The Ladies' Paradise (BBC tie-in) (Oxford World's Classics) (68 page)

‘I want to … I want to …’

‘No, it’s impossible … And what about my brothers? I’ve sworn never to marry. I can’t bring you two children, can I?’

‘They’ll be my brothers too … say yes, Denise!’

‘No, no, leave me, you’re tormenting me!’

Little by little he was losing heart, driven mad by this final obstacle. What! Even at this price she still refused! In the distance he could hear the din of his three thousand employees, shifting his regal fortune about by the armful. And that idiotic million lying there on his desk! He could not bear the irony of it; he would gladly have thrown it into the street.

‘Go, then!’ he exclaimed in a flood of tears. ‘Go and join the man you love … That’s the reason, isn’t it? You warned me; I ought to have known, and not tormented you any further.’

She stood there dazed, astonished at the violence of this despair. Her heart was bursting. Then, with the impetuosity of a child, she threw her arms round his neck, sobbing too, and exclaimed:

‘Oh! Monsieur Mouret, it’s you I love!’

A last murmur, the distant acclamation of the crowd, rose from the Ladies’ Paradise. The portrait of Madame Hédouin was still smiling with its painted lips. Mouret had collapsed on to the desk, and was sitting there in the middle of his million which he no longer even noticed. He was still holding Denise, clasping her tightly to his breast, telling her that she could go away now, that she could spend a month in Valognes, which would end the gossip, and that then he would go and fetch her himself, and bring her back, all powerful, on his arm.

Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin
: the Ladies’ Paradise is situated in the Opéra district of Paris, which was largely rebuilt by Baron Haussmann in the final years of the Second Empire (1852–70). Many of the streets whose names recur in the text (Rue de Choiseul, Rue Gaillon, Rue de la Michodière, Rue Monsigny, Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs, Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin, Rue Sainte-Anne, Rue Saint-Roch) are situated in this area.

Mexico
: French troops fought in Mexico from 1862 to 1865 in support of the Austrian Archduke Maximilian as emperor of that country. In 1867 Maximilian was shot and a republic set up in Mexico. Allusions of this kind enable Zola to situate his novels historically.

Rambouillet
: some 35 miles south-west of Paris, well known for its forest and palace.

shop
: the description of the Baudus and their shop is highly reminiscent of Balzac’s descriptions in
La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote
(1829) and
Grandeur et décadence de César Birotteau
(1837), in which he chronicled the predecessors of the department store, the
magasins de nouveauté.

Seine-et-Oise
: a former
département
encompassing most of greater Paris; in 1964 it was divided into three smaller
départements
(Essonne, Val d’Oise, Yvelines).

Vabre
: an allusion to Auguste Vabre, a character (a silk merchant) in
Pot-Bouille,
the novel Zola wrote immediately before
The Ladies’ Paradise
and which features the young Octave Mouret, who has an affair with Vabre’s wife.

Midi
: the South of France; Mouret comes from Zola’s fictional ‘Plassans’ (i.e. Aix-en-Provence).

business
: Aristide Boucicaut, the founder of the Bon Marché, had encouraged his employees to invest their money in his shop, giving them 6 per cent interest on their investment.

supervision
: although the character of Octave Mouret is based largely on Aristide Boucicaut, the relationship between Mouret and Bourdoncle was suggested by the partnership between Alfred Chauchard and Auguste Hériot, founders of the Grands Magasins du Louvre (1855).

father
: Octave’s father was François Mouret, son of Ursule Macquart and the hatter Mouret, and husband of Marthe Rougon, the daughter of Pierre and Félicité Rougon: see
La Fortune des Rougon
(1871) and
La Conquête de Plassans
(1874).

voices
: the details contained in the preceding pages (the counterfoil book, the system of commissions and percentages, the counting-house, the receiving department) are based (like many others in the novel, but very systematically here) on the notes Zola took on Boucicaut’s innovations at the Bon Marché.

Chablis
: a small town in Burgundy famous for its dry white wine.

Port-aux-Vins
: the Port-aux-Vins, where the boats that transported wines and spirits to Paris docked, was situated on the Quai Saint-Bernard between the Rue des Fossés-Saint-Bernard and the Rue Cuvier.

Auvergne
: a region of south central France.

Constantine
: a town captured by the French on 13 Oct. 1837 during the conquest of Algeria.

crinolines
: a hooped skirt which became fashionable in France after 1855.

Rue de Rivoli and the Rue d’Alger
: a well-to-do area in the first
arrondissement.

Baron Hartmann, director of the Crédit Immobilier
: the historical reference here is to the great modernizer of Paris, Baron Haussmann (1809–91), Napoleon Ill’s Prefect of the Seine (1853–70). In seventeen years he was responsible for a vast transformation of the city. By 1870 one-fifth of the streets in central Paris were his creation, and the acreage of the city had been doubled by annexation. At the height of the reconstruction, one in five Parisian workers was employed in the building trade. In the name of slum clearance, some 350,000 people (on Haussmann’s own estimation) were displaced from the
quartiers
of old Paris to make way for the new boulevards, parks, and ‘pleasure grounds’. Zola’s reference to Haussmann is conflated with the operations of the Société des Immeubles Rivoli, founded by the Péreire brothers (and soon renamed the Compagnie Immobilière), which in 1855 built many of the buildings along the Rue de Rivoli. The ‘Haussmanization’ of Paris, and the speculative frenzy it provoked, are described in Zola’s novel
La Curée
(‘The Kill’, 1872).

