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| Félix Vallotton, Le Bon Marché, 1898 |
Au Bonheur des dames, extract
On Monday, March 14, the Bonheur des Dames inaugurated its renovated store with the exhibition of its new summer stock, which was supposed to last three days. Outside blew a bitter wind, and those passing by, surprised by this return of winter, walked quickly, buttoning their coats. Nevertheless, the neighboring boutiques were simmering with emotion; and you could see the pale faces of the small-shop owners against the windows, busy counting the first cars that stopped in front of the main entrance on Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin. Tall and deep like a church portico, decorated with a motif of sculptures representing Industry and Commerce shaking hands in a labyrinth of symbols, this entrance was shielded by a glass awning whose freshly-painted gilded ornaments cast light on the sidewalks like the sun’s rays. The facades, still raw and white, extended to the right and left, turned on Rue Monsigny and Rue de la Michodière, and occupied the whole block except for the side on Rue du Dix-Décembre, where the Crédit Immobilier was going to build. All across the length of this development, which recalled the military barracks, when the small-shop owners raised their heads, they could see the piles of merchandise through the one-way mirrors, which from the ground floor to the second floor let ample light into the store. And this enormous cube, this colossal marketplace, which prevented them from seeing the sky, seemed to be the cause of the cold which made them shiver behind their frozen counters.
Still, Mouret was there, giving his orders starting at 10 am. In the middle, along the axis formed by the main entrance, a wide gallery went from one end to the other, flanked by two narrower galleries to the left and to the right, the Monsigny gallery and the Michodière gallery. The hallways had been glazed and transformed into exhibit spaces; iron stairways arose from the ground floor, iron bridges shot from one end to the other, on both floors. The architect who happened to be intelligent, a young man who loved the modern times, had only used stone in the basement and for the corner pillars, and had built the whole skeleton out of iron, the columns supporting the joist and beam structure. The arches supporting the floors and the dividing walls of the interior distribution rooms were made of brick. Everywhere space had been made, the outside air and light could enter freely, the public could circulate with ease, under the bold extension of the long-range trusses. It was the cathedral of modern commerce, solid and light, made for a people of female clients. Below, in the central gallery, after the items on sale at the entrance, came the ties, gloves and silks; the whites and the rouennerie occupied the Monsigny gallery, the notions, hosiery, draperies and woolens the Michodière gallery. Then, on the first floor, were the tailoring department, lingerie, shawls, lace and other new aisles, and relegated to the second floor were the bedding, rugs and upholstery, basically all the items that took up a lot of space and were difficult to handle. Currently, there were thirty-nine aisles, 1,800 employees, among which 200 were women. The sonorous life of the tall metallic nave was humming with a whole world of people.
Mouret’s only passion was to win over the woman. He wanted her to be the queen of his store, he had built this temple in her honor, in order to better have her at his mercy. His strategy consisted in exciting her by bestowing gallant attentions on her, tampering with her desires, and exploiting her feverishness. So, night and day, he racked his brain to try to come up with new ideas. Already, wanting to avoid that the delicate ladies overexerted themselves, he had built two elevators upholstered with velvet. In addition, he had just opened a buffet, where cookies and cordials were served freely, as well as a reading room, a monumental gallery, decorated very luxuriously, where he even had gone as far as to put up paintings on view. However, his deepest idea, when it came to the woman who lacked vanity, had been to conquer her through her child; he did not miss any opportunity, he speculated about all sentiments, created aisles for little boys and girls, stopped the mothers in their tracks as they were passing by and offered pretty pictures and balloons to their babies. This gift of balloons was a stroke of genius. They were distributed to every buyer, red balloons made of fine plastic, with the name of the store written on them in large letters, and which, held by a thread, hanging in the air above, were a living walking advertisement on the streets.
The greatest power was above all in advertising. Mouret went as far as to spend 300,000 francs each year in catalogues, announcements and posters. For his launch of the new summer stock, he had distributed 200,000 catalogues, 50,000 of which had gone abroad and had been translated in all languages. Now, he had them illustrated with etchings, he even accompanied them with samples, attached to the paper. An overflow of shelves, the Bonheur des Dames cried out to everyone, invaded the walls, newspapers, even the curtains at the theatre. He professed that the woman is defenseless against the advertisement, that she fatally ends up giving in. Moreover, he tried to trap her in more learned ways; he analyzed her as if he were a great moralist. And so, he had discovered that she could not resist cheap merchandise, that she bought things she did not need when she thought she had concluded a deal that was to her advantage; and based on this observation, he calculated his system for lowering prices, he progressively lowered the price of the items that remained unsold, preferring to sell at a loss, always faithful to the principle of the fast turnover of merchandise. What’s more, he had further penetrated into the heart of the woman, having just come up with “returns”, a masterpiece of jesuitic seduction. “Please always take it, madame: you can always return it if you no longer like it”. And the woman who resisted found a last excuse, the possibility to rectify her madness; she bought the item, and her conscience was clear. Now, returns and low prices were part of the classical mechanism of the new commerce.
