The Ladies' Paradise (BBC tie-in) (Oxford World's Classics) (61 page)

Deeply moved by the terrible sadness of the old place, she no longer dared to say anything, and was herself unable to drag her eyes away from the mildewed stones that were falling. Upstairs, in a corner of the ceiling of her old room, she could still see the name ‘Ernestine’ written in shaky black letters with the flame of a candle; and the memory of her days of poverty came back to her, and filled her with pity for all suffering. The workmen, in order to knock down a section of wall all at once, had had the idea of attacking it at its base. It was tottering.

‘I wish it would crush them all!’ Bourras muttered savagely.

There was a terrible cracking noise. The terrified workmen ran out into the street. The wall was shaking and carrying the whole house with it as it crashed down. The hovel, with all its subsidences and cracks, could no longer stand the strain; one push had sufficed to split it from top to bottom. There was a pitiful landslide, the flattening of a mud hut sodden with rain. Not a board remained standing, and there was nothing left on the ground but a pile of rubbish, the refuse of the past heaped up by the roadside.

‘My God!’ the old man cried, as if the blow had reverberated in the very depths of his being.

He stood there gaping; he would never have thought it would be over so quickly. He gazed at the open gash, the open space which had at last been created on the flank of the Ladies’ Paradise, which was now rid of the wart which had been disfiguring it. It was like the squashing of a gnat, the ultimate triumph over the bitter obstinacy of the infinitely small; the whole block had been overrun and conquered. Passers-by who had gathered on the pavement were talking in loud voices with the workmen, who were complaining angrily about these old buildings, which were quite liable to kill people.

‘Monsieur Bourras,’ repeated Denise, trying to draw him aside, ‘you know you won’t be abandoned. All your needs will be provided for …’

He drew himself up.

‘I don’t have any needs … They sent you, didn’t they? Well, tell them that old Bourras still knows how to work, and that he can find work wherever he wants … Really, it would be too much to expect them to give charity to the people they murder!’

At that she implored him:

‘Please accept, don’t make me so unhappy.’

But he shook his white mane.

‘No, no, it’s all over. Goodbye. You’re young; go and live happily, and don’t stop old people from having their own ideas.’

He cast a last glance at the pile of rubbish, then hobbled away. She watched him disappear, jostled by the crowd on the pavement. He turned the corner of the Place Gaillon, and that was all.

For a moment Denise remained motionless, lost in thought. Then she went into her uncle’s house. The draper was alone in the dark Vieil Elbeuf. The charwoman came only in the mornings and evenings to do a little cooking, and to help him take down and put up the shutters. He spent hours deep in solitude, often without anyone coming to disturb him for the whole day, and when a customer did venture in he became confused and unable to find the goods. He walked up and down continuously in the silence and half-light, still with his heavy funereal gait, giving way to a morbid need, to real paroxysms of forced marching, as if he wanted to lull and deaden his pain.

‘Are you feeling better, Uncle?’ asked Denise.

He only stopped for a second, and then started again, walking from the cash-desk to a dark corner.

‘Yes, yes, very well… Thank you.’

She tried to think of something comforting to say, some cheerful remark, but found it impossible to do so.

‘Did you hear the noise? The house has come down.’

‘So it has!’ he murmured with an astonished look. ‘That must have been the house … I felt the ground tremble. I shut my door this morning when I saw them on the roof.’

He made a vague gesture, as if to say that such things no longer interested him. Each time he came back to the cash-desk, he looked at the empty bench, the bench covered with worn velvet on which his wife and daughter had grown up. Then,
when his perpetual tramping brought him to the other end of the shop, he would look at the shelves drowned in shadow, in which a few pieces of cloth were being destroyed by mildew. It was a widowed shop: those whom he loved were gone, his business had come to a shameful end, he was left alone, carrying his dead heart and his broken pride about with him through these catastrophes. He looked up at the black ceiling, listening to the silence coming from the darkness in the little dining-room, the family nook he had loved so much, even down to its stale smell. Not a breath was left in the ancient dwelling, and his regular, heavy footsteps made the old walls echo, as if he was walking on the tomb of everything he had loved.

