But the greatest power of all was the advertising. Mouret now spent three hundred thousand francs a year in catalogues, advertisements, and bills.[1] For his summer sale he had launched forth two hundred thousand catalogues, fifty thousand of which went abroad, translated into every language. He now had them illustrated with engravings, and embellished with samples, gummed to the leaves. There was an overflowing display; the name of The Ladies' Paradise met the eye all over the world, it invaded the walls and hoardings, the newspapers, and even the curtains of the theatres. He claimed that woman was powerless against advertising, that she was bound to be attracted by uproar. Analyzing her moreover like a great moralist he laid still more enticing traps for her. Thus he had discovered that she could not resist a bargain, that she bought without necessity whenever she thought she saw a thing cheap, and on this observation he based his system of reductions, progressively lowering the price of unsold articles, and preferring to sell them at a loss rather than keep them by him, given his principle of constantly renewing his goods. And he had penetrated still further into the heart of woman, and had just planned the system of "returns", a masterpiece of Jesuitical seduction. "Take whatever you like, madame; you can return it if you find you don't like it." And the woman who hesitated, herein found a last excuse, the possibility of repairing an act of folly were it deemed too extravagant: she took the article with an easy conscience. And now the returns and reduction of prices system formed part of the everyday working of the new style of business.
[1] After all, this is only £12,000 or about a quarter of the amount which a single English firm of soap-manufacturers spends in advertising every year.
But where Mouret revealed himself as an unrivalled master was in the interior arrangement of his shops. He laid it down as a law that not a corner of The Ladies' Paradise ought to remain deserted; he required a noise, a crowd, evidence of life everywhere; for life, said he, attracts life, increases and multiplies it. And this principle he applied in a variety of ways. 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 low-priced articles; and so the common people crowded there, stopping up the doorway and making the shop look as if it were crammed with customers, when it was often only half full. Then, in the galleries, he found a means of concealing the departments where business occasionally became slack; for instance, he surrounded the shawl department in summer, and the printed calico department in winter, with other busy departments, steeping them in continual uproar. It was he alone who had thought of reserving the second-floor for the carpet and furniture galleries; for customers were less numerous in such departments which if placed on the ground floor would have often presented a chilly void. If he could only have managed it, he would have let the street run through his shop.