CHAPTER IX.
It was on a Monday, the 14th of March, that The Ladies' Paradise inaugurated its new buildings by a great exhibition of summer novelties, which was to last three days. Outside, a sharp wind was blowing, the passers-by, surprised by this return of winter, spun along, buttoned up in their overcoats. However, behind the closed doors of the neighbouring shops, quite an agitation was fermenting; and one could see, against the windows, the pale faces of the small tradesmen, occupied in counting the first carriages which stopped before the new grand entrance in the Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin. This door, lofty and deep like a church porch, surmounted by a group—Industry and Commerce hand-in-hand amidst a complication of symbols—was sheltered by a vast awning, the fresh gilding of which seemed to light up the pavement with a ray of sunshine. To the right and left stretched the shop fronts, barely dry and of a blinding whiteness, running along the Rue Monsigny and the Rue de la Michodière, occupying the whole island, except on the Rue du Dix-Décembre side, where the Crédit Immobilier intended to build. Along this barrack-like development, the small tradesmen, when they raised their heads, perceived the piles of goods through the large plate-glass windows which, from the ground floor up to the second storey, opened the house to the light of day. And this enormous cube, this colossal bazaar, shut out the sky from them, seeming to cause the cold which was making them shiver behind their frozen counters.
As early as six o'clock, Mouret was on the spot, giving his final orders. In the centre, starting from the grand entrance, a large gallery ran from end to end, flanked right and left by two narrower galleries, the Monsigny Gallery and the Michodière Gallery. The court-yards had been glazed and turned into halls, iron staircases rose from the ground floor, iron bridges were thrown from one end to the other on the two storeys. The architect, who happened to be a young man of talent with modern ideas, had only used stone for the under-ground floor and the corner pillars, constructing the whole ground with the corner pillars, constructing the whole carcase of iron, the assemblage of beams and rafters being supported by columns. The arches of the flooring and the partitions were of brickwork. Space had been gained everywhere, light and air entered freely, and the public circulated with the greatest ease under the bold flights of the far-stretching girders. It was the cathedral of modern commerce, light but solid, made for a nation of customers. Below, in the central gallery, after the door bargains, came the cravat, the glove, and the silk departments; the Monsigny Gallery was occupied by the linen and the Rouen goods; the Michodière Gallery by the mercery, the hosiery, the drapery, and the woollen departments. Then, on the first floor were installed the ready-made, the under-linen, the shawl, the lace, and other new departments, whilst the bedding, the carpets, the furnishing materials, all the cumbersome articles difficult to handle, had been relegated to the second floor. The number of departments was now thirty-nine, with eighteen hundred employees, of whom two hundred were women. Quite a little world operated there, in the sonorous life of the high metallic naves.
Mouret's unique passion was to conquer woman. He wished her to be queen in his house, and he had built this temple to get her completely at his mercy. His sole aim was to intoxicate her with gallant attentions, and traffic on her desires, work on her fever. Night and day he racked his brain to invent fresh attractions. He had already introduced two lifts lined with velvet for the upper storeys, in order to spare delicate ladies the trouble of mounting the stairs. Then he had just opened a bar where the customers could find, gratis, some light refreshment, syrups and biscuits, and a reading-room, a monumental gallery, decorated with excessive luxury, in which he had even ventured on an exhibition of pictures. But his most profound idea was to conquer the mother through the child, when unable to do so through her coquetry; he neglected no means, speculated on every sentiment, created departments for little boys and girls, arresting the passing mothers by distributing pictures and air-balls to the children. A stroke of genius this idea of distributing to each buyer a red air-ball made of fine gutta-percha, bearing in large letters the name of the shop, and which, held by a string, floated in the air, parading in the streets a living advertisement.
But the greatest power of all was the advertising. Mouret spent three hundred thousand francs a year in catalogues, advertisements, and bills. For his summer sale he had launched forth two hundred thousand catalogues, of which fifty thousand went abroad, translated into every language. He now had them illustrated with engravings, even accompanying them with samples, gummed between the leaves. It was an overflowing display; The Ladies' Paradise became a household word all over the world, invading the walls, the newspapers, and even the curtains at the theatres. He declared that woman was powerless against advertising, that she was bound to follow the crowd. Not only that, he laid still more seductive traps for her, analysing her like a great moralist. Thus he had discovered that she could not resist a bargain, that she bought without necessity when she thought she saw a cheap line, and on this observation he based his system of reductions in price, progressively lowering the price of unsold articles, preferring to sell them at a loss, faithful to his principle of the continual renewal of the goods. He had penetrated still further into the heart of woman, and had just thought of the “returns,” a masterpiece of Jesuitical seduction. “Take whatever you like, madame; you can return the article if you don't like it.” And the woman who hesitated was provided with the last excuse, the possibility of repairing an extravagant folly, she took the article with an easy conscience. The returns and the reduction of prices now formed part of the classical working of the new style of business.
But where Mouret revealed himself as an unrivalled master was in the interior arrangement of the shops. He laid down as a law that not a corner of The Ladies' Paradise ought to remain deserted, requiring everywhere a noise, a crowd, evidence of life; for life, said he, attracts life, increases and multiplies. From this law he drew all sorts of applications. In the first place, there ought always to be a crush at the entrance, so that the people in the street should mistake it for a riot; and he obtained this crush by placing a lot of bargains at the doors, shelves and baskets overflowing with very low-priced articles; so that the common people crowded there, stopping up the doorway, making the shop look as if it were crammed with customers, when it was often only half full. Then, in the galleries, he had the art of concealing the departments in which business was slack; for instance, the shawl department in summer, and the printed calico department in winter, he surrounded them with busy departments, drowning them with a continual uproar. It was he alone who had been inspired with the idea of placing on the second-floor the carpet and furniture counters, counters where the customers were less frequent, and which if placed on the ground floor would have caused empty, cold spaces. If he could have managed it, he would have had the street running through his shop.
Just at that moment, Mouret was a prey to an attack of inspiration. On the Saturday evening, as he was giving a last look at the preparations for the Monday's great sale, he was suddenly struck with the idea that the arrangement of the departments adopted by him was wrong and stupid; and yet It seemed a perfectly logical arrangement: the stuffs on one side, the made-up articles on the other, an intelligent order of things which would enable the customers to find their way themselves. He had thought of this orderly arrangement formerly, in Madame Hédouin's narrow shop; and now he felt his faith shaken, just as he carried out his idea. Suddenly he cried out that they would “have to alter all that.” They had forty-eight hours, and half what had been done had to be changed. The staff, frightened, bewildered, had been obliged to work two nights and the entire Sunday, amidst a frightful disorder. On the Monday morning even, an hour before the opening, there was still some goods to be placed. Decidedly the governor was going mad, no one understood, a general consternation prevailed.