Finally Denise broached the subject which had brought her there.

‘Uncle, you can’t stay here like this. You must make up your mind.’

Without stopping, he replied:

‘Of course, but what can I do? I’ve tried to sell, but no one came. My God! One day I’ll just close the shop and go away.’

She knew that there was no longer any danger that he would be declared bankrupt. In the face of such relentless misfortune, his creditors had preferred to come to an agreement. Her uncle would simply find himself in the street, with everything paid.

‘But what will you do, then?’ she murmured, trying to find a way of coming to the offer she still could not bring herself to make.

‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘I’ll manage somehow.’

He had changed his route, and was now walking from the dining-room to the shop-windows; each time he reached them, he gazed dejectedly at the pitiful windows and their forgotten display. He did not even look up at the triumphant façade of the Ladies’ Paradise, its architectural lines stretching into the distance to right and left at both ends of the street. He was exhausted; he no longer had the strength to lose his temper.

‘Listen, Uncle,’ Denise said finally in embarrassment. ‘Perhaps there might be a job for you …’

She began again, blurting out:

‘Yes, I’ve been asked to offer you a job as a shopwalker.’

‘Well, where?’ asked Baudu.

‘There! Opposite … At our place … Six thousand francs, it isn’t very tiring work.’

Suddenly he came to a standstill, facing her. But, instead of flying into a rage as she had feared, he became very pale, overcome with emotion, with a feeling of resignation.

‘Opposite, opposite,’ he muttered several times. ‘You want me to go and work opposite?’

Denise herself was overcome by the same emotion. She thought of the long struggle between the two shops, recalled the funeral processions of Geneviève and Madame Baudu, and saw before her the Vieil Elbeuf overthrown, utterly destroyed by the Ladies’ Paradise. And the idea of her uncle going to work opposite, and walking about there in a white tie, made her feel sick with pity and resentment.

‘But Denise, my dear, how could I?’ he said simply, wringing his pathetic, trembling hands.

‘No, no, Uncle!’ she exclaimed, with an upsurge of her whole upright, generous being. ‘It would be wrong … Forgive me, I beg of you.’

He had started walking up and down again; once more his tread was shaking the sepulchral emptiness of the house. And when she left him, he was still walking, walking with the obstinate restlessness of deep despair, which goes round and round in circles without ever being able to escape.

Denise had another sleepless night. She had now plumbed the depths of her impotence. She could do nothing to relieve the distress even of her own family. She had to witness to the bitter end the inexorable workings of life, which requires the seed of death for its continual renewal. She no longer fought against it; she accepted this law of the struggle; but her woman’s heart was filled with compassion, moved to tears and brotherly love for the whole of suffering humanity. For years she had been caught in the wheels of the machine. Had she not shed her own blood in it? Had she not been bruised, driven out, heaped with insults? Even now she was frightened at feeling herself singled out by the logic of events. Why should it be her, a frail little girl? Why should her small hand suddenly become such a powerful part of the monster’s
work? And the force which was carrying everything before it was carrying her away too, she whose coming was to be a revenge. Mouret had invented this mechanism for crushing people, and its brutal operation shocked her. He had strewn the neighbourhood with ruins, he had despoiled some and killed others; yet she loved him for the grandeur of his achievement, and each time he committed some fresh excess of power, despite the flood of tears which overwhelmed her at the thought of the misery of the vanquished, she loved him even more.

T
HE
Rue du Dix-Décembre, brand new with its chalk-white houses and the last scaffoldings of a few buildings which were behind schedule, stretched out beneath a clear February sky; a stream of carriages was passing triumphantly along the middle of the new opening, full of light, which was cutting through the dank shade of the ancient Saint-Roch district; and between the Rue de la Michodière and the Rue de Choiseul there was almost a riot, the crush of a crowd of people excited by a month of advertising, and looking up open-mouthed at the monumental façade of the Ladies’ Paradise. It was going to be opened that Monday, on the occasion of a great white sale.

