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The Fat and the Thin

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Title: The Fat and the Thin

Author: Émile Zola

Translator: Ernest Alfred Vizetelly


        
Release date: April 22, 2006 [eBook #5744]
                Most recently updated: May 25, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5744

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FAT AND THE THIN ***




The Fat and the Thin

(LE VENTRE DE PARIS)

by Émile Zola

Translated, With An Introduction, By Ernest Alfred Vizetelly


Contents

 INTRODUCTION
 CHAPTER I
 CHAPTER II
 CHAPTER III
 CHAPTER IV
 CHAPTER V
 CHAPTER VI




Let me have men about me that are fat: Sleek-headed men, and such as
sleep o’ nights: Yond’ Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks
too much: such men are dangerous. SHAKESPEARE: _Julius Caesar_, act i,
sc. 2.




INTRODUCTION


“THE FAT AND THE THIN,” or, to use the French title, “Le Ventre de
Paris,” is a story of life in and around those vast Central Markets
which form a distinctive feature of modern Paris. Even the reader who
has never crossed the Channel must have heard of the Parisian _Halles_,
for much has been written about them, not only in English books on the
French metropolis, but also in English newspapers, magazines, and
reviews; so that few, I fancy, will commence the perusal of the present
volume without having, at all events, some knowledge of its subject
matter.

The Paris markets form such a world of their own, and teem at certain
hours of the day and night with such exuberance of life, that it was
only natural they should attract the attention of a novelist like M.
Zola, who, to use his own words, delights “in any subject in which vast
masses of people can be shown in motion.” Mr. Sherard tells us[*] that
the idea of “Le Ventre de Paris” first occurred to M. Zola in 1872,
when he used continually to take his friend Paul Alexis for a ramble
through the Halles. I have in my possession, however, an article
written by M. Zola some five or six years before that time, and in this
one can already detect the germ of the present work; just as the motif
of another of M. Zola’s novels, “La Joie de Vivre,” can be traced to a
short story written for a Russian review.

[*] _Emile Zola: a Biographical and Critical Study_, by Robert
Harborough Sherard, pp. 103, 104. London, Chatto & Windus, 1893.


Similar instances are frequently to be found in the writings of English
as well as French novelists, and are, of course, easily explained. A
young man unknown to fame, and unable to procure the publication of a
long novel, often contents himself with embodying some particular idea
in a short sketch or story, which finds its way into one or another
periodical, where it lies buried and forgotten by everybody—excepting
its author. Time goes by, however, the writer achieves some measure of
success, and one day it occurs to him to elaborate and perfect that old
idea of his, only a faint _apercu_ of which, for lack of opportunity,
he had been able to give in the past. With a little research, no doubt,
an interesting essay might be written on these literary resuscitations;
but if one except certain novelists who are so deficient in ideas that
they continue writing and rewriting the same story throughout their
lives, it will, I think, be generally found that the revivals in
question are due to some such reason as that given above.

It should be mentioned that the article of M. Zola’s young days to
which I have referred is not one on market life in particular, but one
on violets. It contains, however, a vigorous, if brief, picture of the
Halles in the small hours of the morning, and is instinct with that
realistic descriptive power of which M. Zola has since given so many
proofs. We hear the rumbling and clattering of the market carts, we see
the piles of red meat, the baskets of silvery fish, the mountains of
vegetables, green and white; in a few paragraphs the whole market world
passes in kaleidoscopic fashion before our eyes by the pale, dancing
light of the gas lamps and the lanterns. Several years after the paper
I speak of was published, when M. Zola began to issue “Le Ventre de
Paris,” M. Tournachon, better known as Nadar, the aeronaut and
photographer, rushed into print to proclaim that the realistic novelist
had simply pilfered his ideas from an account of the Halles which he
(Tournachon) had but lately written. M. Zola, as is so often his wont,
scorned to reply to this charge of plagiarism; but, had he chosen, he
could have promptly settled the matter by producing his own forgotten
article.

At the risk of passing for a literary ghoul, I propose to exhume some
portion of the paper in question, as, so far as translation can avail,
it will show how M. Zola wrote and what he thought in 1867. After the
description of the markets to which I have alluded, there comes the
following passage:—

I was gazing at the preparations for the great daily orgy of Paris when
I espied a throng of people bustling suspiciously in a corner. A few
lanterns threw a yellow light upon this crowd. Children, women, and men
with outstretched hands were fumbling in dark piles which extended
along the footway. I thought that those piles must be remnants of meat
sold for a trifling price, and that all those wretched people were
rushing upon them to feed. I drew near, and discovered my mistake. The
heaps were not heaps of meat, but heaps of violets. All the flowery
poesy of the streets of Paris lay there, on that muddy pavement, amidst
mountains of food. The gardeners of the suburbs had brought their
sweet-scented harvests to the markets and were disposing of them to the
hawkers. From the rough fingers of their peasant growers the violets
were passing to the dirty hands of those who would cry them in the
streets. At winter time it is between four and six o’clock in the
morning that the flowers of Paris are thus sold at the Halles. Whilst
the city sleeps and its butchers are getting all ready for its daily
attack of indigestion, a trade in poetry is plied in dark, dank
corners. When the sun rises the bright red meat will be displayed in
trim, carefully dressed joints, and the violets, mounted on bits of
osier, will gleam softly within their elegant collars of green leaves.
But when they arrive, in the dark night, the bullocks, already ripped
open, discharge black blood, and the trodden flowers lie prone upon the
footways. . . . I noticed just in front of me one large bunch which had
slipped off a neighbouring mound and was almost bathing in the gutter.
I picked it up. Underneath, it was soiled with mud; the greasy, fetid
sewer water had left black stains upon the flowers. And then, gazing at
these exquisite daughters of our gardens and our woods, astray amidst
all the filth of the city, I began to ponder. On what woman’s bosom
would those wretched flowerets open and bloom? Some hawker would dip
them in a pail of water, and of all the bitter odours of the Paris mud
they would retain but a slight pungency, which would remain mingled
with their own sweet perfume. The water would remove their stains, they
would pale somewhat, and become a joy both for the smell and for the
sight. Nevertheless, in the depths of each corolla there would still
remain some particle of mud suggestive of impurity. And I asked myself
how much love and passion was represented by all those heaps of flowers
shivering in the bleak wind. To how many loving ones, and how many
indifferent ones, and how many egotistical ones, would all those
thousands and thousands of violets go! In a few hours’ time they would
be scattered to the four corners of Paris, and for a paltry copper the
passers-by would purchase a glimpse and a whiff of springtide in the
muddy streets.

Imperfect as the rendering may be, I think that the above passage will
show that M. Zola was already possessed of a large amount of his
acknowledged realistic power at the early date I have mentioned. I
should also have liked to quote a rather amusing story of a priggish
Philistine who ate violets with oil and vinegar, strongly peppered, but
considerations of space forbid; so I will pass to another passage,
which is of more interest and importance. Both French and English
critics have often contended that although M. Zola is a married man, he
knows very little of women, as there has virtually never been any
_feminine romance_ in his life. There are those who are aware of the
contrary, but whose tongues are stayed by considerations of delicacy
and respect. Still, as the passage I am now about to reproduce is
signed and acknowledged as fact by M. Zola himself, I see no harm in
slightly raising the veil from a long-past episode in the master’s
life:—

The light was rising, and as I stood there before that footway
transformed into a bed of flowers my strange night-fancies gave place
to recollections at once sweet and sad. I thought of my last excursion
to Fontenay-aux-Roses, with the loved one, the good fairy of my
twentieth year. Springtime was budding into birth, the tender foliage
gleamed in the pale April sunshine. The little pathway skirting the
hill was bordered by large fields of violets. As one passed along, a
strong perfume seemed to penetrate one and make one languid. _She_ was
leaning on my arm, faint with love from the sweet odour of the flowers.
A whiteness hovered over the country-side, little insects buzzed in the
sunshine, deep silence fell from the heavens, and so low was the sound
of our kisses that not a bird in all the hedges showed sign of fear. At
a turn of the path we perceived some old bent women, who with dry,
withered hands were hurriedly gathering violets and throwing them into
large baskets. She who was with me glanced longingly at the flowers,
and I called one of the women. “You want some violets?” said she. “How
much? A pound?”

God of Heaven! She sold her flowers by the pound! We fled in deep
distress. It seemed as though the country-side had been transformed
into a huge grocer’s shop. . . . Then we ascended to the woods of
Verrieres, and there, in the grass, under the soft, fresh foliage, we
found some tiny violets which seemed to be dreadfully afraid, and
contrived to hide themselves with all sorts of artful ruses. During two
long hours I scoured the grass and peered into every nook, and as soon
as ever I found a fresh violet I carried it to her. She bought it of
me, and the price that I exacted was a kiss. . . . And I thought of all
those things, of all that happiness, amidst the hubbub of the markets
of Paris, before those poor dead flowers whose graveyard the footway
had become. I remembered my good fairy, who is now dead and gone, and
the little bouquet of dry violets which I still preserve in a drawer.
When I returned home I counted their withered stems: there were twenty
of them, and over my lips there passed the gentle warmth of my loved
one’s twenty kisses.

And now from violets I must, with a brutality akin to that which M.
Zola himself displays in some of his transitions, pass to very
different things, for some time back a well-known English poet and
essayist wrote of the present work that it was redolent of pork,
onions, and cheese. To one of his sensitive temperament, with a muse
strictly nourished on sugar and water, such gross edibles as pork and
cheese and onions were peculiarly offensive. That humble plant the
onion, employed to flavour wellnigh every savoury dish, can assuredly
need no defence; in most European countries, too, cheese has long been
known as the poor man’s friend; whilst as for pork, apart from all
other considerations, I can claim for it a distinct place in English
literature. A greater essayist by far than the critic to whom I am
referring, a certain Mr. Charles Lamb, of the India House, has left us
an immortal page on the origin of roast pig and crackling. And, when
everything is considered, I should much like to know why novels should
be confined to the aspirations of the soul, and why they should not
also treat of the requirements of our physical nature? From the days of
antiquity we have all known what befell the members when, guided by the
brain, they were foolish enough to revolt against the stomach. The
latter plays a considerable part not only in each individual organism,
but also in the life of the world. Over and over again—I could adduce a
score of historical examples—it has thwarted the mightiest designs of
the human mind. We mortals are much addicted to talking of our minds
and our souls and treating our bodies as mere dross. But I hold—it is a
personal opinion—that in the vast majority of cases the former are
largely governed by the last. I conceive, therefore, that a novel which
takes our daily sustenance as one of its themes has the best of all
_raisons d’être_. A foreign writer of far more consequence and ability
than myself—Signor Edmondo de Amicis—has proclaimed the present book to
be “one of the most original and happiest inventions of French genius,”
and I am strongly inclined to share his opinion.

It should be observed that the work does not merely treat of the
provisioning of a great city. That provisioning is its _scenario_; but
it also embraces a powerful allegory, the prose song of “the eternal
battle between the lean of this world and the fat—a battle in which, as
the author shows, the latter always come off successful. It is, too, in
its way an allegory of the triumph of the fat bourgeois, who lives well
and beds softly, over the gaunt and Ishmael artist—an allegory which M.
Zola has more than once introduced into his pages, another notable
instance thereof being found in ‘Germinal,’ with the fat, well-fed
Gregoires on the one hand, and the starving Maheus on the other.”

From this quotation from Mr. Sherard’s pages it will be gathered that
M. Zola had a distinct social aim in writing this book. Wellnigh the
whole social question may, indeed, be summed up in the words “food and
comfort”; and in a series of novels like “Les Rougon-Macquart,” dealing
firstly with different conditions and grades of society, and, secondly,
with the influence which the Second Empire exercised on France, the
present volume necessarily had its place marked out from the very
first.

Mr. Sherard has told us of all the labour which M. Zola expended on the
preparation of the work, of his multitudinous visits to the Paris
markets, his patient investigation of their organism, and his keen
artistic interest in their manifold phases of life. And bred as I was
in Paris, a partaker as I have been of her exultations and her woes
they have always had for me a strong attraction. My memory goes back to
the earlier years of their existence, and I can well remember many of
the old surroundings which have now disappeared. I can recollect the
last vestiges of the antique _piliers_, built by Francis I, facing the
Rue de la Tonnellerie. Paul Niquet’s, with its “bowel-twisting brandy”
and its crew of drunken ragpickers, was certainly before my time; but I
can readily recall Baratte’s and Bordier’s and all the folly and
prodigality which raged there; I knew, too, several of the noted
thieves’ haunts which took the place of Niquet’s, and which one was
careful never to enter without due precaution. And then, when the
German armies were beleaguering Paris, and two millions of people were
shut off from the world, I often strolled to the Halles to view their
strangely altered aspect. The fish pavilion, of which M. Zola has so
much to say, was bare and deserted. The railway drays, laden with the
comestible treasures of the ocean, no longer thundered through the
covered ways. At the most one found an auction going on in one or
another corner, and a few Seine eels or gudgeons fetching wellnigh
their weight in gold. Then, in the butter and cheese pavilions, one
could only procure some nauseous melted fat, while in the meat
department horse and mule and donkey took the place of beef and veal
and mutton. Mule and donkey were very scarce, and commanded high
prices, but both were of better flavour than horse; mule, indeed, being
quite a delicacy. I also well remember a stall at which dog was sold,
and, hunger knowing no law, I once purchased, cooked, and ate a couple
of canine cutlets which cost me two francs apiece. The flesh was pinky
and very tender, yet I would not willingly make such a repast again.
However, peace and plenty at last came round once more, the Halles
regained their old-time aspect, and in the years which followed I more
than once saw the dawn rise slowly over the mounds of cabbages,
carrots, leeks, and pumpkins, even as M. Zola describes in the
following pages. He has, I think, depicted with remarkable accuracy and
artistic skill the many varying effects of colour that are produced as
the climbing sun casts its early beams on the giant larder and its
masses of food—effects of colour which, to quote a famous saying of the
first Napoleon, show that “the markets of Paris are the Louvre of the
people” in more senses than one.

The reader will bear in mind that the period dealt with by the author
in this work is that of 1857-60, when the new Halles Centrales were yet
young, and indeed not altogether complete. Still, although many old
landmarks have long since been swept away, the picture of life in all
essential particulars remained the same. Prior to 1860 the limits of
Paris were the so-called _boulevards exterieurs_, from which a girdle
of suburbs, such as Montmartre, Belleville, Passy, and Montrouge,
extended to the fortifications; and the population of the city was then
only 1,400,000 souls. Some of the figures which will be found scattered
through M. Zola’s work must therefore be taken as applying entirely to
the past.

Nowadays the amount of business transacted at the Halles has very
largely increased, in spite of the multiplication of district markets.
Paris seems to have an insatiable appetite, though, on the other hand,
its cuisine is fast becoming all simplicity. To my thinking, few more
remarkable changes have come over the Parisians of recent years than
this change of diet. One by one great restaurants, formerly renowned
for particular dishes and special wines, have been compelled through
lack of custom to close their doors; and this has not been caused so
much by inability to defray the cost of high feeding as by inability to
indulge in it with impunity in a physical sense. In fact, Paris has
become a city of impaired digestions, which nowadays seek the
simplicity without the heaviness of the old English cuisine; and,
should things continue in their present course, I fancy that Parisians
anxious for high feeding will ultimately have to cross over to our side
of the Channel.

These remarks, I trust, will not be considered out of place in an
introduction to a work which to no small extent treats of the appetite
of Paris. The reader will find that the characters portrayed by M. Zola
are all types of humble life, but I fail to see that their
circumstances should render them any the less interesting. A faithful
portrait of a shopkeeper, a workman, or a workgirl is artistically of
far more value than all the imaginary sketches of impossible dukes and
good and wicked baronets in which so many English novels abound.
Several of M. Zola’s personages seem to me extremely lifelike—Gavard,
indeed, is a _chef-d’oeuvre_ of portraiture: I have known many men like
him; and no one who lived in Paris under the Empire can deny the
accuracy with which the author has delineated his hero Florent, the
dreamy and hapless revolutionary caught in the toils of others. In
those days, too, there was many such a plot as M. Zola describes,
instigated by agents like Logre and Lebigre, and allowed to mature till
the eve of an election or some other important event which rendered its
exposure desirable for the purpose of influencing public opinion. In
fact, in all that relates to the so-called “conspiracy of the markets,”
M. Zola, whilst changing time and place to suit the requirements of his
story, has simply followed historical lines. As for the Quenus, who
play such prominent parts in the narrative, the husband is a weakling
with no soul above his stewpans, whilst his wife, the beautiful Lisa,
in reality wears the breeches and rules the roast. The manner in which
she cures Quenu of his political proclivities, though savouring of
persuasiveness rather than violence, is worthy of the immortal Mrs.
Caudle: Douglas Jerrold might have signed a certain lecture which she
administers to her astounded helpmate. Of Pauline, the Quenus’
daughter, we see but little in the story, but she becomes the heroine
of another of M. Zola’s novels, “La Joie de Vivre,” and instead of
inheriting the egotism of her parents, develops a passionate love and
devotion for others. In a like way Claude Lantier, Florent’s artist
friend and son of Gervaise of the “Assommoir,” figures more
particularly in “L’Oeuvre,” which tells how his painful struggle for
fame resulted in madness and suicide. With reference to the beautiful
Norman and the other fishwives and gossips scattered through the
present volume, and those genuine types of Parisian _gaminerie_, Muche,
Marjolin, and Cadine, I may mention that I have frequently chastened
their language in deference to English susceptibilities, so that the
story, whilst retaining every essential feature, contains nothing to
which exception can reasonably be taken.

E. A. V.




THE FAT AND THE THIN




CHAPTER I


Amidst the deep silence and solitude prevailing in the avenue several
market gardeners’ carts were climbing the slope which led towards
Paris, and the fronts of the houses, asleep behind the dim lines of
elms on either side of the road, echoed back the rhythmical jolting of
the wheels. At the Neuilly bridge a cart full of cabbages and another
full of peas had joined the eight waggons of carrots and turnips coming
down from Nanterre; and the horses, left to themselves, had continued
plodding along with lowered heads, at a regular though lazy pace, which
the ascent of the slope now slackened. The sleeping waggoners, wrapped
in woollen cloaks, striped black and grey, and grasping the reins
slackly in their closed hands, were stretched at full length on their
stomachs atop of the piles of vegetables. Every now and then, a gas
lamp, following some patch of gloom, would light up the hobnails of a
boot, the blue sleeve of a blouse, or the peak of a cap peering out of
the huge florescence of vegetables—red bouquets of carrots, white
bouquets of turnips, and the overflowing greenery of peas and cabbages.

And all along the road, and along the neighbouring roads, in front and
behind, the distant rumbling of vehicles told of the presence of
similar contingents of the great caravan which was travelling onward
through the gloom and deep slumber of that matutinal hour, lulling the
dark city to continued repose with its echoes of passing food.

Madame Francois’s horse, Balthazar, an animal that was far too fat, led
the van. He was plodding on, half asleep and wagging his ears, when
suddenly, on reaching the Rue de Longchamp, he quivered with fear and
came to a dead stop. The horses behind, thus unexpectedly checked, ran
their heads against the backs of the carts in front of them, and the
procession halted amidst a clattering of bolts and chains and the oaths
of the awakened waggoners. Madame Francois, who sat in front of her
vehicle, with her back to a board which kept her vegetables in
position, looked down; but, in the dim light thrown to the left by a
small square lantern, which illuminated little beyond one of
Balthazar’s sheeny flanks, she could distinguish nothing.

“Come, old woman, let’s get on!” cried one of the men, who had raised
himself to a kneeling position amongst his turnips; “it’s only some
drunken sot.”

Madame Francois, however, had bent forward and on her right hand had
caught sight of a black mass, lying almost under the horse’s hoofs, and
blocking the road.

“You wouldn’t have us drive over a man, would you?” said she, jumping
to the ground.

It was indeed a man lying at full length upon the road, with his arms
stretched out and his face in the dust. He seemed to be remarkably
tall, but as withered as a dry branch, and the wonder was that
Balthazar had not broken him in half with a blow from his hoof. Madame
Francois thought that he was dead; but on stooping and taking hold of
one of his hands, she found that it was quite warm.

“Poor fellow!” she murmured softly.

The waggoners, however, were getting impatient.

“Hurry up, there!” said the man kneeling amongst the turnips, in a
hoarse voice. “He’s drunk till he can hold no more, the hog! Shove him
into the gutter.”

Meantime, the man on the road had opened his eyes. He looked at Madame
Francois with a startled air, but did not move. She herself now thought
that he must indeed be drunk.

“You mustn’t stop here,” she said to him, “or you’ll get run over and
killed. Where were you going?”

“I don’t know,” replied the man in a faint voice.

Then, with an effort and an anxious expression, he added: “I was going
to Paris; I fell down, and don’t remember any more.”

