The ladies had just extricated themselves. They were in the Saint-Augustin Hall, which they were greatly surprised to find almost empty. But a feeling of comfort penetrated them, they seemed to be entering into spring after emerging from the winter of the street. Whilst the piercing wind, laden with rain and hail, was still blowing out of doors, the fine season was already budding forth in The Paradise galleries, with the light stuffs, soft flowery shades and rural gaiety of summer dresses and parasols.
"Do look there!" exclaimed Madame de Boves, standing motionless, her eyes in the air.
It was the exhibition of parasols. Wide-open and rounded like shields, they covered the whole hall, from the glazed roofing to the varnished oak mouldings below. They described festoons round the arches of the upper storeys; they descended in garlands down the slender columns; they ran in close lines along the balustrades of the galleries and the staircases; and everywhere ranged symmetrically, speckling the walls with red, green, and yellow, they looked like huge Venetian lanterns, lighted up for some colossal entertainment. In the corners were more complicated designs, stars composed of parasols at thirty-nine sous whose light shades, pale blue, cream-white, and blush rose, had the subdued glow of night-lights; whilst, up above, immense Japanese parasols, on which golden-coloured cranes soared in purple skies, blazed forth with fiery reflections.
Madame Marty endeavouring to find a phrase to express her rapture, exclaimed: "It's like fairyland!" And then trying to find out where she was she continued: "Let's see, the braid is in the mercery department. I shall buy my braid and be off."
"I will go with you," said Madame de Boves. "Eh? Blanche, we'll just go through the shop, nothing more."
But they had hardly left the door before they lost themselves. They turned to the left, and as the mercery department had been moved, they dropped into the one devoted to collarettes, cuffs, trimmings, etc. A hot-house heat, moist and close, laden with the insipid odour of the materials, and muffling the tramping of the crowd, prevailed in the galleries. Then they returned to the door, where an outward current was already established, an interminable défilé of women and children, above whom hovered a multitude of red air-balls. Forty thousand of these were ready; there were men specially placed for their distribution; and to see the customers on their way out, one might have imagined that a flight of enormous soap-bubbles, reflecting the fiery glare of the parasols, was hovering in the air. The whole place was illuminated by them.
"There's quite a world here!" declared Madame de Boves. "You hardly know where you are."
However, the ladies could not remain in the eddy of the door, right in the crush of the entrance and exit. Fortunately, inspector Jouve came to their assistance. He stood in the vestibule, grave and attentive, eyeing each woman as she passed. Specially charged with the indoor police service he was on the look-out for thieves and "lifters."
"The mercery department, ladies?" said he obligingly, "turn to the left; you see! just there behind the hosiery department."
Madame de Boves thanked him. But Madame Marty, on turning round, no longer saw her daughter Valentine beside her. She was beginning to feel frightened, when she caught sight of her, already a long way off, at the end of the Saint-Augustin Hall, deeply absorbed before a table covered with a heap of women's cravats at nineteen sous. Mouret practised the system of offering articles to the customers, hooking and plundering them as they passed; for he made use of every sort of advertisement, laughing at the discretion of certain fellow-tradesmen who thought their goods should be left to speak for themselves. Special salesmen, idle and smooth-tongued Parisians, in this way got rid of considerable quantities of small trashy things.