There was a vast expanse of polychrome architecture, bright and new, and heightened with gold, which heralded the din and glare of the business inside, attracting the eye like a gigantic display blazing with the most brilliant colours. On the ground floor, so as not to kill the effect of the materials in the shop-windows, the decorations were sombre: the base of the building was of sea-green marble—the corner piles and supporting columns were inlaid with black marble, their severity lightened by gilded tablets; and everything else was of plate glass in a framework of metal—nothing but glass, which seemed to open up the depths of the galleries and halls to the daylight of the street. But, as the storeys rose up, the tones became brighter and brighter. Mosaics stretched out in the frieze on the ground floor—a garland of red and blue flowers alternating with slabs of marble on which the names of various wares were carved—encircling the colossus, disappearing into infinity. Next, the base of the first floor, made of glazed bricks, was in its turn supporting the glass of the broad bay windows as far up as the frieze, which consisted of gilded shields bearing the coats of arms of French towns, and designs in terracotta, the glazing of which repeated the clear tones of the base. Finally, at the very top, the entablature burst out as if it was a flamboyant blossoming of the whole shop-front, the mosaics and ceramics reappeared in warmer colouring, the zinc of the gutters was cut in a pattern and gilded,
statues representing the great industrial and manufacturing cities were lined up on the acroterium, their delicate silhouettes standing out against the sky. The sightseers were especially impressed by the central door, which was as high as a triumphal arch, also decorated with an abundance of mosaics and ceramics, and surmounted by an allegorical group—Woman being dressed and embraced by a laughing flight of little Cupids—the fresh gilding of which glittered in the sun.

At about two o’clock the police were obliged to move the crowd on and to supervise the parking of carriages. The palace was built; the temple to Fashion’s madness for spending had been set up. It dominated a whole neighbourhood and cast its shadow over it. Already the wound left on its flank by the demolition of Bourras’s hovel had healed so completely that it would have been impossible to find the place where that ancient wart had been; in superb isolation the four shop-fronts now ran the length of the four streets. On the opposite pavement the Vieil Elbeuf, which had been closed since Baudu’s admittance into a home for the elderly, was walled up like a tomb behind the shutters which were no longer taken down; the wheels of passing cabs splashed them with mud, while in the rising tide of publicity they were being drowned under posters which glued them together and seemed to be the final act in the burial of the old way of business. In the middle of the dead shop-window soiled by the street, motley with the rags and tatters of the life of the city, a huge yellow poster was displayed like a flag planted on a conquered empire. It was still wet, and in letters two feet high it announced the great sale at the Ladies’ Paradise. It was as if, after its successive extensions, the colossus had been seized with shame and repugnance for the murky neighbourhood in which it had first sprung up and which it had later massacred, and had just turned its back on it, leaving the mud of the narrow streets behind it, presenting its upstart face to the sunny thoroughfare of the new Paris. Now, as it was represented in the picture on the advertisements, it had grown bigger and bigger, like the ogre in the fairy-tale whose shoulders threatened to break through the clouds. First, in the foreground of this picture, the Rue du Dix-Décembre, the Rue de la Michodière, and the Rue Monsigny were full of little black figures and stretched out inordinately, as
if to open up the way for customers from all over the world. Then there was a bird’s-eye view of the buildings themselves, of vastly exaggerated proportions, with their roofs indicating the position of the covered galleries and their courtyards with glass roofs through which the halls could be seen, an endless lake of glass and zinc shining in the sunshine. Beyond, Paris stretched out, but a Paris which was dwarfed and eaten up by the monster: the houses surrounding it had the humility of thatched cottages, and were scattered beyond it in a dust of blurred chimneys. The monuments seemed to be melting away: two marks on the left-hand side indicated Notre-Dame, there was a circumflex accent on the right for the Invalides, and in the background was the Panthéon lost and shamefaced, no bigger than a pea. The skyline, crumbling into dust, had become nothing but a pathetic frame for the picture, and its distant blurred outlines indicated that it, too, as far away as the heights of Châtillon and the open country, was now enslaved.