Madame Francois could now see him more distinctly, and he was truly a
pitiable object, with his ragged black coat and trousers, through the
rents in which you could espy his scraggy limbs. Underneath a black
cloth cap, which was drawn low over his brows, as though he were afraid
of being recognised, could be seen two large brown eyes, gleaming with
peculiar softness in his otherwise stern and harassed countenance. It
seemed to Madame Francois that he was in far too famished a condition
to have got drunk.

“And what part of Paris were you going to?” she continued.

The man did not reply immediately. This questioning seemed to distress
him. He appeared to be thinking the matter over, but at last said
hesitatingly, “Over yonder, towards the markets.”

He had now, with great difficulty, got to his feet again, and seemed
anxious to resume his journey. But Madame Francois noticed that he
tottered, and clung for support to one of the shafts of her waggon.

“Are you tired?” she asked him.

“Yes, very tired,” he replied.

Then she suddenly assumed a grumpy tone, as though displeased, and,
giving him a push, exclaimed: “Look sharp, then, and climb into my
cart. You’ve made us lose a lot of time. I’m going to the markets, and
I’ll turn you out there with my vegetables.”

Then, as the man seemed inclined to refuse her offer, she pushed him up
with her stout arms, and bundled him down upon the turnips and carrots.

“Come, now, don’t give us any more trouble,” she cried angrily. “You
are quite enough to provoke one, my good fellow. Don’t I tell you that
I’m going to the markets? Sleep away up there. I’ll wake you when we
arrive.”

She herself then clambered into the cart again, and settled herself
with her back against the board, grasping the reins of Balthazar, who
started off drowsily, swaying his ears once more. The other waggons
followed, and the procession resumed its lazy march through the
darkness, whilst the rhythmical jolting of the wheels again awoke the
echoes of the sleepy house fronts, and the waggoners, wrapped in their
cloaks, dozed off afresh. The one who had called to Madame Francois
growled out as he lay down: “As if we’d nothing better to do than pick
up every drunken sot we come across! You’re a scorcher, old woman!”

The waggons rumbled on, and the horses picked their own way, with
drooping heads. The stranger whom Madame Francois had befriended was
lying on his stomach, with his long legs lost amongst the turnips which
filled the back part of the cart, whilst his face was buried amidst the
spreading piles of carrot bunches. With weary, extended arms he
clutched hold of his vegetable couch in fear of being thrown to the
ground by one of the waggon’s jolts, and his eyes were fixed on the two
long lines of gas lamps which stretched away in front of him till they
mingled with a swarm of other lights in the distance atop of the slope.
Far away on the horizon floated a spreading, whitish vapour, showing
where Paris slept amidst the luminous haze of all those flamelets.

“I come from Nanterre, and my name’s Madame Francois,” said the market
gardener presently. “Since my poor man died I go to the markets every
morning myself. It’s a hard life, as you may guess. And who are you?”

“My name’s Florent, I come from a distance,” replied the stranger, with
embarrassment. “Please excuse me, but I’m really so tired that it is
painful to me to talk.”

He was evidently unwilling to say anything more, and so Madame Francois
relapsed into silence, and allowed the reins to fall loosely on the
back of Balthazar, who went his way like an animal acquainted with
every stone of the road.

Meantime, with his eyes still fixed upon the far-spreading glare of
Paris, Florent was pondering over the story which he had refused to
communicate to Madame Francois. After making his escape from Cayenne,
whither he had been transported for his participation in the resistance
to Louis Napoleon’s Coup d’Etat, he had wandered about Dutch Guiana for
a couple of years, burning to return to France, yet dreading the
Imperial police. At last, however, he once more saw before him the
beloved and mighty city which he had so keenly regretted and so
ardently longed for. He would hide himself there, he told himself, and
again lead the quiet, peaceable life that he had lived years ago. The
police would never be any the wiser; and everyone would imagine,
indeed, that he had died over yonder, across the sea. Then he thought
of his arrival at Havre, where he had landed with only some fifteen
francs tied up in a corner of his handkerchief. He had been able to pay
for a seat in the coach as far as Rouen, but from that point he had
been forced to continue his journey on foot, as he had scarcely thirty
sous left of his little store. At Vernon his last copper had gone in
bread. After that he had no clear recollection of anything. He fancied
that he could remember having slept for several hours in a ditch, and
having shown the papers with which he had provided himself to a
gendarme; however, he had only a very confused idea of what had
happened. He had left Vernon without any breakfast, seized every now
and then with hopeless despair and raging pangs which had driven him to
munch the leaves of the hedges as he tramped along. A prey to cramp and
fright, his body bent, his sight dimmed, and his feet sore, he had
continued his weary march, ever drawn onwards in a semi-unconscious
state by a vision of Paris, which, far, far away, beyond the horizon,
seemed to be summoning him and waiting for him.

When he at length reached Courbevoie, the night was very dark. Paris,
looking like a patch of star-sprent sky that had fallen upon the black
earth, seemed to him to wear a forbidding aspect, as though angry at
his return. Then he felt very faint, and his legs almost gave way
beneath him as he descended the hill. As he crossed the Neuilly bridge
he sustained himself by clinging to the parapet, and bent over and
looked at the Seine rolling inky waves between its dense, massy banks.
A red lamp on the water seemed to be watching him with a sanguineous
eye. And then he had to climb the hill if he would reach Paris on its
summit yonder. The hundreds of leagues which he had already travelled
were as nothing to it. That bit of a road filled him with despair. He
would never be able, he thought, to reach yonder light crowned summit.
The spacious avenue lay before him with its silence and its darkness,
its lines of tall trees and low houses, its broad grey footwalks,
speckled with the shadows of overhanging branches, and parted
occasionally by the gloomy gaps of side streets. The squat yellow
flames of the gas lamps, standing erect at regular intervals, alone
imparted a little life to the lonely wilderness. And Florent seemed to
make no progress; the avenue appeared to grow ever longer and longer,
to be carrying Paris away into the far depths of the night. At last he
fancied that the gas lamps, with their single eyes, were running off on
either hand, whisking the road away with them; and then, overcome by
vertigo, he stumbled and fell on the roadway like a log.

Now he was lying at ease on his couch of greenery, which seemed to him
soft as a feather bed. He had slightly raised his head so as to keep
his eyes on the luminous haze which was spreading above the dark roofs
which he could divine on the horizon. He was nearing his goal, carried
along towards it, with nothing to do but to yield to the leisurely
jolts of the waggon; and, free from all further fatigue, he now only
suffered from hunger. Hunger, indeed, had once more awoke within him
with frightful and wellnigh intolerable pangs. His limbs seemed to have
fallen asleep; he was only conscious of the existence of his stomach,
horribly cramped and twisted as by a red-hot iron. The fresh odour of
the vegetables, amongst which he was lying, affected him so keenly that
he almost fainted away. He strained himself against that piled-up mass
of food with all his remaining strength, in order to compress his
stomach and silence its groans. And the nine other waggons behind him,
with their mountains of cabbages and peas, their piles of artichokes,
lettuces, celery, and leeks, seemed to him to be slowly overtaking him,
as though to bury him whilst he was thus tortured by hunger beneath an
avalanche of food. Presently the procession halted, and there was a
sound of deep voices. They had reached the barriers, and the municipal
customs officers were examining the waggons. A moment later Florent
entered Paris, in a swoon, lying atop of the carrots, with clenched
teeth.

“Hallow! You up there!” Madame Francois called out sharply.

And as the stranger made no attempt to move, she clambered up and shook
him. Florent rose to a sitting posture. He had slept and no longer felt
the pangs of hunger, but was dizzy and confused.

“You’ll help me to unload, won’t you?” Madame Francois said to him, as
she made him get down.

He helped her. A stout man with a felt hat on his head and a badge in
the top buttonhole of his coat was striking the ground with a stick and
grumbling loudly:

“Come, come, now, make haste! You must get on faster than that! Bring
the waggon a little more forward. How many yards’ standing have you?
Four, isn’t it?”

Then he gave a ticket to Madame Francois, who took some coppers out of
a little canvas bag and handed them to him; whereupon he went off to
vent his impatience and tap the ground with his stick a little further
away. Madame Francois took hold of Balthazar’s bridle and backed him so
as to bring the wheels of the waggon close to the footway. Then, having
marked out her four yards with some wisps of straw, after removing the
back of the cart, she asked Florent to hand her the vegetables bunch by
bunch. She arranged them sort by sort on her standing, setting them out
artistically, the “tops” forming a band of greenery around each pile;
and it was with remarkable rapidity that she completed her show, which,
in the gloom of early morning, looked like some piece of symmetrically
coloured tapestry. When Florent had handed her a huge bunch of parsley,
which he had found at the bottom of the cart, she asked him for still
another service.

“It would be very kind of you,” said she, “if you would look after my
goods while I put the horse and cart up. I’m only going a couple of
yards, to the Golden Compasses, in the Rue Montorgueil.”

Florent told her that she might make herself easy. He preferred to
remain still, for his hunger had revived since he had begun to move
about. He sat down and leaned against a heap of cabbages beside Madame
Francois’s stock. He was all right there, he told himself, and would
not go further afield, but wait. His head felt empty, and he had no
very clear notion as to where he was. At the beginning of September it
is quite dark in the early morning. Around him lighted lanterns were
flitting or standing stationary in the depths of the gloom. He was
sitting on one side of a broad street which he did not recognise; it
stretched far away into the blackness of the night. He could make out
nothing plainly, excepting the stock of which he had been left in
charge. All around him along the market footways rose similar piles of
goods. The middle of the roadway was blocked by huge grey tumbrels, and
from one end of the street to the other a sound of heavy breathing
passed, betokening the presence of horses which the eye could not
distinguish.

Shouts and calls, the noise of falling wood, or of iron chains slipping
to the ground, the heavy thud of loads of vegetables discharged from
the waggons, and the grating of wheels as the carts were backed against
the footways, filled the yet sonorous awakening, whose near approach
could be felt and heard in the throbbing gloom. Glancing over the pile
of cabbages behind him. Florent caught sight of a man wrapped like a
parcel in his cloak, and snoring away with his head upon some baskets
of plums. Nearer to him, on his left, he could distinguish a lad, some
ten years old, slumbering between two heaps of endive, with an angelic
smile on his face. And as yet there seemed to be nothing on that
pavement that was really awake except the lanterns waving from
invisible arms, and flitting and skipping over the sleep of the
vegetables and human beings spread out there in heaps pending the dawn.
However, what surprised Florent was the sight of some huge pavilions on
either side of the street, pavilions with lofty roofs that seemed to
expand and soar out of sight amidst a swarm of gleams. In his weakened
state of mind he fancied he beheld a series of enormous, symmetrically
built palaces, light and airy as crystal, whose fronts sparkled with
countless streaks of light filtering through endless Venetian shutters.
Gleaming between the slender pillar shafts these narrow golden bars
seemed like ladders of light mounting to the gloomy line of the lower
roofs, and then soaring aloft till they reached the jumble of higher
ones, thus describing the open framework of immense square halls, where
in the yellow flare of the gas lights a multitude of vague, grey,
slumbering things was gathered together.

At last Florent turned his head to look about him, distressed at not
knowing where he was, and filled with vague uneasiness by the sight of
that huge and seemingly fragile vision. And now, as he raised his eyes,
he caught sight of the luminous dial and the grey massive pile of Saint
Eustache’s Church. At this he was much astonished. He was close to
Saint Eustache, yet all was novel to him.

However, Madame Francois had come back again, and was engaged in a
heated discussion with a man who carried a sack over his shoulder and
offered to buy her carrots for a sou a bunch.

“Really, now, you are unreasonable, Lacaille!” said she. “You know
quite well that you will sell them again to the Parisians at four and
five sous the bunch. Don’t tell me that you won’t! You may have them
for two sous the bunch, if you like.”

Then, as the man went off, she continued: “Upon my word, I believe some
people think that things grow of their own accord! Let him go and find
carrots at a sou the bunch elsewhere, tipsy scoundrel that he is! He’ll
come back again presently, you’ll see.”

These last remarks were addressed to Florent. And, seating herself by
his side, Madame Francois resumed: “If you’ve been a long time away
from Paris, you perhaps don’t know the new markets. They haven’t been
built for more than five years at the most. That pavilion you see there
beside us is the flower and fruit market. The fish and poultry markets
are farther away, and over there behind us come the vegetables and the
butter and cheese. There are six pavilions on this side, and on the
other side, across the road, there are four more, with the meat and the
tripe stalls. It’s an enormous place, but it’s horribly cold in the
winter. They talk about pulling down the houses near the corn market to
make room for two more pavilions. But perhaps you know all this?”

“No, indeed,” replied Florent; “I’ve been abroad. And what’s the name
of that big street in front of us?”

“Oh, that’s a new street. It’s called the Rue du Pont Neuf. It leads
from the Seine through here to the Rue Montmartre and the Rue
Montorgueil. You would soon have recognized where you were if it had
been daylight.”

Madame Francois paused and rose, for she saw a woman heading down to
examine her turnips. “Ah, is that you, Mother Chantemesse?” she said in
a friendly way.

Florent meanwhile glanced towards the Rue Montorgueil. It was there
that a body of police officers had arrested him on the night of
December 4.[*] He had been walking along the Boulevard Montmartre at
about two o’clock, quietly making his way through the crowd, and
smiling at the number of soldiers that the Elysee had sent into the
streets to awe the people, when the military suddenly began making a
clean sweep of the thoroughfare, shooting folks down at close range
during a quarter of an hour. Jostled and knocked to the ground, Florent
fell at the corner of the Rue Vivienne and knew nothing further of what
happened, for the panic-stricken crowd, in their wild terror of being
shot, trampled over his body. Presently, hearing everything quiet, he
made an attempt to rise; but across him there lay a young woman in a
pink bonnet, whose shawl had slipped aside, allowing her chemisette,
pleated in little tucks, to be seen. Two bullets had pierced the upper
part of her bosom; and when Florent gently removed the poor creature to
free his legs, two streamlets of blood oozed from her wounds on to his
hands. Then he sprang up with a sudden bound, and rushed madly away,
hatless and with his hands still wet with blood. Until evening he
wandered about the streets, with his head swimming, ever seeing the
young woman lying across his legs with her pale face, her blue staring
eyes, her distorted lips, and her expression of astonishment at thus
meeting death so suddenly. He was a shy, timid fellow. Albeit thirty
years old he had never dared to stare women in the face; and now, for
the rest of his life, he was to have that one fixed in his heart and
memory. He felt as though he had lost some loved one of his own.

[*] 1851. Two days after the Coup d’Etat.—Translator.


In the evening, without knowing how he had got there, still dazed and
horrified as he was by the terrible scenes of the afternoon, he had
found himself at a wine shop in the Rue Montorgueil, where several men
were drinking and talking of throwing up barricades. He went away with
them, helped them to tear up a few paving-stones, and seated himself on
the barricade, weary with his long wandering through the streets, and
reflecting that he would fight when the soldiers came up. However, he
had not even a knife with him, and was still bareheaded. Towards eleven
o’clock he dozed off, and in his sleep could see the two holes in the
dead woman’s white chemisette glaring at him like eyes reddened by
tears and blood. When he awoke he found himself in the grasp of four
police officers, who were pummelling him with their fists. The men who
had built the barricade had fled. The police officers treated him with
still greater violence, and indeed almost strangled him when they
noticed that his hands were stained with blood. It was the blood of the
young woman.

Florent raised his eyes to the luminous dial of Saint Eustache with his
mind so full of these recollections that he did not notice the position
of the pointers. It was, however, nearly four o’clock. The markets were
as yet wrapped in sleep. Madame Francois was still talking to old
Madame Chantemesse, both standing and arguing about the price of
turnips, and Florent now called to mind how narrowly he had escaped
being shot over yonder by the wall of Saint Eustache. A detachment of
gendarmes had just blown out the brains of five unhappy fellows caught
at a barricade in the Rue Greneta. The five corpses were lying on the
footway, at a spot where he thought he could now distinguish a heap of
rosy radishes. He himself had escaped being shot merely because the
policemen only carried swords. They took him to a neighbouring police
station and gave the officer in charge a scrap of paper, on which were
these words written in pencil: “Taken with blood-stained hands. Very
dangerous.” Then he had been dragged from station to station till the
morning came. The scrap of paper accompanied him wherever he went. He
was manacled and guarded as though he were a raving madman. At the
station in the Rue de la Lingerie some tipsy soldiers wanted to shoot
him; and they had already lighted a lantern with that object when the
order arrived for the prisoners to be taken to the depot of the
Prefecture of Police. Two days afterwards he found himself in a
casemate of the fort of Bicêtre. Ever since then he had been suffering
from hunger. He had felt hungry in the casemate, and the pangs of
hunger had never since left him. A hundred men were pent in the depths
of that cellar-like dungeon, where, scarce able to breathe, they
devoured the few mouthfuls of bread that were thrown to them, like so
many captive wild beasts.

When Florent was brought before an investigating magistrate, without
anyone to defend him, and without any evidence being adduced, he was
accused of belonging to a secret society; and when he swore that this
was untrue, the magistrate produced the scrap of paper from amongst the
documents before him: “Taken with blood-stained hands. Very dangerous.”
That was quite sufficient. He was condemned to transportation. Six
weeks afterwards, one January night, a gaoler awoke him and locked him
up in a courtyard with more than four hundred other prisoners. An hour
later this first detachment started for the pontoons and exile,
handcuffed and guarded by a double file of gendarmes with loaded
muskets. They crossed the Austerlitz bridge, followed the line of the
boulevards, and so reached the terminus of the Western Railway line. It
was a joyous carnival night. The windows of the restaurants on the
boulevards glittered with lights. At the top of the Rue Vivienne, just
at the spot where he ever saw the young woman lying dead—that unknown
young woman whose image he always bore with him—he now beheld a large
carriage in which a party of masked women, with bare shoulders and
laughing voices, were venting their impatience at being detained, and
expressing their horror of that endless procession of convicts. The
whole of the way from Paris to Havre the prisoners never received a
mouthful of bread or a drink of water. The officials had forgotten to
give them their rations before starting, and it was not till thirty-six
hours afterwards, when they had been stowed away in the hold of the
frigate _Canada_, that they at last broke their fast.

No, Florent had never again been free from hunger. He recalled all the
past to mind, but could not recollect a single hour of satiety. He had
become dry and withered; his stomach seemed to have shrunk; his skin
clung to his bones. And now that he was back in Paris once more, he
found it fat and sleek and flourishing, teeming with food in the midst
of the darkness. He had returned to it on a couch of vegetables; he
lingered in its midst encompassed by unknown masses of food which still
and ever increased and disquieted him. Had that happy carnival night
continued throughout those seven years, then? Once again he saw the
glittering windows on the boulevards, the laughing women, the
luxurious, greedy city which he had quitted on that far-away January
night; and it seemed to him that everything had expanded and increased
in harmony with those huge markets, whose gigantic breathing, still
heavy from the indigestion of the previous day, he now began to hear.

Old Mother Chantemesse had by this time made up her mind to buy a dozen
bunches of turnips. She put them in her apron, which she held closely
pressed to her person, thus making herself look yet more corpulent than
she was; and for some time longer she lingered there, still gossiping
in a drawling voice. When at last she went away, Madame Francois again
sat down by the side of Florent.

“Poor old Mother Chantemesse!” she said; “she must be at least
seventy-two. I can remember her buying turnips of my father when I was
a mere chit. And she hasn’t a relation in the world; no one but a young
hussy whom she picked up I don’t know where and who does nothing but
bring her trouble. Still, she manages to live, selling things by the
ha’p’orth and clearing her couple of francs profit a day. For my own
part, I’m sure that I could never spend my days on the foot-pavement in
this horrid Paris! And she hasn’t even any relations here!”

“You have some relations in Paris, I suppose?” she asked presently,
seeing that Florent seemed disinclined to talk.

Florent did not appear to hear her. A feeling of distrust came back to
him. His head was teeming with old stories of the police, stories of
spies prowling about at every street corner, and of women selling the
secrets which they managed to worm out of the unhappy fellows they
deluded. Madame Francois was sitting close beside him and certainly
looked perfectly straightforward and honest, with her big calm face,
above which was bound a black and yellow handkerchief. She seemed about
five and thirty years of age, and was somewhat stoutly built, with a
certain hardy beauty due to her life in the fresh air. A pair of black
eyes, which beamed with kindly tenderness, softened the more masculine
characteristics of her person. She certainly was inquisitive, but her
curiosity was probably well meant.

“I’ve a nephew in Paris,” she continued, without seeming at all
offended by Florent’s silence. “He’s turned out badly though, and has
enlisted. It’s a pleasant thing to have somewhere to go to and stay at,
isn’t it? I dare say there’s a big surprise in store for your relations
when they see you. But it’s always a pleasure to welcome one of one’s
own people back again, isn’t it?”

