Emile Zola - THE LADIES' PARADISE

Mouret shrugged his shoulders. “If Gaujean doesn’t look sharp,” replied he, “Gaujean will be floored. What do they complain of? We pay ready money and we take all they can make; it’s strange if they can’t work cheaper at that rate. Besides, the public gets the benefit, and that’s everything.”

The shopman was emptying the second case, whilst Bouthemont was checking the pieces by the invoice. Another shopman, at the end of the counter, was marking them in plain figures, and the checking finished, the invoice, signed by the manager, had to be sent to the chief cashier’s office. Mouret continued looking at this work for a moment, at all this activity round this unpacking of goods which threatened to drown the basement; then, without adding a word, with the air of a captain satisfied with his troops, he went away, followed by Bourdoncle.

They slowly crossed the basement floor. The air-holes placed at intervals admitted a pale light; while in the dark corners, and along the narrow corridors, gas was constantly burning. In these corridors were situated the reserves, large vaults closed with iron railings, containing the surplus goods of each department. Mouret glanced in passing at the heating apparatus, to be lighted on the Monday for the first time, and at the post of firemen guarding a giant gas-meter enclosed in an iron cage. The kitchen and dining rooms, old cellars turned into habitable apartments, were on the left at the corner of the Place Gaillon. At last he arrived at the delivery department, right at the other end of the basement floor. The parcels not taken away by the customers were sent down there, sorted on tables, placed in compartments each representing a district of Paris; then sent up by a large staircase opening just opposite The Old Elbeuf, to the vans standing alongside the pavement. In the mechanical working of The Ladies’ Paradise, this staircase in the Rue de la Michodière disgorged without ceasing the goods swallowed up by the slide in the Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin, after they had passed through the mechanism of the counters up above.

“Campion,” said Mouret to the delivery manager, a retired sergeant with a thin face, “why weren’t six pairs of sheets, bought by a lady yesterday about two o’clock, delivered in the evening?”

“Where does the lady live?” asked the employee.

“In the Rue de Rivoli, at the corner of the Rue d’Alger—Madame Desforges.”

At this early hour the sorting tables were bare, the compartment only contained a few parcels left over night. Whilst Campion was searching amongst these packets, after having consulted a list, Bourdoncle was looking at Mouret, thinking that this wonderful fellow knew everything, thought of everything, even when at the supper-tables of restaurants or in the alcoves of his mistresses. At last Campion discovered the error; the cashier’s department had given a wrong number, and the parcel had come back.

“What is the number of the paydesk that debited that?” asked Mouret: “No. 10, you say?” And turning towards his lieutenant, he added: “No. 10; that’s Albert, isn’t it? We’ll just say two words to him.”

But before starting on their tour round the shops, he wanted to go up to the postal order department, which occupied several rooms on the second floor. It was there that all the provincial and foreign orders arrived; and he went up every morning to see the correspondence. For two years this correspondence had been increasing daily. At first occupying only about ten clerks, it now required more than thirty. Some opened the letters, others read them, seated at both sides of the same table; others again classed them, giving each one a running number, which was repeated on a pigeonhole. Then when the letters had been distributed to the different departments and the latter had delivered the articles, these articles were put in the pigeonholes as they arrived, according to the running numbers. There was then nothing to do but to check and tie them up, which was done in a neighboring room by a squad of workmen who were nailing and tying up from morning to night.

Mouret put his usual question: “How many letters this morning, Levasseur?”

“Five hundred and thirty-four, sir,” replied the chief clerk. “After the commencement of Monday’s sale, I’m afraid we sha’n’t have enough hands. Yesterday we were driven very hard.”

Bourdoncle expressed his satisfaction by a nod of the head. He had not reckoned on five hundred and thirty-four letters on a Tuesday. Round the table, the clerks continued opening and reading the letters amidst a noise of rustling paper, whilst the going and coming of the various articles commenced before the pigeonholes. It was one of the most complicated and important departments of the establishment, one in which there was a continual rush, for, strictly speaking, all the orders received in the morning ought to be sent off the same evening.

“You shall have more hands if you want them,” replied Mouret, who had seen at a glance that the work was well done. “You know that when there’s work to be done we never refuse the men.”

Up above, under the roof, were the small bedrooms for the saleswomen. But he went downstairs again and entered the chief cashier’s office, which was near his own. It was a room with a glazed wicket, and contained an enormous safe, fixed in the wall. Two cashiers there centralized the receipts which Lhomme, the chief cashier at the counters, brought in every evening; they also settled the current expenses, paid the manufacturers, the staff, all the crowd of people who lived by the house. The cashiers’ office communicated with another, full of green cardboard boxes, where ten clerks checked the invoices. Then came another office, the clearinghouse: six young men bending over black desks, having behind them quite a collection of registers, were getting up the discount accounts of the salesmen, by checking the debit notes. This work, which was new to them, did not get on very well.

Mouret and Bourdoncle had crossed the cashiers’ office and the invoice room. When they passed through the other office the young men, who were laughing and joking, started up in surprise. Mouret, without reprimanding them, explained the system of the little bonus he thought of giving them for each error discovered in the debit notes; and when he went out the clerks left off laughing, as if they had been whipped, and commenced working in earnest, looking up the errors.

On the ground-floor, occupied by the shops, Mouret went straight to the paydesk No. 10, where Albert Lhomme was cleaning his nails, waiting for customers. People regularly spoke of “the Lhomme dynasty,” since Madame Aurélie, firsthand at the dress department, after having helped her husband on to the post of chief cashier, had managed to get a pay desk for her son, a tall fellow, pale and vicious, who couldn’t stop anywhere, and who caused her an immense deal of anxiety. But on reaching the young man, Mouret kept in the background, not wishing to render himself unpopular by performing a policeman’s duty, and retaining from policy and taste his part of amiable god. He nudged Bourdoncle gently with his elbow—Bourdoncle, the infallible man, that model of exactitude, whom he generally charged with the work of reprimanding.

“Monsieur Albert,” said the latter, severely, “you have taken another address wrong; the parcel has come back. It’s unbearable!”

The cashier, thinking it his duty to defend himself, called as a witness the messenger who had tied up the packet. This messenger, named Joseph, also belonged to the Lhomme dynasty, for he was Albert’s foster brother, and owed his place to Madame Aurélie’s influence, As the young man wanted to make him say it was the customer’s mistake, Joseph stuttered, twisted the shaggy beard that ornamented his scarred face, struggling between his old soldier’s conscience and gratitude towards his protectors.