of benevolent god. He nudged Bourdoncle gently with his elbow—Bourdoncle, that model of rectitude, whom he usually charged with the task of reprimanding negligent staff.

‘Monsieur Albert,’ said the latter sternly, ‘you’ve taken another address down wrongly; the parcel came back … It’s intolerable!’

The cashier felt obliged to defend himself, and called as a witness the porter who had tied up the parcel. This porter, Joseph by name, also belonged to the Lhomme dynasty, for he was Albert’s foster-brother and owed his job to Madame
Aurélie’s influence. As the young man wanted him to say it was the customer’s mistake, he stuttered, twisting the little goatee beard which made his scarred face seem longer, torn between his conscience as an old soldier and his gratitude towards his protectors.

‘Leave Joseph alone,’ Bourdoncle exclaimed at last. ‘Don’t say any more … You’re lucky that we appreciate your mother’s good work!’

But at that moment Lhomme came running over. From his own cash-desk near the door he could see his son’s, which was in the glove department. Already white-haired, overweight from his sedentary life, he had a flabby, nondescript face, as if worn away by the reflection of the money he was continually counting. The fact that he had had an arm amputated did not hinder him at all in his task, and people even came out of curiosity to see him checking the takings, so swiftly did the notes and coins slip through his left hand, the only one he had. The son of a tax-collector in Chablis,
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he had come to Paris as bookkeeper to a wine-merchant in the Port-aux-Vins.
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Then he had married the daughter of a small Alsatian tailor, the caretaker of the house where he was living in the Rue Cuvier; and from that day on he had been under the thumb of his wife, whose commercial abilities filled him with respect. She earned more than twelve thousand francs in the clothing department, whereas he had a fixed salary of only five thousand francs. And his respect for a wife who could bring such sums into the home extended to his son as well, for he also belonged to her.

‘What’s the matter?’ he murmured. ‘Has Albert made a mistake?’

At that, Mouret reappeared on the scene to play the part of the good prince, as was his custom. When Bourdoncle had made himself feared, Mouret would ensure his own popularity.

‘A silly mistake,’ he murmured. ‘My dear Lhomme, your son is a scatter-brain who really should take his example from you.’

Then, changing the subject and making himself seem even more amiable, he said:

‘What about the concert the other day? … Did you have a good seat?’

A blush spread over the old cashier’s pale cheeks. Music was his only vice, a secret vice he indulged in alone, constantly doing
the rounds of the theatres, concerts, auditions; in spite of his amputated arm he played the horn, thanks to an ingenious system of clamps; and as Madame Lhomme hated noise, in the evening he would wrap his instrument up in a cloth, and was nevertheless delighted to the point of ecstasy by the strangely muffled sounds he extracted from it. In the endless chaos of their domestic life he had made an oasis of music for himself. That and the money in the cash-desk was all that concerned him, apart from his admiration for his wife.

‘A very good seat,’ he answered, his eyes shining. ‘It was really too kind of you, sir.’

Mouret, who took a personal delight in satisfying other people’s passions, sometimes gave Lhomme the tickets forced on him by ladies who were patrons of the arts. And he completed the old man’s delight by saying:

‘Ah! Beethoven, ah! Mozart… What music!’

Without waiting for a reply he moved on and caught up with Bourdoncle, who was already on his tour of inspection through the departments. In the central hall, an inner courtyard covered with a glass roof, were the silks. First they went along the gallery on the Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin side, which was filled from one end to the other with household linen. Nothing unusual struck them as they passed slowly through the crowd of respectful assistants. Then they turned into the printed cotton goods and hosiery, where the same order reigned. But in the woollen department, in the gallery which ran at right angles through to the Rue de la Michodière, Bourdoncle resumed his role of chief executioner on glimpsing a young man sitting on a counter and looking worn out after a sleepless night; the young man, Liénard by name, the son of a rich draper in Angers, hung his head as he received the reprimand, fearing nothing in his idle, carefree life of pleasure except being recalled to the provinces by his father. Admonishments now began to fall like hail, the gallery in the Rue de la Michodière bearing the brunt of the storm; in the drapery department one of those salesmen who received board and lodging but no salary, who were starting their careers and slept in their departments, had come in after eleven o’clock; in the haberdashery department the assistant buyer had just been caught in the basement finishing a cigarette. But the storm broke with especial violence in the glove department, over the head of
one of the few Parisians in the shop, a young man known as Handsome Mignot, the illegitimate son of a lady who taught the harp: his crime was that he had made a scene in the canteen by complaining about the food. As there were three meal services, one at half-past nine, one at half-past ten, and one at half-past eleven, and he went to the third service, he tried to explain that he always had the left-overs, the worst of everything.

‘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,
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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,
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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.