She kept her eyes fixed upon him while she spoke, doubtless
compassionating his extreme scragginess; fancying, too, that there was
a “gentleman” inside those old black rags, and so not daring to slip a
piece of silver into his hand. At last, however, she timidly murmured:
“All the same, if you should happen just at present to be in want of
anything——”

But Florent checked her with uneasy pride. He told her that he had
everything he required, and had a place to go to. She seemed quite
pleased to hear this, and, as though to tranquillise herself concerning
him, repeated several times: “Well, well, in that case you’ve only got
to wait till daylight.”

A large bell at the corner of the fruit market, just over Florent’s
head, now began to ring. The slow regular peals seemed to gradually
dissipate the slumber that yet lingered all around. Carts were still
arriving, and the shouts of the waggoners, the cracking of their whips,
and the grinding of the paving-stones beneath the iron-bound wheels and
the horses’ shoes sounded with an increasing din. The carts could now
only advance by a series of spasmodic jolts, and stretched in a long
line, one behind the other, till they were lost to sight in the distant
darkness, whence a confused roar ascended.

Unloading was in progress all along the Rue du Pont Neuf, the vehicles
being drawn up close to the edge of the footways, while their teams
stood motionless in close order as at a horse fair. Florent felt
interested in one enormous tumbrel which was piled up with magnificent
cabbages, and had only been backed to the kerb with the greatest
difficulty. Its load towered above the lofty gas lamp whose bright
light fell full upon the broad leaves which looked like pieces of dark
green velvet, scalloped and goffered. A young peasant girl, some
sixteen years old, in a blue linen jacket and cap, had climbed on to
the tumbrel, where, buried in the cabbages to her shoulders, she took
them one by one and threw them to somebody concealed in the shade
below. Every now and then the girl would slip and vanish, overwhelmed
by an avalanche of the vegetables, but her rosy nose soon reappeared
amidst the teeming greenery, and she broke into a laugh while the
cabbages again flew down between Florent and the gas lamp. He counted
them mechanically as they fell. When the cart was emptied he felt
worried.

The piles of vegetables on the pavement now extended to the verge of
the roadway. Between the heaps, the market gardeners left narrow paths
to enable people to pass along. The whole of the wide footway was
covered from end to end with dark mounds. As yet, in the sudden dancing
gleams of light from the lanterns, you only just espied the luxuriant
fulness of the bundles of artichokes, the delicate green of the
lettuces, the rosy coral of the carrots, and dull ivory of the turnips.
And these gleams of rich colour flitted along the heaps, according as
the lanterns came and went. The footway was now becoming populated: a
crowd of people had awakened, and was moving hither and thither amidst
the vegetables, stopping at times, and chattering and shouting. In the
distance a loud voice could be heard crying, “Endive! who’s got
endive?” The gates of the pavilion devoted to the sale of ordinary
vegetables had just been opened; and the retail dealers who had stalls
there, with white caps on their heads, fichus knotted over their black
jackets, and skirts pinned up to keep them from getting soiled, now
began to secure their stock for the day, depositing their purchases in
some huge porters’ baskets placed upon the ground. Between the roadway
and the pavilion these baskets were to be seen coming and going on all
sides, knocking against the crowded heads of the bystanders, who
resented the pushing with coarse expressions, whilst all around was a
clamour of voices growing hoarse by prolonged wrangling over a sou or
two. Florent was astonished by the calmness of the female market
gardeners, with bandanas and bronzed faces, displayed amidst all this
garrulous bargaining of the markets.

Behind him, on the footway of the Rue Rambuteau, fruit was being sold.
Hampers and low baskets covered with canvas or straw stood there in
long lines, a strong odour of over-ripe mirabelle plums was wafted
hither and thither. At last a subdued and gentle voice, which he had
heard for some time past, induced him to turn his head, and he saw a
charming darksome little woman sitting on the ground and bargaining.

“Come now, Marcel,” said she, “you’ll take a hundred sous, won’t you?”

The man to whom she was speaking was closely wrapped in his cloak and
made no reply; however, after a silence of five minutes or more, the
young woman returned to the charge.

“Come now, Marcel; a hundred sous for that basket there, and four
francs for the other one; that’ll make nine francs altogether.”

Then came another interval.

“Well, tell me what you will take.”

“Ten francs. You know that well enough already; I told you so before.
But what have you done with your Jules this morning, La Sarriette?”

The young woman began to laugh as she took a handful of small change
out of her pocket.

“Oh,” she replied, “Jules is still in bed. He says that men were not
intended to work.”

She paid for the two baskets, and carried them into the fruit pavilion,
which had just been opened. The market buildings still retained their
gloom-wrapped aspect of airy fragility, streaked with the thousand
lines of light that gleamed from the venetian shutters. People were
beginning to pass along the broad covered streets intersecting the
pavilions, but the more distant buildings still remained deserted
amidst the increasing buzz of life on the footways. By Saint Eustache
the bakers and wine sellers were taking down their shutters, and the
ruddy shops, with their gas lights flaring, showed like gaps of fire in
the gloom in which the grey house-fronts were yet steeped. Florent
noticed a baker’s shop on the left-hand side of the Rue Montorgueil,
replete and golden with its last baking, and fancied he could scent the
pleasant smell of the hot bread. It was now half past four.

Madame Francois by this time had disposed of nearly all her stock. She
had only a few bunches of carrots left when Lacaille once more made his
appearance with his sack.

“Well,” said he, “will you take a sou now?”

“I knew I should see you again,” the good woman quietly answered.
“You’d better take all I have left. There are seventeen bunches.”

“That makes seventeen sous.”

“No; thirty-four.”

At last they agreed to fix the price at twenty-five sous. Madame
Francois was anxious to be off.

“He’d been keeping his eye upon me all the time,” she said to Florent,
when Lacaille had gone off with the carrots in his sack. “That old
rogue runs things down all over the markets, and he often waits till
the last peal of the bell before spending four sous in purchase. Oh,
these Paris folk! They’ll wrangle and argue for an hour to save half a
sou, and then go off and empty their purses at the wine shop.”

Whenever Madame Francois talked of Paris she always spoke in a tone of
disdain, and referred to the city as though it were some ridiculous,
contemptible, far-away place, in which she only condescended to set
foot at nighttime.

“There!” she continued, sitting down again, beside Florent, on some
vegetables belonging to a neighbour, “I can get away now.”

Florent bent his head. He had just committed a theft. When Lacaille
went off he had caught sight of a carrot lying on the ground, and
having picked it up he was holding it tightly in his right hand. Behind
him were some bundles of celery and bunches of parsley were diffusing
pungent odours which painfully affected him.

“Well, I’m off now!” said Madame Francois.

However, she felt interested in this stranger, and could divine that he
was suffering there on that foot-pavement, from which he had never
stirred. She made him fresh offers of assistance, but he again refused
them, with a still more bitter show of pride. He even got up and
remained standing to prove that he was quite strong again. Then, as
Madame Francois turned her head away, he put the carrot to his mouth.
But he had to remove it for a moment, in spite of the terrible longing
which he felt to dig his teeth into it; for Madame Francois turned
round again and looking him full in the face, began to question him
with her good-natured womanly curiosity. Florent, to avoid speaking,
merely answered by nods and shakes of the head. Then, slowly and
gently, he began to eat the carrot.

The worthy woman was at last on the point of going off, when a powerful
voice exclaimed close beside her, “Good morning, Madame Francois.”

The speaker was a slim young man, with big bones and a big head. His
face was bearded, and he had a very delicate nose and narrow sparkling
eyes. He wore on his head a rusty, battered, black felt hat, and was
buttoned up in an immense overcoat, which had once been of a soft
chestnut hue, but which rain had discoloured and streaked with long
greenish stains. Somewhat bent, and quivering with a nervous
restlessness which was doubtless habitual with him, he stood there in a
pair of heavy laced shoes, and the shortness of his trousers allowed a
glimpse of his coarse blue hose.

“Good morning, Monsieur Claude,” the market gardener replied
cheerfully. “I expected you, you know, last Monday, and, as you didn’t
come, I’ve taken care of your canvas for you. I’ve hung it up on a nail
in my room.”

“You are really very kind, Madame Francois. I’ll go to finish that
study of mine one of these days. I wasn’t able to go on Monday. Has
your big plum tree still got all its leaves?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“I wanted to know, because I mean to put it in a corner of the picture.
It will come in nicely by the side of the fowl house. I have been
thinking about it all the week. What lovely vegetables are in the
market this morning! I came down very early, expecting a fine sunrise
effect upon all these heaps of cabbages.”

With a wave of the arm he indicated the footway.

“Well, well, I must be off now,” said Madame Francois. “Good-bye for
the present. We shall meet again soon, I hope, Monsieur Claude.”

However, as she turned to go, she introduced Florent to the young
artist.

“This gentleman, it seems, has just come from a distance,” said she.
“He feels quite lost in your scampish Paris. I dare say you might be of
service to him.”

Then she at last took her departure, feeling pleased at having left the
two men together. Claude looked at Florent with a feeling of interest.
That tall, slight, wavy figure seemed to him original. Madame
Francois’s hasty presentation was in his eyes quite sufficient, and he
addressed Florent with the easy familiarity of a lounger accustomed to
all sorts of chance encounters.

“I’ll accompany you,” he said; “which way are you going?”

Florent felt ill at ease; he was not wont to unbosom himself so
readily. However, ever since his arrival in Paris, a question had been
trembling on his lips, and now he ventured to ask it, with the evident
fear of receiving an unfavourable reply.

“Is the Rue Pirouette still in existence?”

“Oh, yes,” answered the artist. “A very curious corner of old Paris is
the Rue Pirouette. It twists and turns like a dancing girl, and the
houses bulge out like pot-bellied gluttons. I’ve made an etching of it
that isn’t half bad. I’ll show it to you when you come to see me. Is it
to the Rue Pirouette that you want to go?”

Florent, who felt easier and more cheerful now that he knew the street
still existed, declared that he did not want to go there; in fact, he
did not want to go anywhere in particular. All his distrust awoke into
fresh life at Claude’s insistence.

“Oh! never mind,” said the artist, “let’s go to the Rue Pirouette all
the same. It has such a fine colour at night time. Come along; it’s
only a couple of yards away.”

Florent felt constrained to follow him, and the two men walked off,
side by side, stepping over the hampers and vegetables like a couple of
old friends. On the footway of the Rue Rambuteau there were some
immense heaps of cauliflowers, symmetrically piled up like so many
cannonballs. The soft-white flowers spread out like huge roses in the
midst of their thick green leaves, and the piles had something of the
appearance of bridal bouquets ranged in a row in colossal flower
stands. Claude stopped in front of them, venting cries of admiration.

Then, on turning into the Rue Pirouette, which was just opposite, he
pointed out each house to his companion, and explained his views
concerning it. There was only a single gas lamp, burning in a corner.
The buildings, which had settled down and swollen, threw their
pent-houses forward in such wise as to justify Claude’s allusion to
pot-bellied gluttons, whilst their gables receded, and on either side
they clung to their neighbours for support. Three or four, however,
standing in gloomy recesses, appeared to be on the point of toppling
forward. The solitary gas lamp illumined one which was snowy with a
fresh coat of whitewash, suggesting some flabby broken-down old
dowager, powdered and bedaubed in the hope of appearing young. Then the
others stretched away into the darkness, bruised, dented, and cracked,
greeny with the fall of water from their roofs, and displaying such an
extraordinary variety of attitudes and tints that Claude could not
refrain from laughing as he contemplated them.

Florent, however, came to stand at the corner of the rue de Mondetour,
in front of the last house but one on the left. Here the three floors,
each with two shutterless windows, having little white curtains closely
drawn, seemed wrapped in sleep; but, up above, a light could be seen
flitting behind the curtains of a tiny gable casement. However, the
sight of the shop beneath the pent-house seemed to fill Florent with
the deepest emotion. It was kept by a dealer in cooked vegetables, and
was just being opened. At its far end some metal pans were glittering,
while on several earthen ones in the window there was a display of
cooked spinach and endive, reduced to a paste and arranged in conical
mounds from which customers were served with shovel-like carvers of
white metal, only the handles of which were visible. This sight seemed
to rivet Florent to the ground with surprise. He evidently could not
recognize the place. He read the name of the shopkeeper, Godeboeuf,
which was painted on a red sign board up above, and remained quite
overcome by consternation. His arms dangling beside him, he began to
examine the cooked spinach, with the despairing air of one on whom some
supreme misfortune falls.

However, the gable casement was now opened, and a little old woman
leaned out of it, and looked first at the sky and then at the markets
in the distance.

“Ah, Mademoiselle Saget is an early riser,” exclaimed Claude, who had
just raised his head. And, turning to his companion, he added: “I once
had an aunt living in that house. It’s a regular hive of tittle-tattle!
Ah, the Mehudins are stirring now, I see. There’s a light on the second
floor.”

Florent would have liked to question his companion, but the latter’s
long discoloured overcoat give him a disquieting appearance. So without
a word Florent followed him, whilst he went on talking about the
Mehudins. These Mehudins were fish-girls, it seemed; the older one was
a magnificent creature, while the younger one, who sold fresh-water
fish, reminded Claude of one of Murillo’s virgins, whenever he saw her
standing with her fair face amidst her carps and eels.

From this Claude went on to remark with asperity that Murillo painted
like an ignoramus. But all at once he stopped short in the middle of
the street.

“Come!” he exclaimed, “tell me where it is that you want to go.”

“I don’t want to go anywhere just at present,” replied Florent in
confusion. “Let’s go wherever you like.”

Just as they were leaving the Rue Pirouette, some one called to Claude
from a wine shop at the corner of the street. The young man went in,
dragging Florent with him. The shutters had been taken down on one side
only, and the gas was still burning in the sleepy atmosphere of the
shop. A forgotten napkin and some cards that had been used in the
previous evening’s play were still lying on the tables; and the fresh
breeze that streamed in through the open doorway freshened the close,
warm vinous air. The landlord, Monsieur Lebigre, was serving his
customers. He wore a sleeved waistcoat, and his fat regular features,
fringed by an untidy beard, were still pale with sleep. Standing in
front of the counter, groups of men, with heavy, tired eyes, were
drinking, coughing, and spitting, whilst trying to rouse themselves by
the aid of white wine and brandy. Amongst them Florent recognised
Lacaille, whose sack now overflowed with various sorts of vegetables.
He was taking his third dram with a friend, who was telling him a long
story about the purchase of a hamper of potatoes.[*] When he had
emptied his glass, he went to chat with Monsieur Lebigre in a little
glazed compartment at the end of the room, where the gas had not yet
been lighted.

[*] At the Paris central markets potatoes are sold by the hamper, not
by the sack as in England.—Translator.


“What will you take?” Claude asked of Florent.

He had on entering grasped the hand of the person who had called out to
him. This was a market porter,[*] a well-built young man of two and
twenty at the most. His cheeks and chin were clean-shaven, but he wore
a small moustache, and looked a sprightly, strapping fellow with his
broad-brimmed hat covered with chalk, and his wool-worked neck-piece,
the straps falling from which tightened his short blue blouse. Claude,
who called him Alexandre, patted his arms, and asked him when they were
going to Charentonneau again. Then they talked about a grand excursion
they had made together in a boat on the Marne, when they had eaten a
rabbit for supper in the evening.

[*] _Fort_ is the French term, literally “a strong man,” as every
market porter needs to be.—Translator.


“Well, what will you take?” Claude again asked Florent.

The latter looked at the counter in great embarrassment. At one end of
it some stoneware pots, encircled with brass bands and containing punch
and hot wine, were standing over the short blue flames of a gas stove.
Florent at last confessed that a glass of something warm would be
welcome. Monsieur Lebigre thereupon served them with three glasses of
punch. In a basket near the pots were some smoking hot rolls which had
only just arrived. However, as neither of the others took one, Florent
likewise refrained, and drank his punch. He felt it slipping down into
his empty stomach, like a steam of molten lead. It was Alexandre who
paid for the “shout.”

“He’s a fine fellow, that Alexandre!” said Claude, when he and Florent
found themselves alone again on the footway of the Rue Rambuteau. “He’s
a very amusing companion to take into the country. He’s fond of showing
his strength. And then he’s so magnificently built! I have seen him
stripped. Ah, if I could only get him to pose for me in the nude out in
the open air! Well, we’ll go and take a turn through the markets now,
if you like.”

Florent followed, yielding entirely to his new friend’s guidance. A
bright glow at the far end of the Rue Rambuteau announced the break of
day. The far-spreading voice of the markets was become more sonorous,
and every now and then the peals of a bell ringing in some distant
pavilion mingled with the swelling, rising clamour. Claude and Florent
entered one of the covered streets between the fish and poultry
pavilions. Florent raised his eyes and looked at the lofty vault
overhead, the inner timbers of which glistened amidst a black lacework
of iron supports. As he turned into the great central thoroughfare he
pictured himself in some strange town, with its various districts and
suburbs, promenades and streets, squares and cross-roads, all suddenly
placed under shelter on a rainy day by the whim of some gigantic power.
The deep gloom brooding in the hollows of the roofs multiplied, as it
were, the forest of pillars, and infinitely increased the number of the
delicate ribs, railed galleries, and transparent shutters. And over the
phantom city and far away into the depths of the shade, a teeming,
flowering vegetation of luxuriant metal-work, with spindle-shaped stems
and twining knotted branches, covered the vast expanse as with the
foliage of some ancient forest. Several departments of the markets
still slumbered behind their closed iron gates. The butter and poultry
pavilions displayed rows of little trellised stalls and long alleys,
which lines of gas lights showed to be deserted. The fish market,
however, had just been opened, and women were flitting to and fro
amongst the white slabs littered with shadowy hampers and cloths. Among
the vegetables and fruit and flowers the noise and bustle were
gradually increasing. The whole place was by degree waking up, from the
popular quarter where the cabbages are piled at four o’clock in the
morning, to the lazy and wealthy district which only hangs up its
pullets and pheasants when the hands of the clock point to eight.

The great covered alleys were now teeming with life. All along the
footways on both sides of the road there were still many market
gardeners, with other small growers from the environs of Paris, who
displayed baskets containing their “gatherings” of the previous
evening—bundles of vegetables and clusters of fruit. Whilst the crowd
incessantly paced hither and thither, vehicles barred the road; and
Florent, in order to pass them, had to press against some dingy sacks,
like coal-sacks in appearance, and so numerous and heavy that the
axle-trees of the vans bent beneath them. They were quite damp, and
exhaled a fresh odour of seaweed. From a rent low down in the side of
one of them a black stream of big mussels was trickling.

Florent and Claude had now to pause at every step. The fish was
arriving and one after another the drays of the railway companies drove
up laden with wooden cages full of the hampers and baskets that had
come by train from the sea coast. And to get out of the way of the fish
drays, which became more and more numerous and disquieting, the artist
and Florent rushed amongst the wheels of the drays laden with butter
and eggs and cheese, huge yellow vehicles bearing coloured lanterns,
and drawn by four horses. The market porters carried the cases of eggs,
and baskets of cheese and butter, into the auction pavilion, where
clerks were making entries in note books by the light of the gas.

Claude was quite charmed with all this uproar, and forgot everything to
gaze at some effect of light, some group of blouses, or the picturesque
unloading of a cart. At last they extricated themselves from the crowd,
and as they continued on their way along the main artery they presently
found themselves amidst an exquisite perfume which seemed to be
following them. They were in the cut-flower market. All over the
footways, to the right and left, women were seated in front of large
rectangular baskets full of bunches of roses, violets, dahlias, and
marguerites. At times the clumps darkened and looked like splotches of
blood, at others they brightened into silvery greys of the softest
tones. A lighted candle, standing near one basket, set amidst the
general blackness quite a melody of colour—the bright variegations of
marguerites, the blood-red crimson of dahlias, the bluey purple of
violets, and the warm flesh tints of roses. And nothing could have been
sweeter or more suggestive of springtide than this soft breath of
perfume encountered on the footway, on emerging from the sharp odours
of the fish market and the pestilential smell of the butter and the
cheese.

Claude and Florent turned round and strolled about, loitering among the
flowers. They halted with some curiosity before several women who were
selling bunches of fern and bundles of vine-leaves, neatly tied up in
packets of five and twenty. Then they turned down another covered
alley, which was almost deserted, and where their footsteps echoed as
though they had been walking through a church. Here they found a little
cart, scarcely larger than a wheelbarrow, to which was harnessed a
diminutive donkey, who, no doubt, felt bored, for at sight of them he
began braying with such prolonged and sonorous force that the vast
roofing of the markets fairly trembled. Then the horses began to neigh
in reply, there was a sound of pawing and tramping, a distant uproar,
which swelled, rolled along, then died away.

