Free The Ladies' Paradise (BBC tie-in) (Oxford World's Classics) by Emile Zola, Brian Nelson Page B

suddenly competition had brought ruin. There was also the house at Rambouillet, thecountry house to which the draper had been dreaming of retiring for the last ten years; a bargain he called it, an old shack he was obliged continually to repair, which he had reluctantly decided to let to people who never paid the rent. His last profits were being spent on it—the only vice he had ever had in his honest, upright career, obstinately attached to the old ways.
    ‘Now then,’ he suddenly declared, ‘we must make room for the others … That’s enough useless talk!’
    They all seemed to wake up. The gas jet was hissing in the dead, stifling air of the little room. Everyone jumped up, breaking the gloomy silence. Pépé, however, was sleeping so soundly that they laid him down on some pieces of thick flannel. Jean, yawning, had already gone back to the front door.
    ‘In short, you do what you like,’ Baudu repeated once more to his niece. ‘We’re just telling you the facts, that’s all. But it’s your business.’
    He looked at her intently, waiting for a decisive answer. Denise, instead of being turned against the Ladies’ Paradise by these stories, was more fascinated by it than ever, and kept her air of calmness and sweetness, under which there lay an obstinate Norman will. She was content to reply: ‘We’ll see, Uncle.’
    And she talked of going to bed early with the children, for they were all three very tired. But it was only just striking six, so she decided to stay in the shop a few moments longer. Night had fallen, and she found the street quite dark, soaked with fine, dense rain which had been falling since sunset. A surprise greeted her: a few moments had sufficed for the roadway to become filled with pebbles, for the gutters to be running with dirty water and the pavements to be covered in thick, sticky mud; and through the driving rain she could see nothing but a confused stream of umbrellas, jostling each other, swelling out like great gloomy wings in the darkness. She drew back at first, struck by the cold, feeling even more depressed because of the badly lit shop, which had a particularly dismal appearance at this time of night. A damp breeze, the breath of the old neighbourhood, came in from the street; it seemed as if the water streaming from the umbrellas was running right up to the counters and the pavement, with its mud and puddles, was coming into the old shop’s ground floor, white with saltpetre rot, giving it a final coatof mildew. It was a vision of old Paris, soaked through, and it made her shiver, surprised and dismayed to find the great city so cold and ugly.
    But on the other side of the road the deep rows of gas burners at the Ladies’ Paradise were being lit. She drew nearer, once more attracted and, as it were, warmed by this source of blazing light. The machine was still humming, still active, letting off steam in a final roar, while the salesmen were folding up the materials and the cashiers counting their takings. Through windows dimmed with condensation she could make out a vague profusion of lights, the confused interior of a factory. Behind the curtain of rain this vision, distant and blurred, seemed like some giant stokehold, in which the black shadows of the stokers could be seen moving against the red fire of the furnaces. The window displays had become indistinct also, and nothing could now be seen opposite but the snowy lace, the white of which was heightened by the frosted glass globes of a row of gas jets. Against this chapel-like background, the coats were bursting with energy; the great velvet overcoat trimmed with silver fox suggested the curved outline of a headless woman, running through the downpour to some festivity in the mysterious Parisian night.
    Denise, yielding to temptation, had come as far as the door without noticing the raindrops falling on her. At this time of night, the Ladies’ Paradise, with its furnace-like glare, seduced her completely. In the