After a painful silence, Mouret himself began to speak of the Baudus, by expressing his sorrow at the death of their daughter. They were very worthy and very honest people but had been pursued by the worst of luck. Then he resumed his arguments: at bottom, they had really brought about their own misfortunes by obstinately clinging to the old customs in their worm-eaten place. It was not astonishing that their house should be falling about their heads. He had predicted it scores of times; she must even remember that he had told her to warn her uncle of a fatal disaster, if he should still cling to his stupid old-fashioned ways. And the catastrophe had arrived; no one in the world could now prevent it. People could not reasonably expect him to ruin himself to save the neighbourhood. Besides, if he had been foolish enough to close The Ladies' Paradise, another great establishment would have sprung up of itself next door, for the idea was now starting from the four corners of the globe; the triumph of these manufacturing and trading centres was sown by the spirit of the age, which was sweeping away the falling edifices of ancient times. Little by little as he went on speaking, Mouret warmed up, and with eloquent emotion defended himself against the hatred of his involuntary victims, against the clamour of the small moribund businesses that he could hear around him. They could not keep their dead above ground, he continued, they must bury them; and, with a gesture, he consigned the corpse of old-fashioned trading to the grave, swept into the common hole all those putrifying pestilential remains which were becoming a disgrace to the bright, sun-lit streets of new Paris. No, no, he felt no remorse, he was simply doing the work of his age, and she knew it, she who loved life, who had a passion for vast transactions settled in the full glare of publicity. Reduced to silence, she listened to him for some time longer and then went away, her soul full of trouble.