Meantime, in the Rue Berger in front of them, Claude and Florent
perceived a number of bare, frontless, salesmen’s shops, where, by the
light of flaring gas jets, they could distinguish piles of hampers and
fruit, enclosed by three dirty walls which were covered with addition
sums in pencil. And the two wanderers were still standing there,
contemplating this scene, when they noticed a well-dressed woman
huddled up in a cab which looked quite lost and forlorn in the block of
carts as it stealthily made its way onwards.

“There’s Cinderella coming back without her slippers,” remarked Claude
with a smile.

They began chatting together as they went back towards the markets.
Claude whistled as he strolled along with his hands in his pockets, and
expatiated on his love for this mountain of food which rises every
morning in the very centre of Paris. He prowled about the footways
night after night, dreaming of colossal still-life subjects, paintings
of an extraordinary character. He had even started on one, having his
friend Marjolin and that jade Cadine to pose for him; but it was hard
work to paint those confounded vegetables and fruit and fish and
meat—they were all so beautiful! Florent listened to the artist’s
enthusiastic talk with a void and hunger-aching stomach. It did not
seem to occur to Claude that all those things were intended to be
eaten. Their charm for him lay in their colour. Suddenly, however, he
ceased speaking and, with a gesture that was habitual to him, tightened
the long red sash which he wore under his green-stained coat.

And then with a sly expression he resumed:

“Besides, I breakfast here, through my eyes, at any rate, and that’s
better than getting nothing at all. Sometimes, when I’ve forgotten to
dine on the previous day, I treat myself to a perfect fit of
indigestion in the morning by watching the carts arrive here laden with
all sorts of good things. On such mornings as those I love my
vegetables more than ever. Ah! the exasperating part, the rank
injustice of it all, is that those rascally Philistines really eat
these things!”

Then he went on to tell Florent of a supper to which a friend had
treated him at Baratte’s on a day of affluence. They had partaken of
oysters, fish, and game. But Baratte’s had sadly fallen, and all the
carnival life of the old Marché des Innocents was now buried. In place
thereof they had those huge central markets, that colossus of ironwork,
that new and wonderful town. Fools might say what they liked; it was
the embodiment of the spirit of the times. Florent, however, could not
at first make out whether he was condemning the picturesqueness of
Baratte’s or its good cheer.

But Claude next began to inveigh against romanticism. He preferred his
piles of vegetables, he said, to the rags of the middle ages; and he
ended by reproaching himself with guilty weakness in making an etching
of the Rue Pirouette. All those grimy old places ought to be levelled
to the ground, he declared, and modern houses ought to be built in
their stead.

“There!” he exclaimed, coming to a halt, “look at the corner of the
footway yonder! Isn’t that a picture readymade, ever so much more human
and natural than all their confounded consumptive daubs?”

Along the covered way women were now selling hot soup and coffee. At
one corner of the foot-pavement a large circle of customers clustered
round a vendor of cabbage soup. The bright tin caldron, full of broth,
was steaming over a little low stove, through the holes of which came
the pale glow of the embers. From a napkin-lined basket the woman took
some thin slices of bread and dropped them into yellow cups; then with
a ladle she filled the cups with liquor. Around her were saleswomen
neatly dressed, market gardeners in blouses, porters with coats soiled
by the loads they had carried, poor ragged vagabonds—in fact, all the
early hungry ones of the markets, eating, and scalding their mouths,
and drawing back their chins to avoid soiling them with the drippings
from their spoons. The delighted artist blinked, and sought a point of
view so as to get a good ensemble of the picture. That cabbage soup,
however, exhaled a very strong odour. Florent, for his part, turned his
head away, distressed by the sight of the full cups which the customers
emptied in silence, glancing around them the while like suspicious
animals. As the woman began serving a fresh customer, Claude himself
was affected by the odorous steam of the soup, which was wafted full in
his face.

He again tightened his sash, half amused and half annoyed. Then
resuming his walk, and alluding to the punch paid for by Alexandre, he
said to Florent in a low voice:

“It’s very odd, but have you ever noticed that although a man can
always find somebody to treat him to something to drink, he can never
find a soul who will stand him anything to eat?”

The dawn was now rising. The houses on the Boulevard de Sebastopol at
the end of the Rue de la Cossonnerie were still black; but above the
sharp line of their slate roofs a patch of pale blue sky, circumscribed
by the arch-pieces of the covered way, showed like a gleaming
half-moon. Claude, who had been bending over some grated openings on a
level with the ground, through which a glimpse could be obtained of
deep cellars where gas lights glimmered, now glanced up into the air
between the lofty pillars, as though scanning the dark roofs which
fringed the clear sky. Then he halted again, with his eyes fixed on one
of the light iron ladders which connect the superposed market roofs and
give access from one to the other. Florent asked him what he was
seeking there.

“I’m looking for that scamp of a Marjolin,” replied the artist. “He’s
sure to be in some guttering up there, unless, indeed, he’s been
spending the night in the poultry cellars. I want him to give me a
sitting.”

Then he went on to relate how a market saleswoman had found his friend
Marjolin one morning in a pile of cabbages, and how Marjolin had grown
up in all liberty on the surrounding footways. When an attempt had been
made to send him to school he had fallen ill, and it had been necessary
to bring him back to the markets. He knew every nook and corner of
them, and loved them with a filial affection, leading the agile life of
a squirrel in that forest of ironwork. He and Cadine, the hussy whom
Mother Chantemesse had picked up one night in the old Market of the
Innocents, made a pretty couple—he, a splendid foolish fellow, as
glowing as a Rubens, with a ruddy down on his skin which attracted the
sunlight; and she, slight and sly, with a comical phiz under her tangle
of black curly hair.

Whilst talking Claude quickened his steps, and soon brought his
companion back to Saint Eustache again. Florent, whose legs were once
more giving way, dropped upon a bench near the omnibus office. The
morning air was freshening. At the far end of the Rue Rambuteau rosy
gleams were streaking the milky sky, which higher up was slashed by
broad grey rifts. Such was the sweet balsamic scent of this dawn, that
Florent for a moment fancied himself in the open country, on the brow
of a hill. But behind the bench Claude pointed out to him the many
aromatic herbs and bulbs on sale. All along the footway skirting the
tripe market there were, so to say, fields of thyme and lavender,
garlic and shallots; and round the young plane-trees on the pavement
the vendors had twined long branches of laurel, forming trophies of
greenery. The strong scent of the laurel leaves prevailed over every
other odour.

At present the luminous dial of Saint Eustache was paling as a
night-light does when surprised by the dawn. The gas jets in the wine
shops in the neighbouring streets went out one by one, like stars
extinguished by the brightness. And Florent gazed at the vast markets
now gradually emerging from the gloom, from the dreamland in which he
had beheld them, stretching out their ranges of open palaces.
Greenish-grey in hue, they looked more solid now, and even more
colossal with their prodigious masting of columns upholding an endless
expanse of roofs. They rose up in geometrically shaped masses; and when
all the inner lights had been extinguished and the square uniform
buildings were steeped in the rising dawn, they seemed typical of some
gigantic modern machine, some engine, some caldron for the supply of a
whole people, some colossal belly, bolted and riveted, built up of wood
and glass and iron, and endowed with all the elegance and power of some
mechanical motive appliance working there with flaring furnaces, and
wild, bewildering revolutions of wheels.

Claude, however, had enthusiastically sprung on to the bench, and stood
upon it. He compelled his companion to admire the effect of the dawn
rising over the vegetables. There was a perfect sea of these extending
between the two clusters of pavilions from Saint Eustache to the Rue
des Halles. And in the two open spaces at either end the flood of
greenery rose to even greater height, and quite submerged the
pavements. The dawn appeared slowly, softly grey in hue, and spreading
a light water-colour tint over everything. These surging piles akin to
hurrying waves, this river of verdure rushing along the roadway like an
autumn torrent, assumed delicate shadowy tints—tender violet,
blush-rose, and greeny yellow, all the soft, light hues which at
sunrise make the sky look like a canopy of shot silk. And by degrees,
as the fires of dawn rose higher and higher at the far end of the Rue
Rambuteau, the mass of vegetation grew brighter and brighter, emerging
more and more distinctly from the bluey gloom that clung to the ground.
Salad herbs, cabbage-lettuce, endive, and succory, with rich soil still
clinging to their roots, exposed their swelling hearts; bundles of
spinach, bundles of sorrel, clusters of artichokes, piles of peas and
beans, mounds of cos-lettuce, tied round with straws, sounded every
note in the whole gamut of greenery, from the sheeny lacquer-like green
of the pods to the deep-toned green of the foliage; a continuous gamut
with ascending and descending scales which died away in the variegated
tones of the heads of celery and bundles of leeks. But the highest and
most sonorous notes still came from the patches of bright carrots and
snowy turnips, strewn in prodigious quantities all along the markets
and lighting them up with the medley of their two colours.

At the crossway in the Rue des Halles cabbages were piled up in
mountains; there were white ones, hard and compact as metal balls,
curly savoys, whose great leaves made them look like basins of green
bronze, and red cabbages, which the dawn seemed to transform into
superb masses of bloom with the hue of wine-lees, splotched with dark
purple and carmine. At the other side of the markets, at the crossway
near Saint Eustache, the end of the Rue Rambuteau was blocked by a
barricade of orange-hued pumpkins, sprawling with swelling bellies in
two superposed rows. And here and there gleamed the glistening ruddy
brown of a hamper of onions, the blood-red crimson of a heap of
tomatoes, the quiet yellow of a display of marrows, and the sombre
violet of the fruit of the eggplant; while numerous fat black radishes
still left patches of gloom amidst the quivering brilliance of the
general awakening.

Claude clapped his hands at the sight. He declared that those
“blackguard vegetables” were wild, mad, sublime! He stoutly maintained
that they were not yet dead, but, gathered in the previous evening,
waited for the morning sun to bid him good-bye from the flag-stones of
the market. He could observe their vitality, he declared, see their
leaves stir and open as though their roots were yet firmly and warmly
embedded in well-manured soil. And here, in the markets, he added, he
heard the death-rattle of all the kitchen gardens of the environs of
Paris.

A crowd of white caps, loose black jackets, and blue blouses was
swarming in the narrow paths between the various piles. The big baskets
of the market porters passed along slowly, above the heads of the
throng. Retail dealers, costermongers, and greengrocers were making
their purchases in haste. Corporals and nuns clustered round the
mountains of cabbages, and college cooks prowled about inquisitively,
on the look-out for good bargains. The unloading was still going on;
heavy tumbrels, discharging their contents as though these were so many
paving-stones, added more and more waves to the sea of greenery which
was now beating against the opposite footways. And from the far end of
the Rue du Pont Neuf fresh rows of carts were still and ever arriving.

“What a fine sight it is!” exclaimed Claude in an ecstasy of
enthusiasm.

Florent was suffering keenly. He fancied that all this was some
supernatural temptation, and, unwilling to look at the markets any
longer, turned towards Saint Eustache, a side view of which he obtained
from the spot where he now stood. With its roses, and broad arched
windows, its bell-turret, and roofs of slate, it looked as though
painted in sepia against the blue of the sky. He fixed his eyes at last
on the sombre depths of the Rue Montorgueil, where fragments of gaudy
sign boards showed conspicuously, and on the corner of the Rue
Montmartre, where there were balconies gleaming with letters of gold.
And when he again glanced at the cross-roads, his gaze was solicited by
other sign boards, on which such inscriptions as “Druggist and
Chemist,” “Flour and Grain” appeared in big red and black capital
letters upon faded backgrounds. Near these corners, houses with narrow
windows were now awakening, setting amidst the newness and airiness of
the Rue du Pont Neuf a few of the yellow ancient facades of olden
Paris. Standing at the empty windows of the great drapery shop at the
corner of the Rue Rambuteau a number of spruce-looking counter-jumpers
in their shirt sleeves, with snowy-white wristbands and tight-fitting
pantaloons, were “dressing” their goods. Farther away, in the windows
of the severe looking, barrack-like Guillot establishment, biscuits in
gilt wrappers and fancy cakes on glass stands were tastefully set out.
All the shops were now open; and workmen in white blouses, with tools
under their arms, were hurrying along the road.

Claude had not yet got down from the bench. He was standing on tiptoe
in order to see the farther down the streets. Suddenly, in the midst of
the crowd which he overlooked, he caught sight of a fair head with long
wavy locks, followed by a little black one covered with curly tumbled
hair.

“Hallo, Marjolin! Hallo, Cadine!” he shouted; and then, as his voice
was drowned by the general uproar, he jumped to the ground and started
off. But all at once, recollecting that he had left Florent behind him,
he hastily came back. “I live at the end of the Impasse des
Bourdonnais,” he said rapidly. “My name’s written in chalk on the door,
Claude Lantier. Come and see the etching of the Rue Pirouette.”

Then he vanished. He was quite ignorant of Florent’s name, and, after
favouring him with his views on art, parted from him as he had met him,
at the roadside.

Florent was now alone, and at first this pleased him. Ever since Madame
Francoise had picked him up in the Avenue de Neuilly he had been coming
and going in a state of pain fraught somnolence which had quite
prevented him from forming any definite ideas of his surroundings. Now
at last he was at liberty to do what he liked, and he tried to shake
himself free from that intolerable vision of teeming food by which he
was pursued. But his head still felt empty and dizzy, and all that he
could find within him was a kind of vague fear. The day was now growing
quite bright, and he could be distinctly seen. He looked down at his
wretched shabby coat and trousers. He buttoned the first, dusted the
latter, and strove to make a bit of a toilet, fearing lest those black
rags of his should proclaim aloud whence he had come. He was seated in
the middle of the bench, by the side of some wandering vagabonds who
had settled themselves there while waiting for the sunrise. The
neighbourhood of the markets is a favourite spot with vagrants in the
small hours of the morning. However, two constables, still in night
uniform, with cloaks and _kepis_, paced up and down the footway side by
side, their hands resting behind their backs; and every time they
passed the bench they glanced at the game which they scented there.
Florent felt sure that they recognised him, and were consulting
together about arresting him. At this thought his anguish of mind
became extreme. He felt a wild desire to get up and run away; but he
did not dare to do so, and was quite at a loss as to how he might take
himself off. The repeated glances of the constables, their cold,
deliberate scrutiny caused him the keenest torture. At length he rose
from the bench, making a great effort to restrain himself from rushing
off as quickly as his long legs could carry him; and succeeded in
walking quietly away, though his shoulders quivered in the fear he felt
of suddenly feeling the rough hands of the constables clutching at his
collar from behind.

He had now only one thought, one desire, which was to get away from the
markets as quickly as possible. He would wait and make his
investigations later on, when the footways should be clear. The three
streets which met here—the Rue Montmartre, Rue Montorgueil, and Rue
Turbigo—filled him with uneasiness. They were blocked by vehicles of
all kinds, and their footways were crowded with vegetables. Florent
went straight along as far as the Rue Pierre Lescot, but there the
cress and the potato markets seemed to him insuperable obstacles. So he
resolved to take the Rue Rambuteau. On reaching the Boulevard de
Sebastopol, however, he came across such a block of vans and carts and
waggonettes that he turned back and proceeded along the Rue Saint
Denis. Then he got amongst the vegetables once more. Retail dealers had
just set up their stalls, formed of planks resting on tall hampers; and
the deluge of cabbages and carrots and turnips began all over again.
The markets were overflowing. Florent tried to make his escape from
this pursuing flood which ever overtook him in his flight. He tried the
Rue de la Cossonnerie, the Rue Berger, the Square des Innocents, the
Rue de la Ferronnerie, and the Rue des Halles. And at last he came to a
standstill, quite discouraged and scared at finding himself unable to
escape from the infernal circle of vegetables, which now seemed to
dance around him, twining clinging verdure about his legs.

The everlasting stream of carts and horses stretched away as far as the
Rue de Rivoli and the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville. Huge vans were
carrying away supplies for all the greengrocers and fruiterers of an
entire district; _chars-a-bancs_ were starting for the suburbs with
straining, groaning sides. In the Rue de Pont Neuf Florent got
completely bewildered. He stumbled upon a crowd of hand-carts, in which
numerous costermongers were arranging their purchases. Amongst them he
recognised Lacaille, who went off along the Rue Saint Honoré, pushing a
barrow of carrots and cauliflowers before him. Florent followed him, in
the hope that he would guide him out of the mob. The pavement was now
quite slippery, although the weather was dry, and the litter of
artichoke stalks, turnip tops, and leaves of all kinds made walking
somewhat dangerous. Florent stumbled at almost every step. He lost
sight of Lacaille in the Rue Vauvilliers, and on approaching the corn
market he again found the streets barricaded with vehicles. Then he
made no further attempt to struggle; he was once more in the clutch of
the markets, and their stream of life bore him back. Slowly retracing
his steps, he presently found himself by Saint Eustache again.

He now heard the loud continuous rumbling of the waggons that were
setting out from the markets. Paris was doling out the daily food of
its two million inhabitants. These markets were like some huge central
organ beating with giant force, and sending the blood of life through
every vein of the city. The uproar was akin to that of colossal jaws—a
mighty sound to which each phase of the provisioning contributed, from
the whip-cracking of the larger retail dealers as they started off for
the district markets to the dragging pit-a-pat of the old shoes worn by
the poor women who hawked their lettuces in baskets from door to door.

Florent turned into a covered way on the left, intersecting the group
of four pavilions whose deep silent gloom he had remarked during the
night. He hoped that he might there find a refuge, discover some corner
in which he could hide himself. But these pavilions were now as busy,
as lively as the others. Florent walked on to the end of the street.
Drays were driving up at a quick trot, crowding the market with cages
full of live poultry, and square hampers in which dead birds were
stowed in deep layers. On the other side of the way were other drays
from which porters were removing freshly killed calves, wrapped in
canvas, and laid at full length in baskets, whence only the four
bleeding stumps of their legs protruded. There were also whole sheep,
and sides and quarters of beef. Butchers in long white aprons marked
the meat with a stamp, carried it off, weighted it, and hung it up on
hooks in the auction room. Florent, with his face close to the grating,
stood gazing at the rows of hanging carcasses, at the ruddy sheep and
oxen and paler calves, all streaked with yellow fat and sinews, and
with bellies yawning open. Then he passed along the sidewalk where the
tripe market was held, amidst the pallid calves’ feet and heads, the
rolled tripe neatly packed in boxes, the brains delicately set out in
flat baskets, the sanguineous livers, and purplish kidneys. He checked
his steps in front of some long two-wheeled carts, covered with round
awnings, and containing sides of pork hung on each side of the vehicle
over a bed of straw. Seen from the back end, the interiors of the carts
looked like recesses of some tabernacle, like some taper-lighted
chapel, such was the glow of all the bare flesh they contained. And on
the beds of straw were lines of tin cans, full of the blood that had
trickled from the pigs. Thereupon Florent was attacked by a sort of
rage. The insipid odour of the meat, the pungent smell of the tripe
exasperated him. He made his way out of the covered road, preferring to
return once more to the footwalk of the Rue de Pont Neuf.

He was enduring perfect agony. The shiver of early morning came upon
him; his teeth chattered, and he was afraid of falling to the ground
and finding himself unable to rise again. He looked about, but could
see no vacant place on any bench. Had he found one he would have
dropped asleep there, even at the risk of being awakened by the police.
Then, as giddiness nearly blinded him, he leaned for support against a
tree, with his eyes closed and his ears ringing. The raw carrot, which
he had swallowed almost without chewing, was torturing his stomach, and
the glass of punch which he had drunk seemed to have intoxicated him.
He was indeed intoxicated with misery, weariness, and hunger. Again he
felt a burning fire in the pit of the stomach, to which he every now
and then carried his hands, as though he were trying to stop up a hole
through which all his life was oozing away. As he stood there he
fancied that the foot-pavement rocked beneath him; and thinking that he
might perhaps lessen his sufferings by walking, he went straight on
through the vegetables again. He lost himself among them. He went along
a narrow footway, turned down another, was forced to retrace his steps,
bungled in doing so, and once more found himself amidst piles of
greenery. Some heaps were so high that people seemed to be walking
between walls of bundles and bunches. Only their heads slightly
overtopped these ramparts, and passed along showing whitely or blackly
according to the colour of their hats or caps; whilst the huge swinging
baskets, carried aloft on a level with the greenery, looked like osier
boats floating on a stagnant, mossy lake.

Florent stumbled against a thousand obstacles—against porters taking up
their burdens, and saleswomen disputing in rough tones. He slipped over
the thick bed of waste leaves and stumps which covered the footway, and
was almost suffocated by the powerful odour of crushed verdure. At last
he halted in a sort of confused stupor, and surrendered to the pushing
of some and the insults of others; and then he became a mere waif, a
piece of wreckage tossed about on the surface of that surging sea.

He was fast losing all self-respect, and would willingly have begged.
The recollection of his foolish pride during the night exasperated him.
If he had accepted Madame Francois’s charity, if he had not felt such
idiotic fear of Claude, he would not now have been stranded there
groaning in the midst of these cabbages. And he was especially angry
with himself for not having questioned the artist when they were in the
Rue Pirouette. Now, alas! he was alone and deserted, liable to die in
the streets like a homeless dog.

