bread
0.90
paperclips
0.40 2
artichokes
1.12
ham
3.15
petits-suisses
1.20
wine
2.15
hairdresser
16.00
tip
1.50
stockings
3.10
repair to coffee grinder
15.00
washing powder
2.70
razor blades
4.00
2.60
plums
1.80
coffee
3.00
chicory
1.80
TOTAL
59.42
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Plassaert, 3
ADÈLE AND JEAN PLASSAERT are sitting side by side at their desk, a grey metal structure fitted with hanging file drawers. The worktop is cluttered with open ledgers, their long columns covered in meticulous handwriting. Light comes from an old petrol lamp with a cast-iron stand and two green globes. To one side, a bottle of whisky: McAnguish’s Caledonian Panacea, with a label depicting a jovial wench giving a dram to a moustachioed grenadier in a bearskin hat.
Jean Plassaert is a short and rather fat man; he is wearing a multicoloured Hawaiian party shirt, and a tie consisting of a bootlace with shiny ends held in a plaited leather woggle. In front of him he has a whitewood box copiously provided with stickers, postage stamps, rubber stamps, red wax seals, and from it he has taken five art-déco silver and paste-glass brooches representing five stylised female athletes: a swimmer doing the crawl amidst a wreath of ripples, a skier schussing downhill, a gymnast in a tutu juggling lighted torches, a golfer with raised mashie, and a diver performing a perfect swan. He has laid four of them side by side on his blotting pad and is showing the fifth – the diver – to his wife.
Adèle is a woman of about forty, small, dry, thin-lipped. She is wearing a fur-collared red velvet two-piece suit. In order to look at the brooch which her husband is showing her, she has raised her eyes from the book she has been studying: a bulky guide to Egypt, open at a double page reproduction of an extract from one of the earliest known dictionaries of Egyptology, F. Rablé’s Libvre mangificque dez Merveyes que pouvent estre vuyes es La Egipte (Lyons, 1560):
HIEROGLYPHICKS: Holie inscriptions. Were thus ycleped the letters of the clerkes of Auntient Egypte made on divers images of trees, grasses, animals, fisshes, briddes, & tools by nature and office of whiche was shewn their designationes.
OBELISKS: Longe and heighe stone bodkins, brode at the foot and tapering to a poinct at yr hede. To be seen at Rome, about the Church of Seint Peter, is one swich intire, and manie others also. Upon those that be aboute an stronde, they weren wont to licht a leming fire the Seylors to avaunce in stormie weather, and weren cleped obeliskolychnies.
PYRAMIDS: Tall and square biltings of stone or brickes, brode at the foot and poincted at the top, in the shap of a flame of fire. Manie are to be seen above the Nil, by Cayre.
CATADUPES: of the Nil: a place in the Ethiops’ land whereon the Nil falleth from high mountaines in swich horribile noise that men of those parts are almost alle deaf as is wryt by Claude Galen. The noise is herd more an thrie days off, which is as much as from Paris to Tours. See Ptol., Cicero in Som. Scipionis; Plinius, lib. 6, cap. 9, and Strabo.
The Plassaerts, traders in Indian cotton goods and other exotic merchandise, are organised, efficient, and, in their own words, “professional”.
Their first contact with the Far East, about twenty years ago, coincided with their first meeting. That year the Employees’ Association of the bank where they were both on placement (he at the Aubervilliers branch, she at Montrouge) organised a trip to Outer Mongolia. The country itself held little interest for them, Ulan Bator Hoto being just a big village with a few official buildings of typically Stalinist design, and the Gobi desert having nothing much to show for itself apart from its horses and a few grinning Mongols with protruding cheekbones and fur hats, but the stop-overs they made in Iran on the outward journey and in Afghanistan on the return filled them with excitement. They shared a taste for travel and for fixing deals; they both possessed a certain kind of unconventional inventiveness, a developed sense of alternative lifestyles, and considerable resourcefulness; all of which prompted them to pack in the cash counter, where in truth nothing very exalting awaited them, and to set up in the antiques business. With a patched-up truck and a float of a few thousand francs, they started to clear cellars and attics, touring country fairs and on Sunday mornings selling at the then not very popular flea market at Vanves slightly dented hunting horns, mostly incomplete encyclopædias, silver forks, some flaking, and decorated plates (A Bad Joke: a man asleep in a garden, another man stealing up on him, pouring a liquid into his ear; or, on another one, in the middle of a thicket in which the faces of two grinning scamps are hidden, an angry gamekeeper: Where Have Those Two Scoundrels Got to?; or another, showing a very young sailor-suited sword-swallower, with the caption: One Swallow Doesn’t Make a Mummer).
Competition was fierce, and though they had flair, they lacked experience; on several occasions they got landed with job lots containing nothing saleable, and the only good deals they pulled off were with stocks of old clothing, RAF jackets, American-style button-down shirts, Swiss moccasins, T-shirts, Davy Crockett headgear, and blue jeans, thanks to which they managed to survive through those years even if they didn’t expand.
In the early sixties, not long before they moved into Rue Simon-Crubellier, they came across a most curious character, in a pizzeria in Rue des Ciseaux: a neurasthenic lawyer, of Dutch origin, settled in Indonesia, who had spent many years as the Jakarta agent for several trading companies before setting up his own export-import business. With his remarkable knowledge of all the craft products made in Southeast Asia, having no equal when it came to evading customs controls, or short-circuiting insurance companies and handling agents, or avoiding taxes, he packed three rusty freighters to the gunwales, all year round, with Malaysian seashells, Philippine handkerchiefs, Formosan kimonos, Indian shirts, Nepalese jackets, Afghan furs, Sinhalese lacquers, Macao barometers, Hong Kong toys, and a hundred other kinds of goods from dozens of different places, which he redistributed around Germany with a markup of between two and three hundred percent.
