The Ladies' Paradise (BBC tie-in) (Oxford World's Classics) (31 page)

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.’

F
OR
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: but 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.

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.