For the last time he raised his eyes and looked at the markets. At
present they were glittering in the sun. A broad ray was pouring
through the covered road from the far end, cleaving the massy pavilions
with an arcade of light, whilst fiery beams rained down upon the far
expanse of roofs. The huge iron framework grew less distinct, assumed a
bluey hue, became nothing but a shadowy silhouette outlined against the
flaming flare of the sunrise. But up above a pane of glass took fire,
drops of light trickled down the broad sloping zinc plates to the
gutterings; and then, below, a tumultuous city appeared amidst a haze
of dancing golden dust. The general awakening had spread, from the
first start of the market gardeners snoring in their cloaks, to the
brisk rolling of the food-laden railway drays. And the whole city was
opening its iron gates, the footways were humming, the pavilions
roaring with life. Shouts and cries of all kinds rent the air; it was
as though the strain, which Florent had heard gathering force in the
gloom ever since four in the morning, had now attained its fullest
volume. To the right and left, on all sides indeed, the sharp cries
accompanying the auction sales sounded shrilly like flutes amidst the
sonorous bass roar of the crowd. It was the fish, the butter, the
poultry, and the meat being sold.

The pealing of bells passed through the air, imparting a quiver to the
buzzing of the opening markets. Around Florent the sun was setting the
vegetables aflame. He no longer perceived any of those soft
water-colour tints which had predominated in the pale light of early
morning. The swelling hearts of the lettuces were now gleaming
brightly, the scales of greenery showed forth with wondrous vigour, the
carrots glowed blood-red, the turnips shone as if incandescent in the
triumphant radiance of the sun.

On Florent’s left some waggons were discharging fresh loads of
cabbages. He turned his eyes, and away in the distance saw carts yet
streaming out of the Rue Turbigo. The tide was still and ever rising.
He had felt it about his ankles, then on a level with his stomach, and
now it was threatening to drown him altogether. Blinded and submerged,
his ears buzzing, his stomach overpowered by all that he had seen, he
asked for mercy; and wild grief took possession of him at the thought
of dying there of starvation in the very heart of glutted Paris, amidst
the effulgent awakening of her markets. Big hot tears started from his
eyes.

Walking on, he had now reached one of the larger alleys. Two women, one
short and old, the other tall and withered, passed him, talking
together as they made their way towards the pavilions.

“So you’ve come to do your marketing, Mademoiselle Saget?” said the
tall withered woman.

“Well, yes, Madame Lecœur, if you can give it such a name as marketing.
I’m a lone woman, you know, and live on next to nothing. I should have
liked a small cauliflower, but everything is so dear. How is butter
selling to-day?”

“At thirty-four sous. I have some which is first rate. Will you come
and look at it?”

“Well, I don’t know if I shall want any to-day; I’ve still a little
lard left.”

Making a supreme effort, Florent followed these two women. He
recollected having heard Claude name the old one—Mademoiselle
Saget—when they were in the Rue Pirouette; and he made up his mind to
question her when she should have parted from her tall withered
acquaintance.

“And how’s your niece?” Mademoiselle Saget now asked.

“Oh, La Sarriette does as she likes,” Madame Lecœur replied in a bitter
tone. “She’s chosen to set up for herself and her affairs no longer
concern me. When her lovers have beggared her, she needn’t come to me
for any bread.”

“And you were so good to her, too! She ought to do well this year;
fruit is yielding big profits. And your brother-in-law, how is he?”

“Oh, he——”

Madame Lecœur bit her lips, and seemed disinclined to say anything
more.

“Still the same as ever, I suppose?” continued Mademoiselle Saget.
“He’s a very worthy man. Still, I once heard it said that he spent his
money in such a way that—”

“But does anyone know how he spends his money?” interrupted Madame
Lecœur, with much asperity. “He’s a miserly niggard, a scurvy fellow,
that’s what I say! Do you know, mademoiselle, he’d see me die of
starvation rather than lend me five francs! He knows quite well that
there’s nothing to be made out of butter this season, any more than out
of cheese and eggs; whereas he can sell as much poultry as ever he
chooses. But not once, I assure you, not once has he offered to help
me. I am too proud, as you know, to accept any assistance from him;
still it would have pleased me to have had it offered.”

“Ah, by the way, there he is, your brother-in-law!” suddenly exclaimed
Mademoiselle Saget, lowering her voice.

The two women turned and gazed at a man who was crossing the road to
enter the covered way close by.

“I’m in a hurry,” murmured Madame Lecœur. “I left my stall without
anyone to look after it; and, besides, I don’t want to speak to him.”

However, Florent also had mechanically turned round and glanced at the
individual referred to. This was a short, squarely-built man, with a
cheery look and grey, close-cut brush-like hair. Under each arm he was
carrying a fat goose, whose head hung down and flapped against his
legs. And then all at once Florent made a gesture of delight.
Forgetting his fatigue, he ran after the man, and, overtaking him,
tapped him on the shoulder.

“Gavard!” he exclaimed.

The other raised his head and stared with surprise at Florent’s tall
black figure, which he did not at first recognise. Then all at once:
“What! is it you?” he cried, as if overcome with amazement. “Is it
really you?”

He all but let his geese fall, and seemed unable to master his
surprise. On catching sight, however, of his sister-in-law and
Mademoiselle Saget, who were watching the meeting at a distance, he
began to walk on again.

“Come along; don’t let us stop here,” he said. “There are too many eyes
and tongues about.”

When they were in the covered way they began to chat. Florent related
how he had gone to the Rue Pirouette, at which Gavard seemed much
amused and laughed heartily. Then he told Florent that his brother
Quenu had moved from that street and had reopened his pork shop close
by, in the Rue Rambuteau, just in front of the markets. And afterwards
he was again highly amused to hear that Florent had been wandering
about all that morning with Claude Lantier, an odd kind of fish, who,
strangely enough, said he, was Madame Quenu’s nephew. Thus chatting,
Gavard was on the point of taking Florent straight to the pork shop,
but, on hearing that he had returned to France with false papers, he
suddenly assumed all sorts of solemn and mysterious airs, and insisted
upon walking some fifteen paces in front of him, to avoid attracting
attention. After passing through the poultry pavilion, where he hung
his geese up in his stall, he began to cross the Rue Rambuteau, still
followed by Florent; and then, halting in the middle of the road, he
glanced significantly towards a large and well-appointed pork shop.

The sun was obliquely enfilading the Rue Rambuteau, lighting up the
fronts of the houses, in the midst of which the Rue Pirouette formed a
dark gap. At the other end the great pile of Saint Eustache glittered
brightly in the sunlight like some huge reliquary. And right through
the crowd, from the distant crossway, an army of street-sweepers was
advancing in file down the road, the brooms swishing rhythmically,
while scavengers provided with forks pitched the collected refuse into
tumbrels, which at intervals of a score of paces halted with a noise
like the chattering of broken pots. However, all Florent’s attention
was concentrated on the pork shop, open and radiant in the rising sun.

It stood very near the corner of the Rue Pirouette and provided quite a
feast for the eyes. Its aspect was bright and smiling, touches of
brilliant colour showing conspicuously amidst all the snowy marble. The
sign board, on which the name of QUENU-GRADELLE glittered in fat gilt
letters encircled by leaves and branches painted on a soft-hued
background, was protected by a sheet of glass. On two panels, one on
each side of the shop-front, and both, like the board above, covered
with glass, were paintings representing various chubby little cupids
playing amidst boars’ heads, pork chops and strings of sausages; and
these latter still-life subjects, embellished with scrolls and bows,
had been painted in such soft tones that the uncooked pork which they
represented had the pinkiness of raspberry jam. Within this pleasing
framework arose the window display, arranged upon a bed of fine
blue-paper shavings. Here and there fern-leaves, tastefully disposed,
changed the plates which they encircled into bouquets fringed with
foliage. There was a wealth of rich, luscious, melting things. Down
below, quite close to the window, jars of preserved sausage-meat were
interspersed with pots of mustard. Above these were some small, plump,
boned hams. Golden with their dressings of toasted bread-crumbs, and
adorned at the knuckles with green rosettes. Next came the larger
dishes, some containing preserved Strasburg tongues, enclosed in
bladders coloured a bright red and varnished, so that they looked quite
sanguineous beside the pale sausages and trotters; then there were
black-puddings coiled like harmless snakes, healthy looking
chitterlings piled up two by two; Lyons sausages in little silver copes
that made them look like choristers; hot pies, with little banner-like
tickets stuck in them; big hams, and great glazed joints of veal and
pork, whose jelly was as limpid as sugar-candy. In the rear were other
dishes and earthen pans in which meat, minced and sliced, slumbered
beneath lakes of melted fat. And betwixt the various plates and dishes,
jars and bottle of sauce, cullis, stock and preserved truffles, pans of
_foie gras_ and boxes of sardines and tunny-fish were strewn over the
bed of paper shavings. A box of creamy cheeses, and one of edible
snails, the apertures of whose shells were dressed with butter and
parsley, had been placed carelessly at either corner. Finally, from a
bar overhead strings of sausages and saveloys of various sizes hung
down symmetrically like cords and tassels; while in the rear fragments
of intestinal membranes showed like lacework, like some _guipure_ of
white flesh. And on the highest tier in this sanctuary of gluttony,
amidst the membranes and between two bouquets of purple gladioli, the
window stand was crowned by a small square aquarium, ornamented with
rock-work, and containing a couple of gold-fish, which were continually
swimming round it.

Florent’s whole body thrilled at the sight. Then he perceived a woman
standing in the sunlight at the door of the shop. With her prosperous,
happy look in the midst of all those inviting things she added to the
cherry aspect of the place. She was a fine woman and quite blocked the
doorway. Still, she was not over stout, but simply buxom, with the full
ripeness of her thirty years. She had only just risen, yet her glossy
hair was already brushed smooth and arranged in little flat bands over
her temples, giving her an appearance of extreme neatness. She had the
fine skin, the pinky-white complexion common to those whose life is
spent in an atmosphere of raw meat and fat. There was a touch of
gravity about her demeanour, her movements were calm and slow; what
mirth or pleasure she felt she expressed by her eyes, her lips
retaining all their seriousness. A collar of starched linen encircled
her neck, white sleevelets reached to her elbows, and a white apron
fell even over the tips of her shoes, so that you saw but little of her
black cashmere dress, which clung tightly to her well-rounded shoulders
and swelling bosom. The sun rays poured hotly upon all the whiteness
she displayed. However, although her bluish-black hair, her rosy face,
and bright sleeves and apron were steeped in the glow of light, she
never once blinked, but enjoyed her morning bath of sunshine with
blissful tranquillity, her soft eyes smiling the while at the flow and
riot of the markets. She had the appearance of a very worthy woman.

“That is your brother’s wife, your sister-in-law, Lisa,” Gavard said to
Florent.

He had saluted her with a slight inclination of the head. Then he
darted along the house passage, continuing to take the most minute
precautions, and unwilling to let Florent enter the premises through
the shop, though there was no one there. It was evident that he felt
great pleasure in dabbling in what he considered to be a compromising
business.

“Wait here,” he said, “while I go to see whether your brother is alone.
You can come in when I clap my hands.”

Thereupon he opened a door at the end of the passage. But as soon as
Florent heard his brother’s voice behind it, he sprang inside at a
bound. Quenu, who was much attached to him, threw his arms round his
neck, and they kissed each other like children.

“Ah! dash it all! Is it really you, my dear fellow?” stammered the pork
butcher. “I never expected to see you again. I felt sure you were dead!
Why, only yesterday I was saying to Lisa, ‘That poor fellow, Florent!’”

However, he stopped short, and popping his head into the shop, called
out, “Lisa! Lisa!” Then turning towards a little girl who had crept
into a corner, he added, “Pauline, go and find your mother.”

The little one did not stir, however. She was an extremely fine child,
five years of age, with a plump chubby face, bearing a strong
resemblance to that of the pork butcher’s wife. In her arms she was
holding a huge yellow cat, which had cheerfully surrendered itself to
her embrace, with its legs dangling downwards; and she now squeezed it
tightly with her little arms, as if she were afraid that yonder
shabby-looking gentleman might rob her of it.

Lisa, however, leisurely made her appearance.

“Here is my brother Florent!” exclaimed Quenu.

Lisa addressed him as “Monsieur,” and gave him a kindly welcome. She
scanned him quietly from head to foot, without evincing any
disagreeable surprise. Merely a faint pout appeared for a moment on her
lips. Then, standing by, she began to smile at her husband’s
demonstrations of affection. Quenu, however, at last recovered his
calmness, and noticing Florent’s fleshless, poverty-stricken
appearance, exclaimed: “Ah, my poor fellow, you haven’t improved in
your looks since you were over yonder. For my part, I’ve grown fat; but
what would you have!”

He had indeed grown fat, too fat for his thirty years. He seemed to be
bursting through his shirt and apron, through all the snowy-white linen
in which he was swathed like a huge doll. With advancing years his
clean-shaven face had become elongated, assuming a faint resemblance to
the snout of one of those pigs amidst whose flesh his hands worked and
lived the whole day through. Florent scarcely recognised him. He had
now seated himself, and his glance turned from his brother to handsome
Lisa and little Pauline. They were all brimful of health, squarely
built, sleek, in prime condition; and in their turn they looked at
Florent with the uneasy astonishment which corpulent people feel at the
sight of a scraggy person. The very cat, whose skin was distended by
fat, dilated its yellow eyes and scrutinised him with an air of
distrust.

“You’ll wait till we have breakfast, won’t you?” asked Quenu. “We have
it early, at ten o’clock.”

A penetrating odour of cookery pervaded the place; and Florent looked
back upon the terrible night which he had just spent, his arrival
amongst the vegetables, his agony in the midst of the markets, the
endless avalanches of food from which he had just escaped. And then in
a low tone and with a gentle smile he responded:

“No; I’m really very hungry, you see.”




CHAPTER II


Florent had just begun to study law in Paris when his mother died. She
lived at Le Vigan, in the department of the Gard, and had taken for her
second husband one Quenu, a native of Yvetot in Normandy, whom some
sub-prefect had transplanted to the south and then forgotten there. He
had remained in employment at the sub-prefecture, finding the country
charming, the wine good, and the women very amiable. Three years after
his marriage he had been carried off by a bad attack of indigestion,
leaving as sole legacy to his wife a sturdy boy who resembled him. It
was only with very great difficulty that the widow could pay the
college fees of Florent, her elder son, the issue of her first
marriage. He was a very gentle youth, devoted to his studies, and
constantly won the chief prizes at school. It was upon him that his
mother lavished all her affection and based all her hopes. Perhaps, in
bestowing so much love on this slim pale youth, she was giving evidence
of her preference for her first husband, a tender-hearted, caressing
Provençal, who had loved her devotedly. Quenu, whose good humour and
amiability had at first attracted her, had perhaps displayed too much
self-satisfaction, and shown too plainly that he looked upon himself as
the main source of happiness. At all events she formed the opinion that
her younger son—and in southern families younger sons are still often
sacrificed—would never do any good; so she contented herself with
sending him to a school kept by a neighbouring old maid, where the lad
learned nothing but how to idle his time away. The two brothers grew up
far apart from each other, as though they were strangers.

When Florent arrived at Le Vigan his mother was already buried. She had
insisted upon having her illness concealed from him till the very last
moment, for fear of disturbing his studies. Thus he found little Quenu,
who was then twelve years old, sitting and sobbing alone on a table in
the middle of the kitchen. A furniture dealer, a neighbour, gave him
particulars of his mother’s last hours. She had reached the end of her
resources, had killed herself by the hard work which she had undertaken
to earn sufficient money that her elder son might continue his legal
studies. To her modest trade in ribbons, the profits of which were but
small, she had been obliged to add other occupations, which kept her up
very late at night. Her one idea of seeing Florent established as an
advocate, holding a good position in the town, had gradually caused her
to become hard and miserly, without pity for either herself or others.
Little Quenu was allowed to wander about in ragged breeches, and in
blouses from which the sleeves were falling away. He never dared to
serve himself at table, but waited till he received his allowance of
bread from his mother’s hands. She gave herself equally thin slices,
and it was to the effects of this regimen that she had succumbed, in
deep despair at having failed to accomplish her self-allotted task.

This story made a most painful impression upon Florent’s tender nature,
and his sobs wellnigh choked him. He took his little half brother in
his arms, held him to his breast, and kissed him as though to restore
to him the love of which he had unwittingly deprived him. Then he
looked at the lad’s gaping shoes, torn sleeves, and dirty hands, at all
the manifest signs of wretchedness and neglect. And he told him that he
would take him away, and that they would both live happily together.
The next day, when he began to inquire into affairs, he felt afraid
that he would not be able to keep sufficient money to pay for the
journey back to Paris. However, he was determined to leave Le Vigan at
any cost. He was fortunately able to sell the little ribbon business,
and this enabled him to discharge his mother’s debts, for despite her
strictness in money matters she had gradually run up bills. Then, as
there was nothing left, his mother’s neighbour, the furniture dealer,
offered him five hundred francs for her chattels and stock of linen. It
was a very good bargain for the dealer, but the young man thanked him
with tears in his eyes. He bought his brother some new clothes, and
took him away that same evening.

On his return to Paris he gave up all thought of continuing to attend
the Law School, and postponed every ambitious project. He obtained a
few pupils, and established himself with little Quenu in the Rue Royer
Collard, at the corner of the Rue Saint Jacques, in a big room which he
furnished with two iron bedsteads, a wardrobe, a table, and four
chairs. He now had a child to look after, and this assumed paternity
was very pleasing to him. During the earlier days he attempted to give
the lad some lessons when he returned home in the evening, but Quenu
was an unwilling pupil. He was dull of understanding, and refused to
learn, bursting into tears and regretfully recalling the time when his
mother had allowed him to run wild in the streets. Florent thereupon
stopped his lessons in despair, and to console the lad promised him a
holiday of indefinite length. As an excuse for his own weakness he
repeated that he had not brought his brother to Paris to distress him.
To see him grow up in happiness became his chief desire. He quite
worshipped the boy, was charmed with his merry laughter, and felt
infinite joy in seeing him about him, healthy and vigorous, and without
a care. Florent for his part remained very slim and lean in his
threadbare coat, and his face began to turn yellow amidst all the
drudgery and worry of teaching; but Quenu grew up plump and merry, a
little dense, indeed, and scarce able to read or write, but endowed
with high spirits which nothing could ruffle, and which filled the big
gloomy room in the Rue Royer Collard with gaiety.

Years, meantime, passed by. Florent, who had inherited all his mother’s
spirit of devotion, kept Quenu at home as though he were a big, idle
girl. He did not even suffer him to perform any petty domestic duties,
but always went to buy the provisions himself, and attended to the
cooking and other necessary matters. This kept him, he said, from
indulging in his own bad thoughts. He was given to gloominess, and
fancied that he was disposed to evil. When he returned home in the
evening, splashed with mud, and his head bowed by the annoyances to
which other people’s children had subjected him, his heart melted
beneath the embrace of the sturdy lad whom he found spinning his top on
the tiled flooring of the big room. Quenu laughed at his brother’s
clumsiness in making omelettes, and at the serious fashion in which he
prepared the soup-beef and vegetables. When the lamp was extinguished,
and Florent lay in bed, he sometimes gave way to feelings of sadness.
He longed to resume his legal studies, and strove to map out his duties
in such wise as to secure time to follow the programme of the faculty.
He succeeded in doing this, and was then perfectly happy. But a slight
attack of fever, which confined him to his room for a week, made such a
hole in his purse, and caused him so much alarm, that he abandoned all
idea of completing his studies. The boy was now getting a big fellow,
and Florent took a post as teacher in a school in the Rue de
l’Estrapade, at a salary of eighteen hundred francs per annum. This
seemed like a fortune to him. By dint of economy he hoped to be able to
amass a sum of money which would set Quenu going in the world. When the
lad reached his eighteenth year Florent still treated him as though he
were a daughter for whom a dowry must be provided.

However, during his brother’s brief illness Quenu himself had made
certain reflections. One morning he proclaimed his desire to work,
saying that he was now old enough to earn his own living. Florent was
deeply touched at this. Just opposite, on the other side of the street,
lived a working watchmaker whom Quenu, through the curtainless window,
could see leaning over a little table, manipulating all sorts of
delicate things, and patiently gazing at them through a magnifying
glass all day long. The lad was much attracted by the sight, and
declared that he had a taste for watchmaking. At the end of a
fortnight, however, he became restless, and began to cry like a child
of ten, complaining that the work was too complicated, and that he
would never be able to understand all the silly little things that
enter into the construction of a watch.