He liked the Plassaerts and decided to give them a commission. For seven francs he would sell them shirts which had cost him three, and which they would resell at seventeen, twenty-one, twenty-five, or thirty francs according to the case. They started off in a tiny cobbler’s stall near Place Saint-André-des-Arts. Today they have three stores in Paris, two others in Lille and Cannes, and plan to open a dozen more on a permanent or seasonal basis in spas, on the Atlantic coast, and in winter sports resorts. Meanwhile, they have succeeded in tripling – and soon they will have quadrupled – the floor area of their Parisian apartment and have entirely refurbished a country house near Bernay.
Their business acumen is the perfect complement to their Indonesian associate’s commercial talents: not only do they go over there to find local products that can be marketed easily in France, but they also have European knickknacks and jewellery manufactured there on modern-style or art-déco patterns: in the Celebes, at Macassar, they have found a craftsman, whom they describe unreservedly as a genius, and who, with his dozen workers, can supply on demand and for a few centimes per item clips, rings, brooches, novelty buttons, lighters, smoker’s sets, pens, false eyelashes, yoyos, spectacle frames, combs, cigarette holders, inkwells, letter openers, and a whole heap of trinkets, gewgaws, and baubles in Bakelite, celluloid, galalith, and other plastic materials which you could swear were at least half a century old and which he supplies with “pre-aged patina” and even sometimes with fake repair marks.
Though they still go in for the laid-back style, offering coffee to customers and calling employees by their first names, their rapid expansion is beginning to create difficult problems for them, in stock control, accounting, profitability, and personnel; they are being forced to attempt to diversify their range of products, to subcontract a portion of their business to major stores or to mail-order warehouses, and to look elsewhere for new materials, new items, and new ideas; they have begun to make contacts in South America and black Africa, and they have already signed up an Egyptian trader for the supply of fabrics, imitation Coptic jewellery, and small painted furniture for which they have secured the exclusive rights for Western Europe.
The Plassaerts’ dominant character trait is meanness – methodical, organised meanness, on which they even pride themselves from time to time: for instance, they boast that in their flat and in their shops they never have any fresh flowers – highly perishable goods – but display instead arrangements of everlasting flowers, reeds, Alpine sea holly, and honesty, enhanced by a few peacock feathers. Their meanness is constant and unremitting: not only does it prompt them to eliminate the superfluous – the only overheads allowed are supposed to be productive overheads contributing to prestige required for professional purposes and therefore able to be accounted as investments – but also inspires them to commit acts of unspeakable stinginess, such as pouring Belgian whisky into bottles bearing expensive labels when they have guests, or systematically scrounging sugar lumps from cafés for their own sugar bowl, or asking in the same cafés for the Entertainment Guide which they then leave by their own cash desk for their customers to use, or paring a few pennies off their shopping by haggling over every item and buying loss leaders most of the time.
With an exactness that leaves nothing to chance, in the same way as in the nineteenth century the mistress of the house went through her cook’s account book and didn’t hesitate to demand two pennies back on the turbot, Adèle Plassaert enters every day in a school exercise book the stark figures of her daily outgoings:
bread |
0.90 |
paperclips |
0.40 2 |
artichokes |
1.12 |
ham |
3.15 |
petits-suisses |
1.20 |
wine |
2.15 |
hairdresser |
16.00 |
tip |
1.50 |
stockings |
3.10 |
repair to coffee grinder |
15.00 |
washing powder |
2.70 |
razor blades |
4.00 |
2.60 |
|
plums |
1.80 |
coffee |
3.00 |
chicory |
1.80 |
|
|
TOTAL |
59.42 |
Behind them, on the off-white-painted wall with pale-yellow gloss mouldings, hang sixteen little rectangular drawings in a style reminiscent of fin-de-siècle caricatures. They represent the classical “Paris Streetsellers”, with captions giving their traditional cries:
THE SEAFOOD SELLER
“Cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o!”
THE RAG AND BONE MAN
“Any old rags, any old iron
Any any any old iron”
THE SNAIL LADY
“I’ve got snails, juicy snails
A shilling a dozen, fresh snails”
THE FISH WOMAN
“Prawns, lovely prawns, alive-o!
Skate, nice fresh skate”
THE COOPER
“Barrels, barrels!”
THE OLD-CLOTHES MAN
“Old clothes, any old clothes
Old . . . clothes”
THE GRINDER AND HIS STONE
“Knives, scissors, razors!”
THE COSTERMONGER
“Tender and green artichokes
Tender and young
Ar . . . tichokes”
“Tan, ran, tan, tan, ran, tan
For pots and cans, oh! I’m your man
I’ll mend them all with a tink, tink, tink
And never leave a chink, chink, chink”
THE WAFFLE LADY
“Enjoy yourselves, ladies
Here’s a treat!”
THE ORANGE LADY
“Valencia oranges, lovely ripe oranges!”
THE DOG-CLIPPER
“I clips dogs
And cuts yer cats
Tails an’ ears an’ all”
THE VEGETABLE-SELLER
“Lettuce, cos lettuce, not to hawk
Lovely cos lettuce out for a walk”
THE CHEESE MAN
“Good cream cheese, fresh cheese!”
THE SAW-SETTER
“Here comes the saw-setter
Any saws to set?”
THE GLAZIER
“Glazier, gla-zier
Any broken panes
Here comes the gla-zier!”