THE LADIES' PARADISE. Emile Zola

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.

      “Let Joseph alone,” Bourdoncle exclaimed at last, “and don’t say any more. Ah! it’s a lucky thing for you that we are mindful of your mother’s good services!”

      But at this moment Lhomme came running up. From his office near the door he could see his son’s paydesk, which was in the glove department. Quite white-haired already, deadened by his sedentary life, he had a flabby, colorless face, as if worn out by the reflection of the money he was continually handling. His amputated arm did not at all incommode him in this work, and it was quite a curiosity to see him verify the receipts, so rapidly did the notes and coins slip through his left one, the only one he had. Son of a tax-collector at Chablis, he had come to Paris as a clerk in the office of a merchant of the Port-aux-Vins. Then, whilst lodging in the Rue Cuvier, he married the daughter of his doorkeeper, a small tailor, an Alsatian; and from that day he had bowed submissively before his wife, whose commercial ability filled him with respect. She earned more than twelve thousand francs a year in the dress department, whilst he only drew a fixed salary of five thousand francs. And the deference he felt for a woman bringing such sums into the home was extended to the son, who also belonged to her.

      “What’s the matter?” murmured he; “is Albert in fault?”

      Then, according to his custom, Mouret appeared on the scene, to play the part of good-natured prince. When Bourdoncle had made himself feared, he looked after his own popularity.

      “Nothing of consequence!” murmured he. “My dear Lhomme, your son Albert is a careless fellow, who should take an example from you.” Then, changing the subject, showing himself more amiable than ever, he continued; “And that concert the other day—did you get a good seat?”

      A blush overspread the white cheeks of the old cashier. Music was his only vice, a vice which he indulged in solitarily, frequenting the theatres, the concerts, the rehearsals. Notwithstanding the loss of his arm, he played on the French horn, thanks to an ingenious system of keys; and as Madame Lhomme detested noise, he wrapped up his instrument in cloth in the evening, delighted all the same, in the highest degree, with the strangely dull sounds he drew from it. In the forced irregularity of their domestic life he had made himself an oasis of this music—that and the cash-box, he knew of nothing else, beyond the admiration he felt for his wife.

      “A very good seat,” replied he, with sparkling eyes. “You are really too kind, sir.”

      Mouret, who enjoyed a personal pleasure in satisfying other people’s passions, sometimes gave Lhomme the tickets forced on him by the lady patronesses of such entertainments, and he completed the old man’s delight by saying:

      “Ah, Beethoven! ah, Mozart! What music!” And without waiting for a reply, he went off, rejoining Bourdoncle, already on his tour of inspection through the departments.

      In the central hall, an inner courtyard with a glass roof formed the silk department. Both went along the Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin, occupied by the linen department, from one end to the other. Nothing unusual striking them, they passed on through the crowd of respectful assistants. They then turned into the cotton and hosiery departments, where the same order reigned. But in the department devoted to woollens, occupying the gallery which ran through to the Rue de la Michodière, Bourdoncle resumed the character of executioner, on observing a young man, seated on the counter, looking knocked up after a night passed without sleep. And this young: man, named Liénard, son of a rich Angers draper, bowed his head beneath the reprimand, fearing nothing in his idle, careless life of pleasure except to be recalled by his father. The reprimands now began to shower down, and the gallery of the Rue de la Michodière received the full force of the storm. In the drapery department a salesman, a fresh hand, who slept in the house, had come in after eleven o’clock; in the haberdashery department, the second counterman had just allowed himself to be caught downstairs smoking a cigarette. But the tempest burst with especial violence in the glove department, on the head of one of the rare Parisians in the house, handsome Mignot, as they called him, the illegitimate son of a music-mistress: his crime was having caused a scandal in the dining room by complaining of the food. As there were three tables, one at half-past nine, one at half-past ten, and another at half-past eleven, he wished to explain that belonging to the third table, he always had the leavings, the worst of everything.

      “What! the food not good?” asked Mouret, naïvely, opening his mouth at last.

      He only gave the head cook, a terrible Auvergnat, a franc and a half a head per day, out of which this man still managed to make a good profit; and the food was really execrable. But Bourdoncle shrugged his shoulders: a cook who had four hundred luncheons and four hundred dinners to serve, even in three series, had no time to waste on the refinements of his art.

      “Never mind,” said the governor, good-naturedly, “I wish all our employees to have good, abundant food. I’ll speak to the cook.” And Mignot’s complaint was shelved.

      Then returning to their point of departure, standing up near the door, amidst the umbrellas and neckties, Mouret and Bourdoncle received the report of one of the four