His next whim was to be a locksmith; but this calling he found too
fatiguing. In a couple of years he tried more than ten different
trades. Florent opined that he acted rightly, that it was wrong to take
up a calling one did not like. However, Quenu’s fine eagerness to work
for his living strained the resources of the little establishment very
seriously. Since he had begun flitting from one workshop to another
there had been a constant succession of fresh expenses; money had gone
in new clothes, in meals taken away from home, and in the payment of
footings among fellow workmen. Florent’s salary of eighteen hundred
francs was no longer sufficient, and he was obliged to take a couple of
pupils in the evenings. For eight years he had continued to wear the
same old coat.

However, the two brothers had made a friend. One side of the house in
which they lived overlooked the Rue Saint Jacques, where there was a
large poultry-roasting establishment[*] kept by a worthy man called
Gavard, whose wife was dying from consumption amidst an atmosphere
redolent of plump fowls. When Florent returned home too late to cook a
scrap of meat, he was in the habit of laying out a dozen sous or so on
a small portion of turkey or goose at this shop. Such days were feast
days. Gavard in time grew interested in this tall, scraggy customer,
learned his history, and invited Quenu into his shop. Before long the
young fellow was constantly to be found there. As soon as his brother
left the house he came downstairs and installed himself at the rear of
the roasting shop, quite enraptured with the four huge spits which
turned with a gentle sound in front of the tall bright flames.

[*] These rotisseries, now all but extinct, were at one time a
particular feature of the Parisian provision trade. I can myself
recollect several akin to the one described by M. Zola. I suspect that
they largely owed their origin to the form and dimensions of the
ordinary Parisian kitchen stove, which did not enable people to roast
poultry at home in a convenient way. In the old French cuisine,
moreover, roast joints of meat were virtually unknown; roasting was
almost entirely confined to chickens, geese, turkeys, pheasants, etc.;
and among the middle classes people largely bought their poultry
already cooked of the _rotisseur_, or else confided it to him for the
purpose of roasting, in the same way as our poorer classes still send
their joints to the baker’s. Roasting was also long looked upon in
France as a very delicate art. Brillat-Savarin, in his famous
_Physiologie du Gout_, lays down the dictum that “A man may become a
cook, but is born a _rotisseur_.”—Translator.


The broad copper bands of the fireplace glistened brightly, the poultry
steamed, the fat bubbled melodiously in the dripping-pan, and the spits
seemed to talk amongst themselves and to address kindly words to Quenu,
who, with a long ladle, devoutly basted the golden breasts of the fat
geese and turkeys. He would stay there for hours, quite crimson in the
dancing glow of the flames, and laughing vaguely, with a somewhat
stupid expression, at the birds roasting in front of him. Indeed, he
did not awake from this kind of trance until the geese and turkeys were
unspitted. They were placed on dishes, the spits emerged from their
carcasses smoking hot, and a rich gravy flowed from either end and
filled the shop with a penetrating odour. Then the lad, who, standing
up, had eagerly followed every phase of the dishing, would clap his
hands and begin to talk to the birds, telling them that they were very
nice, and would be eaten up, and that the cats would have nothing but
their bones. And he would give a start of delight whenever Gavard
handed him a slice of bread, which he forthwith put into the
dripping-pan that it might soak and toast there for half an hour.

It was in this shop, no doubt, that Quenu’s love of cookery took its
birth. Later on, when he had tried all sorts of crafts, he returned, as
though driven by fate, to the spits and the poultry and the savoury
gravy which induces one to lick one’s fingers. At first he was afraid
of vexing his brother, who was a small eater and spoke of good fare
with the disdain of a man who is ignorant of it; but afterwards, on
seeing that Florent listened to him when he explained the preparation
of some very elaborate dish, he confessed his desires and presently
found a situation at a large restaurant. From that time forward the
life of the two brothers was settled. They continued to live in the
room in the Rue Royer Collard, whither they returned every evening; the
one glowing and radiant from his hot fire, the other with the depressed
countenance of a shabby, impecunious teacher. Florent still wore his
old black coat, as he sat absorbed in correcting his pupils’ exercises;
while Quenu, to put himself more at ease, donned his white apron, cap,
and jacket, and, flitting about in front of the stove, amused himself
by baking some dainty in the oven. Sometimes they smiled at seeing
themselves thus attired, the one all in black, the other all in white.
These different garbs, one bright and the other sombre, seemed to make
the big room half gay and half mournful. Never, however, was there so
much harmony in a household marked by such dissimilarity. Though the
elder brother grew thinner and thinner, consumed by the ardent
temperament which he had inherited from his Provençal father, and the
younger one waxed fatter and fatter like a true son of Normandy, they
loved each other in the brotherhood they derived from their mother—a
mother who had been all devotion.

They had a relation in Paris, a brother of their mother’s, one
Gradelle, who was in business as a pork butcher in the Rue Pirouette,
near the central markets. He was a fat, hard-hearted, miserly fellow,
and received his nephews as though they were starving paupers the first
time they paid him a visit. They seldom went to see him afterwards. On
his nameday Quenu would take him a bunch of flowers, and receive a
half-franc piece in return for it. Florent’s proud and sensitive nature
suffered keenly when Gradelle scrutinised his shabby clothes with the
anxious, suspicious glance of a miser apprehending a request for a
dinner, or the loan of a five-franc piece. One day, however, it
occurred to Florent in all artlessness to ask his uncle to change a
hundred-franc note for him, and after this the pork butcher showed less
alarm at sight of the lads, as he called them. Still, their friendship
got no further than these infrequent visits.

These years were like a long, sweet, sad dream to Florent. As they
passed he tasted to the full all the bitter joys of self-sacrifice. At
home, in the big room, life was all love and tenderness; but out in the
world, amidst the humiliations inflicted on him by his pupils, and the
rough jostling of the streets, he felt himself yielding to wicked
thoughts. His slain ambitions embittered him. It was long before he
could bring himself to bow to his fate, and accept with equanimity the
painful lot of a poor, plain, commonplace man. At last, to guard
against the temptations of wickedness, he plunged into ideal goodness,
and sought refuge in a self-created sphere of absolute truth and
justice. It was then that he became a republican, entering into the
republican idea even as heart-broken girls enter a convent. And not
finding a republic where sufficient peace and kindliness prevailed to
lull his troubles to sleep, he created one for himself. He took no
pleasure in books. All the blackened paper amidst which he lived spoke
of evil-smelling class-rooms, of pellets of paper chewed by unruly
schoolboys, of long, profitless hours of torture. Besides, books only
suggested to him a spirit of mutiny and pride, whereas it was of peace
and oblivion that he felt most need. To lull and soothe himself with
the ideal imaginings, to dream that he was perfectly happy, and that
all the world would likewise become so, to erect in his brain the
republican city in which he would fain have lived, such now became his
recreation, the task, again and again renewed, of all his leisure
hours. He no longer read any books beyond those which his duties
compelled him to peruse; he preferred to tramp along the Rue Saint
Jacques as far as the outer boulevards, occasionally going yet a
greater distance and returning by the Barriere d’Italie; and all along
the road, with his eyes on the Quartier Mouffetard spread out at his
feet, he would devise reforms of great moral and humanitarian scope,
such as he thought would change that city of suffering into an abode of
bliss. During the turmoil of February 1848, when Paris was stained with
blood he became quite heartbroken, and rushed from one to another of
the public clubs demanding that the blood which had been shed should
find atonement in “the fraternal embrace of all republicans throughout
the world.” He became one of those enthusiastic orators who preached
revolution as a new religion, full of gentleness and salvation. The
terrible days of December 1851, the days of the Coup d’Etat, were
required to wean him from his doctrines of universal love. He was then
without arms; allowed himself to be captured like a sheep, and was
treated as though he were a wolf. He awoke from his sermon on universal
brotherhood to find himself starving on the cold stones of a casemate
at Bicêtre.

Quenu, when two and twenty, was distressed with anguish when his
brother did not return home. On the following day he went to seek his
corpse at the cemetery of Montmartre, where the bodies of those shot
down on the boulevards had been laid out in a line and covered with
straw, from beneath which only their ghastly heads projected. However,
Quenu’s courage failed him, he was blinded by his tears, and had to
pass twice along the line of corpses before acquiring the certainty
that Florent’s was not among them. At last, at the end of a long and
wretched week, he learned at the Prefecture of Police that his brother
was a prisoner. He was not allowed to see him, and when he pressed the
matter the police threatened to arrest him also. Then he hastened off
to his uncle Gradelle, whom he looked upon as a person of importance,
hoping that he might be able to enlist his influence in Florent’s
behalf. But Gradelle waxed wrathful, declared that Florent deserved his
fate, that he ought to have known better than to have mixed himself up
with those rascally republicans. And he even added that Florent was
destined to turn out badly, that it was written on his face.

Quenu wept copiously and remained there, almost choked by his sobs. His
uncle, a little ashamed of his harshness, and feeling that he ought to
do something for him, offered to receive him into his house. He wanted
an assistant, and knew that his nephew was a good cook. Quenu was so
much alarmed by the mere thought of going back to live alone in the big
room in the Rue Royer Collard, that then and there he accepted
Gradelle’s offer. That same night he slept in his uncle’s house, in a
dark hole of a garret just under the room, where there was scarcely
space for him to lie at full length. However, he was less wretched
there than he would have been opposite his brother’s empty couch.

He succeeded at length in obtaining permission to see Florent; but on
his return from Bicêtre he was obliged to take to his bed. For nearly
three weeks he lay fever-stricken, in a stupefied, comatose state.
Gradelle meantime called down all sorts of maledictions on his
republican nephew; and one morning, when he heard of Florent’s
departure for Cayenne, he went upstairs, tapped Quenu on the hands,
awoke him, and bluntly told him the news, thereby bringing about such a
reaction that on the following day the young man was up and about
again. His grief wore itself out, and his soft flabby flesh seemed to
absorb his tears. A month later he laughed again, and then grew vexed
and unhappy with himself for having been merry; but his natural
light-heartedness soon gained the mastery, and he laughed afresh in
unconscious happiness.

He now learned his uncle’s business, from which he derived even more
enjoyment than from cookery. Gradelle told him, however, that he must
not neglect his pots and pans, that it was rare to find a pork butcher
who was also a good cook, and that he had been lucky in serving in a
restaurant before coming to the shop. Gradelle, moreover, made full use
of his nephew’s acquirements, employed him to cook the dinners sent out
to certain customers, and placed all the broiling, and the preparation
of pork chops garnished with gherkins in his special charge. As the
young man was of real service to him, he grew fond of him after his own
fashion, and would nip his plump arms when he was in a good humour.
Gradelle had sold the scanty furniture of the room in the Rue Royer
Collard and retained possession of the proceeds—some forty francs or
so—in order, said he, to prevent the foolish lad, Quenu, from making
ducks and drakes of the cash. After a time, however, he allowed his
nephew six francs a month a pocket-money.

Quenu now became quite happy, in spite of the emptiness of his purse
and the harshness with which he was occasionally treated. He liked to
have life doled out to him; Florent had treated him too much like an
indolent girl. Moreover, he had made a friend at his uncle’s. Gradelle,
when his wife died, had been obliged to engage a girl to attend to the
shop, and had taken care to choose a healthy and attractive one,
knowing that a good-looking girl would set off his viands and help to
tempt custom. Amongst his acquaintances was a widow, living in the Rue
Cuvier, near the Jardin des Plantes, whose deceased husband had been
postmaster at Plassans, the seat of a sub-prefecture in the south of
France. This lady, who lived in a very modest fashion on a small
annuity, had brought with her from Plassans a plump, pretty child, whom
she treated as her own daughter. Lisa, as the young one was called,
attended upon her with much placidity and serenity of disposition.
Somewhat seriously inclined, she looked quite beautiful when she
smiled. Indeed, her great charm came from the exquisite manner in which
she allowed this infrequent smile of hers to escape her. Her eyes then
became most caressing, and her habitual gravity imparted inestimable
value to these sudden, seductive flashes. The old lady had often said
that one of Lisa’s smiles would suffice to lure her to perdition.

When the widow died she left all her savings, amounting to some ten
thousand francs, to her adopted daughter. For a week Lisa lived alone
in the Rue Cuvier; it was there that Gradelle came in search of her. He
had become acquainted with her by often seeing her with her mistress
when the latter called on him in the Rue Pirouette; and at the funeral
she had struck him as having grown so handsome and sturdy that he had
followed the hearse all the way to the cemetery, though he had not
intended to do so. As the coffin was being lowered into the grave, he
reflected what a splendid girl she would be for the counter of a pork
butcher’s shop. He thought the matter over, and finally resolved to
offer her thirty francs a month, with board and lodging. When he made
this proposal, Lisa asked for twenty-four hours to consider it. Then
she arrived one morning with a little bundle of clothes, and her ten
thousand francs concealed in the bosom of her dress. A month later the
whole place belonged to her; she enslaved Gradelle, Quenu, and even the
smallest kitchen-boy. For his part, Quenu would have cut off his
fingers to please her. When she happened to smile, he remained rooted
to the floor, laughing with delight as he gazed at her.

Lisa was the eldest daughter of the Macquarts of Plassans, and her
father was still alive.[*] But she said that he was abroad, and never
wrote to him. Sometimes she just dropped a hint that her mother, now
deceased, had been a hard worker, and that she took after her. She
worked, indeed, very assiduously. However, she sometimes added that the
worthy woman had slaved herself to death in striving to support her
family. Then she would speak of the respective duties of husband and
wife in such a practical though modest fashion as to enchant Quenu. He
assured her that he fully shared her ideas. These were that everyone,
man or woman, ought to work for his or her living, that everyone was
charged with the duty of achieving personal happiness, that great harm
was done by encouraging habits of idleness, and that the presence of so
much misery in the world was greatly due to sloth. This theory of hers
was a sweeping condemnation of drunkenness, of all the legendary
loafing ways of her father Macquart. But, though she did not know it,
there was much of Macquart’s nature in herself. She was merely a
steady, sensible Macquart with a logical desire for comfort, having
grasped the truth of the proverb that as you make your bed so you lie
on it. To sleep in blissful warmth there is no better plan than to
prepare oneself a soft and downy couch; and to the preparation of such
a couch she gave all her time and all her thoughts. When no more than
six years old she had consented to remain quietly on her chair the
whole day through on condition that she should be rewarded with a cake
in the evening.

[*] See M. Zola’s novel, _The Fortune of the Rougons_.—Translator


At Gradelle’s establishment Lisa went on leading the calm, methodical
life which her exquisite smiles illumined. She had not accepted the
pork butcher’s offer at random. She reckoned upon finding a guardian in
him; with the keen scent of those who are born lucky she perhaps
foresaw that the gloomy shop in the Rue Pirouette would bring her the
comfortable future she dreamed of—a life of healthy enjoyment, and work
without fatigue, each hour of which would bring its own reward. She
attended to her counter with the quiet earnestness with which she had
waited upon the postmaster’s widow; and the cleanliness of her aprons
soon became proverbial in the neighbourhood. Uncle Gradelle was so
charmed with this pretty girl that sometimes, as he was stringing his
sausages, he would say to Quenu: “Upon my word, if I weren’t turned
sixty, I think I should be foolish enough to marry her. A wife like
she’d make is worth her weight in gold to a shopkeeper, my lad.”

Quenu himself was growing still fonder of her, though he laughed
merrily one day when a neighbour accused him of being in love with
Lisa. He was not worried with love-sickness. The two were very good
friends, however. In the evening they went up to their bedrooms
together. Lisa slept in a little chamber adjoining the dark hole which
the young man occupied. She had made this room of hers quite bright by
hanging it with muslin curtains. The pair would stand together for a
moment on the landing, holding their candles in their hands, and
chatting as they unlocked their doors. Then, as they closed them, they
said in friendly tones:

“Good night, Mademoiselle Lisa.”

“Good night, Monsieur Quenu.”

As Quenu undressed himself he listened to Lisa making her own
preparations. The partition between the two rooms was very thin.
“There, she is drawing her curtains now,” he would say to himself;
“what can she be doing, I wonder, in front of her chest of drawers? Ah!
she’s sitting down now and taking off her shoes. Now she’s blown her
candle out. Well, good night. I must get to sleep”; and at times, when
he heard her bed creak as she got into it, he would say to himself with
a smile, “Dash it all! Mademoiselle Lisa is no feather.” This idea
seemed to amuse him, and presently he would fall asleep thinking about
the hams and salt pork that he had to prepare the next morning.

This state of affairs went on for a year without causing Lisa a single
blush or Quenu a moment’s embarrassment. When the girl came into the
kitchen in the morning at the busiest moment of the day’s work, they
grasped hands over the dishes of sausage-meat. Sometimes she helped
him, holding the skins with her plump fingers while he filled them with
meat and fat. Sometimes, too, with the tips of their tongues they just
tasted the raw sausage-meat, to see if it was properly seasoned. She
was able to give Quenu some useful hints, for she knew of many
favourite southern recipes, with which he experimented with much
success. He was often aware that she was standing behind his shoulder,
prying into the pans. If he wanted a spoon or a dish, she would hand it
to him. The heat of the fire would bring their blood to their skins;
still, nothing in the world would have induced the young man to cease
stirring the fatty _bouillis_ which were thickening over the fire while
the girl stood gravely by him, discussing the amount of boiling that
was necessary. In the afternoon, when the shop lacked customers, they
quietly chatted together for hours at a time. Lisa sat behind the
counter, leaning back, and knitting in an easy, regular fashion; while
Quenu installed himself on a big oak block, dangling his legs and
tapping his heels against the wood. They got on wonderfully well
together, discussing all sorts of subjects, generally cookery, and then
Uncle Gradelle and the neighbours. Lisa also amused the young man with
stories, just as though he were a child. She knew some very pretty
ones—some miraculous legends, full of lambs and little angels, which
she narrated in a piping voice, with all her wonted seriousness. If a
customer happened to come in, she saved herself the trouble of moving
by asking Quenu to get the required pot of lard or box of snails. And
at eleven o’clock they went slowly up to bed as on the previous night.
As they closed their doors, they calmly repeated the words:

“Good night, Mademoiselle Lisa.”

“Good night, Monsieur Quenu.”

One morning Uncle Gradelle was struck dead by apoplexy while preparing
a galantine. He fell forward, with his face against the chopping-block.
Lisa did not lose her self-possession. She remarked that the dead man
could not be left lying in the middle of the kitchen, and had the body
removed into a little back room where Gradelle had slept. Then she
arranged with the assistants what should be said. It must be given out
that the master had died in his bed; otherwise the whole district would
be disgusted, and the shop would lose its customers. Quenu helped to
carry the dead man away, feeling quite confused, and astonished at
being unable to shed any tears. Presently, however, he and Lisa cried
together. Quenu and his brother Florent were the sole heirs. The
gossips of the neighbourhood credited old Gradelle with the possession
of a considerable fortune. However, not a single crown could be
discovered. Lisa seemed very restless and uneasy. Quenu noticed how
pensive she became, how she kept on looking around her from morning
till night, as though she had lost something. At last she decided to
have a thorough cleaning of the premises, declaring that people were
beginning to talk, that the story of the old man’s death had got about,
and that it was necessary they should make a great show of cleanliness.
One afternoon, after remaining in the cellar for a couple of hours,
whither she herself had gone to wash the salting-tubs, she came up
again, carrying something in her apron. Quenu was just then cutting up
a pig’s fry. She waited till he had finished, talking awhile in an
easy, indifferent fashion. But there was an unusual glitter in her
eyes, and she smiled her most charming smile as she told him that she
wanted to speak to him. She led the way upstairs with seeming
difficulty, impeded by what she had in her apron, which was strained
almost to bursting.

By the time she reached the third floor she found herself short of
breath, and for a moment was obliged to lean against the balustrade.
Quenu, much astonished, followed her into her bedroom without saying a
word. It was the first time she had ever invited him to enter it. She
closed the door, and letting go the corners of her apron, which her
stiffened fingers could no longer hold up, she allowed a stream of gold
and silver coins to flow gently upon her bed. She had discovered Uncle
Gradelle’s treasure at the bottom of a salting-tub. The heap of money
made a deep impression in the softy downy bed.

Lisa and Quenu evinced a quiet delight. They sat down on the edge of
the bed, Lisa at the head and Quenu at the foot, on either side of the
heap of coins, and they counted the money out upon the counterpane, so
as to avoid making any noise. There were forty thousand francs in gold,
and three thousand francs in silver, whilst in a tin box they found
bank notes to the value of forty-two thousand francs. It took them two
hours to count up the treasure. Quenu’s hands trembled slightly, and it
was Lisa who did most of the work.

