5 - Back Room → Front Shop → Cellar → Flat

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(101-103)

The backroom of Madame Marcia's antique shop. 

Madame Marcia, her husband, and her son live in a three-roomed flat on the ground floor right. Her shop is also on the ground floor, on the left, between the concierge's office and the servants' entrance. Madame Marcia has never made any real distinction between the furniture she has for sale and the furniture she has to live in, and she is therefore busy for much of the time with carrying furniture, chandeliers, lamps, crockery, and miscellaneous objects between the flat, the shop, the backroom, and the cellar. 

Such swaps, occurring as a consequence of opportunities to sell or buy something (in the latter case, in order to make room for it) just as much as on impulse, or a sudden whim, or a change of mood for or against some object, are not performed in random order and do not exhaust all twelve possible permutations which could be made between the four locations, as is made clear in figure 1; they strictly follow the schema in figure 2: when Madame Marcia buys something, she puts it in her domestic space, either in the flat or the cellar; the said object may thence proceed to the back room of the shop, and from the backroom into the shop itself; from the shop front it may return to (or arrive at, if it began in the cellar) Madame Marcia's flat.

What is ruled out is for an item to return to the cellar, or to get into the front shop without having been in the backroom, or to go in reverse from the front shop to the backroom, or from the backroom to the flat, or, lastly, to move directly from the cellar to the flat.

 The backroom is dark and narrow, with a lino floor, and cluttered to the point of inextricability with objects of every shape and size. The jumble is such that an exhaustive list of contents is impossible, and we shall have to be satisfied with a description of the pieces protruding from this heteroclite heap with a degree of visibility.

Against the left-hand wall, beside the door leading from the backroom to the front shop, the door whose opening creates just about the only empty space in the room, there is a large Louis XVI roll-top desk, rather coarsely made; the top is open, revealing a green leather writing pad on which a partly unrolled emaki (painted scroll) has been put: it depicts a famous scene from Japanese literature: Prince Genji has got into the palace of the governor Yo No Kami, where, from behind an arras where he has hidden, he watches the governor's wife, the beautiful Utsusemi, with whom he is passionately in love, playing Go with her friend Nokiba No Ogi.

Further along the wall are six wooden chairs painted willow green, supporting rolls of printed cretonne wallpaper. The roll on top depicts a pastoral scene in which a peasant tilling his field alternates with a shepherd leaning on his crook, with his hat tilted back and his dog on a lead, with his sheep scattered all around him, and who raises his eyes to the sky.

Yet further along, past the pile of military parphernalia -- weapons, shields, drums, shakos, pointed helmets, knapsacks, belt buckles, frogged wool-cloth hussars' jackets, leather goods, in the middle of which you can see more distinctly a set of those stubby and slightly curved infantrymen's swords which the French call briquets -- there is an S-shaped mahogany sofa upholstered in flower-patterened cloth, which was given in 1892, so they say, to the singer Grisi by a Russian prince.

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⏰ Last updated: Jan 02, 2020 ⏰

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