Luc
: probably Luc-sur-Mer, in the
département
of Calvados in Normandy.

Lycée Bonaparte
: now the Lycée Condorcet, situated in the Opéra district.

imperial
: a small beard.

Plassans
: Zola’s fictional name for Aix-en-Provence, his own birthplace and the origin of the Rougon-Macquart family (see
La Fortune des Rougon
and
La Conquête de Plassans).

baccalauréat
: the important examination taken at the end of high school.

the four rules
: adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing.

doing wrong
: the character of Vallagnosc represents the disciples of the German pessimist writer Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), whose influence in France was widespread in the 1880s. This type of character is portrayed more fully in Lazare Chanteau, the protagonist of Zola’s novel
La Joie de vivre
(1884), and the aristocratic
fin de siècle
figures of whom Des Esseintes, the protagonist of J.-K. Huysmans’s novel
A rebours
(‘Against Nature’, 1884), is the supreme embodiment.

the new street
: the Rue du Dix-Décembre (later renamed the Rue du 4 Septembre) was in fact declared available for public purposes on 24 Aug. 1864, and officially expropriated in two stages, in Sept. 1867 and Mar. 1868; construction work began at the end of 1868 and it was opened at the end of 1869. Thus there are some slight anachronisms in Zola’s account.

Grand Hotel
: a sumptuous new hotel near the Opéra, the largest and grandest in Paris.

guinguettes
: open-air cafés with dancing.

phalanstery
: a reference to the utopian social theories of Charles Fourier (1772–1837), who wanted a perfect community set apart from the rest of society. He introduced the idea of the self-sufficient, co-operative community (the ‘phalanstery’), free from the constraints and trials of urban industrial civilization. This community was to be based on agriculture and craftsmanship rather than on industrialization, and all members would share equally in the communal life. Rather than have the individual adjust to society, Fourier wished to create a community which responded to individual needs. A number of co-operative communities were formed in Europe and the United States on the principles outlined by Fourier; all were ultimately unsuccessful.

Cotentin
: peninsular region of Normandy.

the Madeleine district
: the Madeleine church, standing at the west end of the
grands boulevards,
is the grandest and smartest of modern Paris churches.

Hôtel Duvillard
: the word ‘Hôtel’ is used here in the sense of private mansion.

the Gard… the Isère
:
départements
in the south of France.

the new Opéra
: Garnier’s grandiose Opera House (the one we know today) was built between 1862 and 1874.

Rue Monsigny
: the Bon Marché, the Louvre, and the Printemps were all substantially extended in stages: the Bon Marché between 1869 and 1872, the Louvre in 1869, the Printemps in 1880.

the Halles
: the great central food market of Paris, designed by the architect Victor Baltard (1805–74) and built in iron between 1851 and 1857. The Halles form the focus of Zola’s
Le Ventre de Paris
(‘The Belly of Paris’, 1873). They were demolished in 1971.

Bois de Vincennes
: wooded area to the east of Paris.

metal naves
: Frantz Jourdain, Zola’s friend and the future designer of La Samaritaine, who had provided Zola with an imaginary layout for his fictional store, shared the general enthusiasm for iron and glass in the second half of the nineteenth century. The triumph of these new architectural materials permitted new forms that met the need of large-scale commerce for more space, light, and ventilation. The man Boucicaut chose as his engineer in the expansion of his shop was Gustave Eiffel (1832–1923), renowned as the builder of the Eiffel Tower—the world’s most famous symbol of the nineteenth century’s enthusiasm for industrial and technological progress.

exhibitions
: Boucicaut opened a picture and sculpture gallery at the Bon Marché in March 1875.

Blots, Libourne, and Tarbes
: provincial towns.

the Batignolles
…
: a district in the north-west of Paris.

the big shops
: while the expansion of commerce was greeted by many as a mark of progress benefiting the consumer and contributing to the economic health of the nation, it was also perceived to possess a darker side in its encouragement of pleasure-seeking and narcissistic self-gratification, a temptation to which women were particularly prone. The emergence of kleptomania, a disease that was seen as both feminine and modern, was a particularly striking instance of the sexual disorder that was seen to lie at the very heart of consumer culture. See Elaine S. Abelson,
When
Ladies Go A-thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

Le Roi Dagobert
: a very popular comic song; King Dagobert was the last Frankish king of the Merovingian dynasty, and ruled all France from
AD
628 to 638.

Poitou
: a region in the south-west of France.

the Gros-Caillou
: an area near the École Militaire and the Invalides on the right bank of the Seine.

Bullier
: a very well-known dance-hall in the Latin Quarter, at the end of the Boulevard Saint-Michel.

King of Prussia
: Wilhelm I (1798–1888) visited Paris for the World Fair (l’Exposition Universelle) of 1867.

twelve times
: annual turnover at the Bon Marché in 1869 was 22 million; in 1877 (the year of Boucicaut’s death) it was 67 million; it reached 100 million (with figures of over one million for the busiest sales days) in 1881–2.

trowel
: Marguerite Boucicaut laid the first stone of the new sections of the Bon Marché on 9 Sept. 1869. Work on the extension continued until 1872; on completion it occupied a whole city block.

firemen
: the documentation Zola collected in the spring of 1882 included statistical details of the Bon Marché and the Louvre: the former, for example, had 11 directors, 36 department heads, and 2,500 employees, including 152 salesgirls and 30 shopwalkers.