They arranged the gold on the pillow in little heaps, leaving the
silver in the hollow depression of the counterpane. When they had
ascertained the total amount—eighty-five thousand francs, to them an
enormous sum—they began to chat. And their conversation naturally
turned upon their future, and they spoke of their marriage, although
there had never been any previous mention of love between them. But
this heap of money seemed to loosen their tongues. They had gradually
seated themselves further back on the bed, leaning against the wall,
beneath the white muslin curtains; and as they talked together, their
hands, playing with the heap of silver between them, met, and remained
linked amidst the pile of five-franc pieces. Twilight surprised them
still sitting together. Then, for the first time, Lisa blushed at
finding the young man by her side. For a few moments, indeed, although
not a thought of evil had come to them, they felt much embarrassed.
Then Lisa went to get her own ten thousand francs. Quenu wanted her to
put them with his uncle’s savings. He mixed the two sums together,
saying with a laugh that the money must be married also. Then it was
agreed that Lisa should keep the hoard in her chest of drawers. When
she had locked it up they both quietly went downstairs. They were now
practically husband and wife.

The wedding took place during the following month. The neighbours
considered the match a very natural one, and in every way suitable.
They had vaguely heard the story of the treasure, and Lisa’s honesty
was the subject of endless eulogy. After all, said the gossips, she
might well have kept the money herself, and not have spoken a word to
Quenu about it; if she had spoken, it was out of pure honesty, for no
one had seen her find the hoard. She well deserved, they added, that
Quenu should make her his wife. That Quenu, by the way, was a lucky
fellow; he wasn’t a beauty himself, yet he had secured a beautiful
wife, who had disinterred a fortune for him. Some even went so far as
to whisper that Lisa was a simpleton for having acted as she had done;
but the young woman only smiled when people speaking to her vaguely
alluded to all these things. She and her husband lived on as
previously, in happy placidity and quiet affection. She still assisted
him as before, their hands still met amidst the sausage-meat, she still
glanced over his shoulder into the pots and pans, and still nothing but
the great fire in the kitchen brought the blood to their cheeks.

However, Lisa was a woman of practical common sense, and speedily saw
the folly of allowing eighty-five thousand francs to lie idle in a
chest of drawers. Quenu would have willingly stowed them away again at
the bottom of the salting-tub until he had gained as much more, when
they could have retired from business and have gone to live at
Suresnes, a suburb to which both were partial. Lisa, however, had other
ambitions. The Rue Pirouette did not accord with her ideas of
cleanliness, her craving for fresh air, light, and healthy life. The
shop where Uncle Gradelle had accumulated his fortune, sou by sou, was
a long, dark place, one of those suspicious looking pork butchers’
shops of the old quarters of the city, where the well-worn flagstones
retain a strong odour of meat in spite of constant washings. Now the
young woman longed for one of those bright modern shops, ornamented
like a drawing-room, and fringing the footway of some broad street with
windows of crystalline transparence. She was not actuated by any petty
ambition to play the fine lady behind a stylish counter, but clearly
realised that commerce in its latest development needed elegant
surroundings. Quenu showed much alarm the first time his wife suggested
that they ought to move and spend some of their money in decorating a
new shop. However, Lisa only shrugged her shoulders and smiled at
finding him so timorous.

One evening, when night was falling and the shop had grown dark, Quenu
and Lisa overheard a woman of the neighbourhood talking to a friend
outside their door.

“No, indeed! I’ve given up dealing with them,” said she. “I wouldn’t
buy a bit of black-pudding from them now on any account. They had a
dead man in their kitchen, you know.”

Quenu wept with vexation. The story of Gradelle’s death in the kitchen
was clearly getting about; and his nephew began to blush before his
customers when he saw them sniffing his wares too closely. So, of his
own accord, he spoke to his wife of her proposal to take a new shop.
Lisa, without saying anything, had already been looking out for other
premises, and had found some, admirably situated, only a few yards
away, in the Rue Rambuteau. The immediate neighbourhood of the central
markets, which were being opened just opposite, would triple their
business, and make their shop known all over Paris.

Quenu allowed himself to be drawn into a lavish expenditure of money;
he laid out over thirty thousand francs in marble, glass, and gilding.
Lisa spent hours with the workmen, giving her views about the slightest
details. When she was at last installed behind the counter, customers
arrived in a perfect procession, merely for the sake of examining the
shop. The inside walls were lined from top to bottom with white marble.
The ceiling was covered with a huge square mirror, framed by a broad
gilded cornice, richly ornamented, whilst from the centre hung a
crystal chandelier with four branches. And behind the counter, and on
the left, and at the far end of the shop were other mirrors, fitted
between the marble panels and looking like doors opening into an
infinite series of brightly lighted halls, where all sorts of
appetising edibles were displayed. The huge counter on the right hand
was considered a very fine piece of work. At intervals along the front
were lozenge-shaped panels of pinky marble. The flooring was of tiles,
alternately white and pink, with a deep red fretting as border. The
whole neighbourhood was proud of the shop, and no one again thought of
referring to the kitchen in the Rue Pirouette, where a man had died.
For quite a month women stopped short on the footway to look at Lisa
between the saveloys and bladders in the window. Her white and pink
flesh excited as much admiration as the marbles. She seemed to be the
soul, the living light, the healthy, sturdy idol of the pork trade; and
thenceforth one and all baptised her “Lisa the beauty.”

To the right of the shop was the dining-room, a neat looking apartment
containing a sideboard, a table, and several cane-seated chairs of
light oak. The matting on the floor, the wallpaper of a soft yellow
tint, the oil-cloth table-cover, coloured to imitate oak, gave the room
a somewhat cold appearance, which was relieved only by the glitter of a
brass hanging lamp, suspended from the ceiling, and spreading its big
shade of transparent porcelain over the table. One of the dining-room
doors opened into the huge square kitchen, at the end of which was a
small paved courtyard, serving for the storage of lumber—tubs, barrels
and pans, and all kinds of utensils not in use. To the left of the
water-tap, alongside the gutter which carried off the greasy water,
stood pots of faded flowers, removed from the shop window, and slowly
dying.

Business was excellent. Quenu, who had been much alarmed by the initial
outlay, now regarded his wife with something like respect, and told his
friends that she had “a wonderful head.” At the end of five years they
had nearly eighty thousand francs invested in the State funds. Lisa
would say that they were not ambitious, that they had no desire to pile
up money too quickly, or else she would have enabled her husband to
gain hundreds and thousands of francs by prompting him to embark in the
wholesale pig trade. But they were still young, and had plenty of time
before them; besides, they didn’t care about a rough, scrambling
business, but preferred to work at their ease, and enjoy life, instead
of wearing themselves out with endless anxieties.

“For instance,” Lisa would add in her expansive moments, “I have, you
know, a cousin in Paris. I never see him, as the two families have
fallen out. He has taken the name of Saccard,[*] on account of certain
matters which he wants to be forgotten. Well, this cousin of mine, I’m
told, makes millions and millions of francs; but he gets no enjoyment
out of life. He’s always in a state of feverish excitement, always
rushing hither and thither, up to his neck in all sorts of worrying
business. Well, it’s impossible, isn’t it, for such a man to eat his
dinner peaceably in the evening? We, at any rate, can take our meals
comfortably, and make sure of what we eat, and we are not harassed by
worries as he is. The only reason why people should care for money is
that money’s wanted for one to live. People like comfort; that’s
natural. But as for making money simply for the sake of making it, and
giving yourself far more trouble and anxiety to gain it than you can
ever get pleasure from it when it’s gained, why, as for me, I’d rather
sit still and cross my arms. And besides, I should like to see all
those millions of my cousin’s. I can’t say that I altogether believe in
them. I caught sight of him the other day in his carriage. He was quite
yellow, and looked ever so sly. A man who’s making money doesn’t have
that kind of expression. But it’s his business, and not mine. For our
part, we prefer to make merely a hundred sous at a time, and to get a
hundred sous’ worth of enjoyment out of them.”

[*] See M. Zola’s novel, _Money_.


The household was undoubtedly thriving. A daughter had been born to the
young couple during their first year of wedlock, and all three of them
looked blooming. The business went on prosperously, without any
laborious fatigue, just as Lisa desired. She had carefully kept free of
any possible source of trouble or anxiety, and the days went by in an
atmosphere of peaceful, unctuous prosperity. Their home was a nook of
sensible happiness—a comfortable manger, so to speak, where father,
mother, and daughter could grow sleek and fat. It was only Quenu who
occasionally felt sad, through thinking of his brother Florent. Up to
the year 1856 he had received letters from him at long intervals. Then
no more came, and he had learned from a newspaper that three convicts
having attempted to escape from the Île du Diable, had been drowned
before they were able to reach the mainland. He had made inquiries at
the Prefecture of Police, but had not learnt anything definite; it
seemed probable that his brother was dead. However, he did not lose all
hope, though months passed without any tidings. Florent, in the
meantime, was wandering about Dutch Guiana, and refrained from writing
home as he was ever in hope of being able to return to France. Quenu at
last began to mourn for him as one mourns for those whom one has been
unable to bid farewell. Lisa had never known Florent, but she spoke
very kindly whenever she saw her husband give way to his sorrow; and
she evinced no impatience when for the hundredth time or so he began to
relate stories of his early days, of his life in the big room in the
Rue Royer Collard, the thirty-six trades which he had taken up one
after another, and the dainties which he had cooked at the stove,
dressed all in white, while Florent was dressed all in black. To such
talk as this, indeed, she listened placidly, with a complacency which
never wearied.

It was into the midst of all this happiness, ripening after careful
culture, that Florent dropped one September morning just as Lisa was
taking her matutinal bath of sunshine, and Quenu, with his eyes still
heavy with sleep, was lazily applying his fingers to the congealed fat
left in the pans from the previous evening. Florent’s arrival caused a
great commotion. Gavard advised them to conceal the “outlaw,” as he
somewhat pompously called Florent. Lisa, who looked pale, and more
serious than was her wont, at last took him to the fifth floor, where
she gave him the room belonging to the girl who assisted her in the
shop. Quenu had cut some slices of bread and ham, but Florent was
scarcely able to eat. He was overcome by dizziness and nausea, and went
to bed, where he remained for five days in a state of delirium, the
outcome of an attack of brain-fever, which fortunately received
energetic treatment. When he recovered consciousness he perceived Lisa
sitting by his bedside, silently stirring some cooling drink in a cup.
As he tried to thank her, she told him that he must keep perfectly
quiet, and that they could talk together later on. At the end of
another three days Florent was on his feet again. Then one morning
Quenu went up to tell him that Lisa awaited them in her room on the
first floor.

Quenu and his wife there occupied a suite of three rooms and a
dressing-room. You first passed through an antechamber, containing
nothing but chairs, and then a small sitting-room, whose furniture,
shrouded in white covers, slumbered in the gloom cast by the Venetian
shutters, which were always kept closed so as to prevent the light blue
of the upholstery from fading. Then came the bedroom, the only one of
the three which was really used. It was very comfortably furnished in
mahogany. The bed, bulky and drowsy of aspect in the depths of the damp
alcove, was really wonderful, with its four mattresses, its four
pillows, its layers of blankets, and its corpulent _édredon_. It was
evidently a bed intended for slumber. A mirrored wardrobe, a washstand
with drawers, a small central table with a worked cover, and several
chairs whose seats were protected by squares of lace, gave the room an
aspect of plain but substantial middle-class luxury. On the left-hand
wall, on either side of the mantelpiece, which was ornamented with some
landscape-painted vases mounted on bronze stands, and a gilt timepiece
on which a figure of Gutenberg, also gilt, stood in an attitude of deep
thought, hung portraits in oils of Quenu and Lisa, in ornate oval
frames. Quenu had a smiling face, while Lisa wore an air of grave
propriety; and both were dressed in black and depicted in flattering
fashion, their features idealised, their skins wondrously smooth, their
complexions soft and pinky. A carpet, in the Wilton style, with a
complicated pattern of roses mingling with stars, concealed the
flooring; while in front of the bed was a fluffy mat, made out of long
pieces of curly wool, a work of patience at which Lisa herself had
toiled while seated behind her counter. But the most striking object of
all in the midst of this array of new furniture was a great square,
thick-set secrétaire, which had been re-polished in vain, for the
cracks and notches in the marble top and the scratches on the old
mahogany front, quite black with age, still showed plainly. Lisa had
desired to retain this piece of furniture, however, as Uncle Gradelle
had used it for more than forty years. It would bring them good luck,
she said. It’s metal fastenings were truly something terrible, it’s
lock was like that of a prison gate, and it was so heavy that it could
scarcely be moved.

When Florent and Quenu entered the room they found Lisa seated at the
lowered desk of the secrétaire, writing and putting down figures in a
big, round, and very legible hand. She signed to them not to disturb
her, and the two men sat down. Florent looked round the room, and
notably at the two portraits, the bed and the timepiece, with an air of
surprise.

“There!” at last exclaimed Lisa, after having carefully verified a
whole page of calculations. “Listen to me now; we have an account to
render to you, my dear Florent.”

It was the first time that she had so addressed him. However, taking up
the page of figures, she continued: “Your Uncle Gradelle died without
leaving a will. Consequently you and your brother are his sole heirs.
We now have to hand your share over to you.”

“But I do not ask you for anything!” exclaimed Florent, “I don’t wish
for anything!”

Quenu had apparently been in ignorance of his wife’s intentions. He
turned rather pale and looked at her with an expression of displeasure.
Of course, he certainly loved his brother dearly; but there was no
occasion to hurl his uncle’s money at him in this way. There would have
been plenty of time to go into the matter later on.

“I know very well, my dear Florent,” continued Lisa, “that you did not
come back with the intention of claiming from us what belongs to you;
but business is business, you know, and we had better get things
settled at once. Your uncle’s savings amounted to eighty-five thousand
francs. I have therefore put down forty-two thousand five hundred to
your credit. See!”

She showed him the figures on the sheet of paper.

“It is unfortunately not so easy to value the shop, plant,
stock-in-trade, and goodwill. I have only been able to put down
approximate amounts, but I don’t think I have underestimated anything.
Well, the total valuation which I have made comes to fifteen thousand
three hundred and ten francs; your half of which is seven thousand six
hundred and fifty-five francs, so that your share amounts, in all, to
fifty thousand one hundred and fifty-five francs. Please verify it for
yourself, will you?”

She had called out the figures in a clear, distinct voice, and she now
handed the paper to Florent, who was obliged to take it.

“But the old man’s business was certainly never worth fifteen thousand
francs!” cried Quenu. “Why, I wouldn’t have given ten thousand for it!”

He had ended by getting quite angry with his wife. Really, it was
absurd to carry honesty to such a point as that! Had Florent said one
word about the business? No, indeed, he had declared that he didn’t
wish for anything.

“The business was worth fifteen thousand three hundred and ten francs,”
Lisa re-asserted, calmly. “You will agree with me, my dear Florent,
that it is quite unnecessary to bring a lawyer into our affairs. It is
for us to arrange the division between ourselves, since you have now
turned up again. I naturally thought of this as soon as you arrived;
and, while you were in bed with the fever, I did my best to draw up
this little inventory. It contains, as you see, a fairly complete
statement of everything. I have been through our old books, and have
called up my memory to help me. Read it aloud, and I will give you any
additional information you may want.”

Florent ended by smiling. He was touched by this easy and, as it were,
natural display of probity. Placing the sheet of figures on the young
woman’s knee, he took hold of her hand and said, “I am very glad, my
dear Lisa, to hear that you are prosperous, but I will not take your
money. The heritage belongs to you and my brother, who took care of my
uncle up to the last. I don’t require anything, and I don’t intend to
hamper you in carrying on your business.”

Lisa insisted, and even showed some vexation, while Quenu gnawed his
thumbs in silence to restrain himself.

“Ah!” resumed Florent with a laugh, “if Uncle Gradelle could hear you,
I think he’d come back and take the money away again. I was never a
favourite of his, you know.”

“Well, no,” muttered Quenu, no longer able to keep still, “he certainly
wasn’t over fond of you.”

Lisa, however, still pressed the matter. She did not like to have money
in her secrétaire that did not belong to her; it would worry her, said
she; the thought of it would disturb her peace. Thereupon Florent,
still in a joking way, proposed to invest his share in the business.
Moreover, said he, he did not intend to refuse their help; he would, no
doubt, be unable to find employment all at once; and then, too, he
would need a complete outfit, for he was scarcely presentable.

“Of course,” cried Quenu, “you will board and lodge with us, and we
will buy you all that you want. That’s understood. You know very well
that we are not likely to leave you in the streets, I hope!”

He was quite moved now, and even felt a trifle ashamed of the alarm he
had experienced at the thought of having to hand over a large amount of
money all at once. He began to joke, and told his brother that he would
undertake to fatten him. Florent gently shook his hand; while Lisa
folded up the sheet of figures and put it away in a drawer of the
secrétaire.

“You are wrong,” she said by way of conclusion. “I have done what I was
bound to do. Now it shall be as you wish. But, for my part, I should
never have had a moment’s peace if I had not put things before you. Bad
thoughts would quite upset me.”

They then began to speak of another matter. It would be necessary to
give some reason for Florent’s presence, and at the same time avoid
exciting the suspicion of the police. He told them that in order to
return to France he had availed himself of the papers of a poor fellow
who had died in his arms at Surinam from yellow fever. By a singular
coincidence this young fellow’s Christian name was Florent.

Florent Laquerriere, to give him his name in full, had left but one
relation in Paris, a female cousin, and had been informed of her death
while in America. Nothing could therefore be easier than for Quenu’s
half brother to pass himself off as the man who had died at Surinam.
Lisa offered to take upon herself the part of the female cousin. They
then agreed to relate that their cousin Florent had returned from
abroad, where he had failed in his attempts to make a fortune, and that
they, the Quenu-Gradelles, as they were called in the neighbourhood,
had received him into their house until he could find suitable
employment. When this was all settled, Quenu insisted upon his brother
making a thorough inspection of the rooms, and would not spare him the
examination of a single stool. Whilst they were in the bare looking
chamber containing nothing but chairs, Lisa pushed open a door, and
showing Florent a small dressing room, told him that the shop girl
should sleep in it, so that he could retain the bedroom on the fifth
floor.

In the evening Florent was arrayed in new clothes from head to foot. He
had insisted upon again having a black coat and black trousers, much
against the advice of Quenu, upon whom black had a depressing effect.
No further attempts were made to conceal his presence in the house, and
Lisa told the story which had been planned to everyone who cared to
hear it. Henceforth Florent spent almost all his time on the premises,
lingering on a chair in the kitchen or leaning against the marble-work
in the shop. At meal times Quenu plied him with food, and evinced
considerable vexation when he proved such a small eater and left half
the contents of his liberally filled plate untouched. Lisa had resumed
her old life, evincing a kindly tolerance of her brother-in-law’s
presence, even in the morning, when he somewhat interfered with the
work. Then she would momentarily forget him, and on suddenly perceiving
his black form in front of her give a slight start of surprise,
followed, however, by one of her sweet smiles, lest he might feel at
all hurt. This skinny man’s disinterestedness had impressed her, and
she regarded him with a feeling akin to respect, mingled with vague
fear. Florent had for his part only felt that there was great affection
around him.

When bedtime came he went upstairs, a little wearied by his lazy day,
with the two young men whom Quenu employed as assistants, and who slept
in attics adjoining his own. Leon, the apprentice, was barely fifteen
years of age. He was a slight, gentle looking lad, addicted to stealing
stray slices of ham and bits of sausages. These he would conceal under
his pillow, eating them during the night without any bread. Several
times at about one o’clock in the morning Florent almost fancied that
Leon was giving a supper-party; for he heard low whispering followed by
a sound of munching jaws and rustling paper. And then a rippling
girlish laugh would break faintly on the deep silence of the sleeping
house like the soft trilling of a flageolet.

The other assistant, Auguste Landois, came from Troyes. Bloated with
unhealthy fat, he had too large a head, and was already bald, although
only twenty-eight years of age. As he went upstairs with Florent on the
first evening, he told him his story in a confused, garrulous way. He
had at first come to Paris merely for the purpose of perfecting himself
in the business, intending to return to Troyes, where his cousin,
Augustine Landois, was waiting for him, and there setting up for
himself as a pork butcher. He and she had had the same godfather and
bore virtually the same Christian name. However, he had grown
ambitious; and now hoped to establish himself in business in Paris by
the aid of the money left him by his mother, which he had deposited
with a notary before leaving Champagne.

Auguste had got so far in his narrative when the fifth floor was
reached; however, he still detained Florent, in order to sound the
praises of Madame Quenu, who had consented to send for Augustine
Landois to replace an assistant who had turned out badly. He himself
was now thoroughly acquainted with his part of the business, and his
cousin was perfecting herself in shop management. In a year or eighteen
months they would be married, and then they would set up on their own
account in some populous corner of Paris, at Plaisance most likely.
They were in no great hurry, he added, for the bacon trade was very bad
that year. Then he proceeded to tell Florent that he and his cousin had
been photographed together at the fair of St. Ouen, and he entered the
attic to have another look at the photograph, which Augustine had left
on the mantelpiece, in her desire that Madame Quenu’s cousin should
have a pretty room. Auguste lingered there for a moment, looking quite
livid in the dim yellow light of his candle, and casting his eyes
around the little chamber which was still full of memorials of the
young girl. Next, stepping up to the bed, he asked Florent if it was
comfortable. His cousin slept below now, said he, and would be better
there in the winter, for the attics were very cold. Then at last he
went off, leaving Florent alone with the bed, and standing in front of
the photograph. As shown on the latter Auguste looked like a sort of
pale Quenu, and Augustine like an immature Lisa.

Florent, although on friendly terms with the assistants, petted by his
brother, and cordially treated by Lisa, presently began to feel very
bored. He had tried, but without success, to obtain some pupils;
moreover, he purposely avoided the students’ quarter for fear of being
recognised. Lisa gently suggested to him that he had better try to
obtain a situation in some commercial house, where he could take charge
of the correspondence and keep the books. She returned to this subject
again and again, and at last offered to find a berth for him herself.
She was gradually becoming impatient at finding him so often in her
way, idle, and not knowing what to do with himself. At first this
impatience was merely due to the dislike she felt of people who do
nothing but cross their arms and eat, and she had no thought of
reproaching him for consuming her substance.

“For my own part,” she would say to him, “I could never spend the whole
day in dreamy lounging. You can’t have any appetite for your meals. You
ought to tire yourself.”

Gavard, also, was seeking a situation for Florent, but in a very
extraordinary and most mysterious fashion. He would have liked to find
some employment of a dramatic character, or in which there should be a
touch of bitter irony, as was suitable for an outlaw. Gavard was a man
who was always in opposition. He had just completed his fiftieth year,
and he boasted that he had already passed judgment on four Governments.
He still contemptuously shrugged his shoulders at the thought of
Charles X, the priests and nobles and other attendant rabble, whom he
had helped to sweep away. Louis Philippe, with his bourgeois following,
had been an imbecile, and he could tell how the citizen-king had
hoarded his coppers in a woollen stocking. As for the Republic of ‘48,
that had been a mere farce, the working classes had deceived him;
however, he no longer acknowledged that he had applauded the Coup
d’Etat, for he now looked upon Napoleon III as his personal enemy, a
scoundrel who shut himself up with Morny and others to indulge in
gluttonous orgies. He was never weary of holding forth upon this
subject. Lowering his voice a little, he would declare that women were
brought to the Tuileries in closed carriages every evening, and that
he, who was speaking, had one night heard the echoes of the orgies
while crossing the Place du Carrousel. It was Gavard’s religion to make
himself as disagreeable as possible to any existing Government. He
would seek to spite it in all sorts of ways, and laugh in secret for
several months at the pranks he played. To begin with, he voted for
candidates who would worry the Ministers at the Corps Législatif. Then,
if he could rob the revenue, or baffle the police, and bring about a
row of some kind or other, he strove to give the affair as much of an
insurrectionary character as possible. He told a great many lies, too;
set himself up as being a very dangerous man; talked as though “the
satellites of the Tuileries” were well acquainted with him and trembled
at the sight of him; and asserted that one half of them must be
guillotined, and the other half transported, the next time there was “a
flare-up.” His violent political creed found food in boastful, bragging
talk of this sort; he displayed all the partiality for a lark and a
rumpus which prompts a Parisian shopkeeper to take down his shutters on
a day of barricade-fighting to get a good view of the corpses of the
slain. When Florent returned from Cayenne, Gavard opined that he had
got hold of a splendid chance for some abominable trick, and bestowed
much thought upon the question of how he might best vent his spleen on
the Emperor and Ministers and everyone in office, down to the very
lowest police constable.

Gavard’s manners with Florent were altogether those of a man tasting
some forbidden pleasure. He contemplated him with blinking eyes,
lowered his voice even when making the most trifling remark, and
grasped his hand with all sorts of masonic flummery. He had at last
lighted upon something in the way of an adventure; he had a friend who
was really compromised, and could, without falsehood speak of the
dangers he incurred. He undoubtedly experienced a secret alarm at the
sight of this man who had returned from transportation, and whose
fleshlessness testified to the long sufferings he had endured; however,
this touch of alarm was delightful, for it increased his notion of his
own importance, and convinced him that he was really doing something
wonderful in treating a dangerous character as a friend. Florent became
a sort of sacred being in his eyes: he swore by him alone, and had
recourse to his name whenever arguments failed him and he wanted to
crush the Government once and for all.

Gavard had lost his wife in the Rue Saint Jacques some months after the
Coup d’Etat; however, he had kept on his roasting shop till 1856. At
that time it was reported that he had made large sums of money by going
into partnership with a neighbouring grocer who had obtained a contract
for supplying dried vegetables to the Crimean expeditionary corps. The
truth was, however, that, having sold his shop, he lived on his income
for a year without doing anything. He himself did not care to talk
about the real origin of his fortune, for to have revealed it would
have prevented him from plainly expressing his opinion of the Crimean
War, which he referred to as a mere adventurous expedition, “undertaken
simply to consolidate the throne and to fill certain persons’ pockets.”
At the end of a year he had grown utterly weary of life in his bachelor
quarters. As he was in the habit of visiting the Quenu-Gradelles almost
daily, he determined to take up his residence nearer to them, and came
to live in the Rue de la Cossonnerie. The neighbouring markets, with
their noisy uproar and endless chatter, quite fascinated him; and he
decided to hire a stall in the poultry pavilion, just for the purpose
of amusing himself and occupying his idle hours with all the gossip.
Thenceforth he lived amidst ceaseless tittle-tattle, acquainted with
every little scandal in the neighbourhood, his head buzzing with the
incessant yelping around him. He blissfully tasted a thousand
titillating delights, having at last found his true element, and
bathing in it, with the voluptuous pleasure of a carp swimming in the
sunshine. Florent would sometimes go to see him at his stall. The
afternoons were still very warm. All along the narrow alleys sat women
plucking poultry. Rays of light streamed in between the awnings, and in
the warm atmosphere, in the golden dust of the sunbeams, feathers
fluttered hither and thither like dancing snowflakes. A trail of
coaxing calls and offers followed Florent as he passed along. “Can I
sell you a fine duck, monsieur?” “I’ve some very fine fat chickens
here, monsieur; come and see!” “Monsieur! monsieur, do just buy this
pair of pigeons!” Deafened and embarrassed he freed himself from the
women, who still went on plucking as they fought for possession of him;
and the fine down flew about and wellnigh choked him, like hot smoke
reeking with the strong odour of the poultry. At last, in the middle of
the alley, near the water-taps, he found Gavard ranting away in his
shirt-sleeves, in front of his stall, with his arms crossed over the
bib of his blue apron. He reigned there, in a gracious, condescending
way, over a group of ten or twelve women. He was the only male dealer
in that part of the market. He was so fond of wagging his tongue that
he had quarrelled with five or six girls whom he had successively
engaged to attend to his stall, and had now made up his mind to sell
his goods himself, naively explaining that the silly women spent the
whole blessed day in gossiping, and that it was beyond his power to
manage them. As someone, however, was still necessary to supply his
place whenever he absented himself he took in Marjolin, who was
prowling about, after attempting in turn all the petty market callings.

Florent sometimes remained for an hour with Gavard, amazed by his
ceaseless flow of chatter, and his calm serenity and assurance amid the
crowd of petticoats. He would interrupt one woman, pick a quarrel with
another ten stalls away, snatch a customer from a third, and make as
much noise himself as his hundred and odd garrulous neighbours, whose
incessant clamour kept the iron plates of the pavilion vibrating
sonorously like so many gongs.

The poultry dealer’s only relations were a sister-in-law and a niece.
When his wife died, her eldest sister, Madame Lecœur, who had become a
widow about a year previously, had mourned for her in an exaggerated
fashion, and gone almost every evening to tender consolation to the
bereaved husband. She had doubtless cherished the hope that she might
win his affection and fill the yet warm place of the deceased. Gavard,
however, abominated lean women; and would, indeed, only stroke such
cats and dogs as were very fat; so that Madame Lecœur, who was long and
withered, failed in her designs.

With her feelings greatly hurt, furious at the ex-roaster’s five-franc
pieces eluding her grasp, she nurtured great spite against him. He
became the enemy to whom she devoted all her time. When she saw him set
up in the markets only a few yards away from the pavilion where she
herself sold butter and eggs and cheese, she accused him of doing so
simply for the sake of annoying her and bringing her bad luck. From
that moment she began to lament, and turned so yellow and melancholy
that she indeed ended by losing her customers and getting into
difficulties. She had for a long time kept with her the daughter of one
of her sisters, a peasant woman who had sent her the child and then
taken no further trouble about it.

This child grew up in the markets. Her surname was Sarriet, and so she
soon became generally known as La Sarriette. At sixteen years of age
she had developed into such a charming sly-looking puss that gentlemen
came to buy cheeses at her aunt’s stall simply for the purpose of
ogling her. She did not care for the gentlemen, however; with her dark
hair, pale face, and eyes glistening like live embers, her sympathies
were with the lower ranks of the people. At last she chose as her lover
a young man from Menilmontant who was employed by her aunt as a porter.
At twenty she set up in business as a fruit dealer with the help of
some funds procured no one knew how; and thenceforth Monsieur Jules, as
her lover was called, displayed spotless hands, a clean blouse, and a
velvet cap; and only came down to the market in the afternoon, in his
slippers. They lived together on the third storey of a large house in
the Rue Vauvilliers, on the ground floor of which was a disreputable
café.

Madame Lecœur’s acerbity of temper was brought to a pitch by what she
called La Sarriette’s ingratitude, and she spoke of the girl in the
most violent and abusive language. They broke off all intercourse, the
aunt fairly exasperated, and the niece and Monsieur Jules concocting
stories about the aunt, which the young man would repeat to the other
dealers in the butter pavilion. Gavard found La Sarriette very
entertaining, and treated her with great indulgence. Whenever they met
he would good-naturedly pat her cheeks.

One afternoon, whilst Florent was sitting in his brother’s shop, tired
out with the fruitless pilgrimages he had made during the morning in
search of work, Marjolin made his appearance there. This big lad, who
had the massiveness and gentleness of a Fleming, was a protege of
Lisa’s. She would say that there was no evil in him; that he was indeed
a little bit stupid, but as strong as a horse, and particularly
interesting from the fact that nobody knew anything of his parentage.
It was she who had got Gavard to employ him.

Lisa was sitting behind the counter, feeling annoyed by the sight of
Florent’s muddy boots which were soiling the pink and white tiles of
the flooring. Twice already had she risen to scatter sawdust about the
shop. However, she smiled at Marjolin as he entered.

“Monsieur Gavard,” began the young man, “has sent me to ask—”

But all at once he stopped and glanced round; then in a lower voice he
resumed: “He told me to wait till there was no one with you, and then
to repeat these words, which he made me learn by heart: ‘Ask them if
there is no danger, and if I can come and talk to them of the matter
they know about.’”

“Tell Monsieur Gavard that we are expecting him,” replied Lisa, who was
quite accustomed to the poultry dealer’s mysterious ways.

Marjolin, however, did not go away; but remained in ecstasy before the
handsome mistress of the shop, contemplating her with an expression of
fawning humility.

Touched, as it were, by this mute adoration, Lisa spoke to him again.

“Are you comfortable with Monsieur Gavard?” she asked. “He’s not an
unkind man, and you ought to try to please him.”

“Yes, Madame Lisa.”

“But you don’t behave as you should, you know. Only yesterday I saw you
clambering about the roofs of the market again; and, besides, you are
constantly with a lot of disreputable lads and lasses. You ought to
remember that you are a man now, and begin to think of the future.”

“Yes, Madame Lisa.”

However, Lisa had to get up to wait upon a lady who came in and wanted
a pound of pork chops. She left the counter and went to the block at
the far end of the shop. Here, with a long, slender knife, she cut
three chops in a loin of pork; and then, raising a small cleaver with
her strong hand, dealt three sharp blows which separated the chops from
the loin. At each blow she dealt, her black merino dress rose slightly
behind her, and the ribs of her stays showed beneath her tightly
stretched bodice. She slowly took up the chops and weighed them with an
air of gravity, her eyes gleaming and her lips tightly closed.

When the lady had gone, and Lisa perceived Marjolin still full of
delight at having seen her deal those three clean, forcible blows with
the cleaver, she at once called out to him, “What! haven’t you gone
yet?”

He thereupon turned to go, but she detained him for a moment longer.

“Now, don’t let me see you again with that hussy Cadine,” she said.
“Oh, it’s no use to deny it! I saw you together this morning in the
tripe market, watching men breaking the sheep’s heads. I can’t
understand what attraction a good-looking young fellow like you can
find in such a slipshod slattern as Cadine. Now then, go and tell
Monsieur Gavard that he had better come at once, while there’s no one
about.”

Marjolin thereupon went off in confusion, without saying a word.

Handsome Lisa remained standing behind her counter, with her head
turned slightly in the direction of her markets, and Florent gazed at
her in silence, surprised to see her looking so beautiful. He had never
looked at her properly before; indeed, he did not know the right way to
look at a woman. He now saw her rising above the viands on the counter.
In front of her was an array of white china dishes, containing long
Arles and Lyons sausages, slices of which had already been cut off,
with tongues and pieces of boiled pork; then a pig’s head in a mass of
jelly; an open pot of preserved sausage-meat, and a large box of
sardines disclosing a pool of oil. On the right and left, upon wooden
platters, were mounds of French and Italian brawn, a common French ham,
of a pinky hue, and a Yorkshire ham, whose deep red lean showed beneath
a broad band of fat. There were other dishes too, round ones and oval
ones, containing spiced tongue, truffled galantine, and a boar’s head
stuffed with pistachio nuts; while close to her, in reach of her hand,
stood some yellow earthen pans containing larded veal, _paté de foie
gras_, and hare-pie.

As there were no signs of Gavard’s coming, she arranged some fore-end
bacon upon a little marble shelf at the end of the counter, put the
jars of lard and dripping back into their places, wiped the plates of
each pair of scales, and saw to the fire of the heater, which was
getting low. Then she turned her head again, and gazed in silence
towards the markets. The smell of all the viands ascended around her,
she was enveloped, as it were, by the aroma of truffles. She looked
beautifully fresh that afternoon. The whiteness of all the dishes was
supplemented by that of her sleevelets and apron, above which appeared
her plump neck and rosy cheeks, which recalled the soft tones of the
hams and the pallor of all the transparent fat.

As Florent continued to gaze at her he began to feel intimidated,
disquieted by her prim, sedate demeanour; and in lieu of openly looking
at her he ended by glancing surreptitiously in the mirrors around the
shop, in which her back and face and profile could be seen. The mirror
on the ceiling, too, reflected the top of her head, with its tightly
rolled chignon and the little bands lowered over her temples. There
seemed, indeed, to be a perfect crowd of Lisas, with broad shoulders,
powerful arms, and round, full bosoms. At last Florent checked his
roving eyes, and let them rest on a particularly pleasing side view of
the young woman as mirrored between two pieces of pork. From the hooks
running along the whole line of mirrors and marbles hung sides of pork
and bands of larding fat; and Lisa, with her massive neck, rounded
hips, and swelling bosom seen in profile, looked like some waxwork
queen in the midst of the dangling fat and meat. However, she bent
forward and smiled in a friendly way at the two gold-fish which were
ever and ever swimming round the aquarium in the window.

Gavard entered the shop. With an air of great importance he went to
fetch Quenu from the kitchen. Then he seated himself upon a small
marble-topped table, while Florent remained on his chair and Lisa
behind the counter; Quenu meantime leaning his back against a side of
pork. And thereupon Gavard announced that he had at last found a
situation for Florent. They would be vastly amused when they heard what
it was, and the Government would be nicely caught.

But all at once he stopped short, for a passing neighbour, Mademoiselle
Saget, having seen such a large party gossiping together at the
Quenu-Gradelles’, had opened the door and entered the shop. Carrying
her everlasting black ribbonless straw hat, which appropriately cast a
shadow over her prying white face, she saluted the men with a slight
bow and Lisa with a sharp smile.

She was an acquaintance of the family, and still lived in the house in
the Rue Pirouette where she had resided for the last forty years,
probably on a small private income; but of that she never spoke. She
had, however, one day talked of Cherbourg, mentioning that she had been
born there. Nothing further was ever known of her antecedents. All her
conversation was about other people; she could tell the whole story of
their daily lives, even to the number of things they sent to be washed
each month; and she carried her prying curiosity concerning her
neighbours’ affairs so far as to listen behind their doors and open
their letters. Her tongue was feared from the Rue Saint Denis to the
Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and from the Rue Saint Honoré to the Rue
Mauconseil. All day long she went ferreting about with her empty bag,
pretending that she was marketing, but in reality buying nothing, as
her sole purpose was to retail scandal and gossip, and keep herself
fully informed of every trifling incident that happened. Indeed, she
had turned her brain into an encyclopaedia brimful of every possible
particular concerning the people of the neighbourhood and their homes.

Quenu had always accused her of having spread the story of his Uncle
Gradelle’s death on the chopping-block, and had borne her a grudge ever
since. She was extremely well posted in the history of Uncle Gradelle
and the Quenus, and knew them, she would say, by heart. For the last
fortnight, however, Florent’s arrival had greatly perplexed her, filled
her, indeed, with a perfect fever of curiosity. She became quite ill
when she discovered any unforeseen gap in her information. And yet she
could have sworn that she had seen that tall lanky fellow somewhere or
other before.

She remained standing in front of the counter, examining the dishes one
after another, and saying in a shrill voice:

“I hardly know what to have. When the afternoon comes I feel quite
famished for my dinner, and then, later on, I don’t seem able to fancy
anything at all. Have you got a cutlet rolled in bread-crumbs left,
Madame Quenu?”

Without waiting for a reply, she removed one of the covers of the
heater. It was that of the compartment reserved for the chitterlings,
sausages, and black-puddings. However, the chafing-dish was quite cold,
and there was nothing left but one stray forgotten sausage.

“Look under the other cover, Mademoiselle Saget,” said Lisa. “I believe
there’s a cutlet there.”

“No, it doesn’t tempt me,” muttered the little old woman, poking her
nose under the other cover, however, all the same. “I felt rather a
fancy for one, but I’m afraid a cutlet would be rather too heavy in the
evening. I’d rather have something, too, that I need not warm.”

While speaking she had turned towards Florent and looked at him; then
she looked at Gavard, who was beating a tattoo with his finger-tips on
the marble table. She smiled at them, as though inviting them to
continue their conversation.

“Wouldn’t a little piece of salt pork suit you?” asked Lisa.

“A piece of salt pork? Yes, that might do.”

Thereupon she took up the fork with plated handle, which was lying at
the edge of the dish, and began to turn all the pieces of pork about,
prodding them, lightly tapping the bones to judge of their thickness,
and minutely scrutinising the shreds of pinky meat. And as she turned
them over she repeated, “No, no; it doesn’t tempt me.”

“Well, then, have a sheep’s tongue, or a bit of brawn, or a slice of
larded veal,” suggested Lisa patiently.

Mademoiselle Saget, however, shook her head. She remained there for a
few minutes longer, pulling dissatisfied faces over the different
dishes; then, seeing that the others were determined to remain silent,
and that she would not be able to learn anything, she took herself off.

“No; I rather felt a fancy for a cutlet rolled in bread-crumbs,” she
said as she left the shop, “but the one you have left is too fat. I
must come another time.”

Lisa bent forward to watch her through the sausage-skins hanging in the
shop-front, and saw her cross the road and enter the fruit market.

“The old she-goat!” growled Gavard.

Then, as they were now alone again, he began to tell them of the
situation he had found for Florent. A friend of his, he said, Monsieur
Verlaque, one of the fish market inspectors, was so ill that he was
obliged to take a rest; and that very morning the poor man had told him
that he should be very glad to find a substitute who would keep his
berth open for him in case he should recover.

“Verlaque, you know, won’t last another six months,” added Gavard, “and
Florent will keep the place. It’s a splendid idea, isn’t it? And it
will be such a take-in for the police! The berth is under the
Prefecture, you know. What glorious fun to see Florent getting paid by
the police, eh?”

He burst into a hearty laugh; the idea struck him as so extremely
comical.

“I won’t take the place,” Florent bluntly replied. “I’ve sworn I’ll
never accept anything from the Empire, and I would rather die of
starvation than serve under the Prefecture. It is quite out of the
question, Gavard, quite so!”

Gavard seemed somewhat put out on hearing this. Quenu had lowered his
head, while Lisa, turning round, looked keenly at Florent, her neck
swollen, her bosom straining her bodice almost to bursting point. She
was just going to open her mouth when La Sarriette entered the shop,
and there was another pause in the conversation.

“Dear me!” exclaimed La Sarriette with her soft laugh, “I’d almost
forgotten to get any bacon fat. Please, Madame Quenu, cut me a dozen
thin strips—very thin ones, you know; I want them for l

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