CHAPTER ONE

In the silence of a deserted avenue, wagons stuffed with produce made their way toward Paris, their thudding wheels rhythmically echoing off the houses sleeping behind the rows of elm trees meandering on either side of the road. At the pont de Neuilly a cart full of cabbages and another full of peas met up with eight carts of turnips and carrots coming in from Nanterre. The horses, their heads bent low, led themselves with their lazy, steady pace, a bit slowed by the slight uphill climb. Up on the carts, lying on their stomachs in the vegetables, wrapped in their black-and-gray-striped wool coats, the drivers slept with the reins in their fists. Occasionally the light from a gas lamp would grope its way through the shadows and brighten the hobnail of a boot, the blue sleeve of a blouse, or the tip of a hat poking from the bright bloom of vegetables—red bouquets of carrots, white bouquets of turnips, or the bursting greenery of peas and cabbages.

All along the road and all the nearby routes, up ahead and farther back, the distant rumbling of carts told of other huge wagons, all pushing on through the darkness and slumber of two in the morning, the sound of passing food lulling the darkened town to stay asleep.

Madame François's horse, Balthazar, an overweight beast, led the column. He dawdled on, half asleep, flicking his ears until, at rue de Longchamp, his legs were suddenly frozen by fear. The other animals bumped their heads into the stalled carts in front of them, and the column halted with the clanking of metal and the cursing of drivers who had been yanked from their sleep. Seated up top, Madame François, with her back against a plank that held the vegetables in place, peered out but saw nothing by the faint light of the little square lantern to her left, which barely lit one of Balthazar's glistening flanks.

“Come on, lady, let's keep moving,” shouted one of the men who was kneeling in turnips. “It's just some drunken idiot.”

But as she leaned over she thought she made out a dark patch of something blocking the road, about to be stepped on by the horse.

“You can't just run people over,” she said, jumping down from her wagon.

It was a man sprawled across the road, his arms stretched out, facedown in the dust. He seemed extraordinarily long and as thin as a dry branch. It was a miracle that Balthazar had not stepped on him and snapped him in two. Madame François thought he was dead, but when she crouched over him and took his hand, she found it was still warm.

“Hey, mister,” she called softly.

But the drivers were growing impatient. The one kneeling in the vegetables shouted in a gruff voice, “Give it up, lady. The son of a bitch is plastered. Shove him in the gutter.”

In the meantime, the man had opened his eyes. He stared, motionless, at Madame François, with a look of bewilderment. She too thought that he must be drunk.

“You can't stay there, you're going to get yourself run over,” she told him. “Where were you going?”

“I don't know,” the man replied in a feeble voice. Then, with great effort and a worried face, “I was going to Paris, and I fell. I don't know …”

Now she could see him better, and he was pathetic with his black pants and black overcoat, so threadbare that they showed the contour of his bare bones. Underneath a hat of coarse black cloth that he had pulled down as though afraid of being recognized, two large brown eyes of a rare gentleness could be seen on a hard and tormented face. Madame François thought that this man was much too feeble to have been drinking.

“Where in Paris were you going?” she asked.

He didn't answer right away. This cross-examination was worrying him. After a moment's reflection, he cautiously replied, “Over there, by Les Halles.”

With great difficulty he had almost stood up again and seemed anxious to be on his way. But Madame François noticed him trying to steady himself against one of the wagon shafts.

“You're tired?”

“Very tired,” he mumbled.

Adopting a gruff tone, as though annoyed, and giving him a shove, she shouted, “Go on, move it! Get up in my wagon! You're wasting my time. I'm going to Les Halles, and I can drop you off with my vegetables.”

When he refused, she practically threw him onto the turnips and carrots in the back with her thick arms and shouted impatiently, “That's enough! No more trouble from you. You're beginning to annoy me, my friend. Didn't I tell you that I'm headed to the market anyway? Go to sleep up there. I'll wake you when we get there.”

She climbed back up, sat sideways with her back against the plank again, and took Balthazar's reins. He started up sleepily, twitching his ears. The other carts followed. The column resumed its slow march in the dark, the sound of wheels on the paving stones again thudding against the sleeping housefronts. The wagoneers, wrapped in their coats, returned to their snoozing. The one who had called out to Madame François grumbled as he lay down, “Damn, does she have to take care of every bum? You are something, lady.”

The carts rolled on, the horses, with their heads bowed, leading themselves. The man Madame François had picked up was lying on his stomach, his long legs lost in the turnips, which filled the back of the cart, while his head was buried in the spreading carrot bunches. With weary outstretched arms he seemed to hug his bed of vegetables for fear a jolt of the cart would send him sprawling in the road. He watched the two endless columns of gaslights ahead of him, which vanished in the distance into a confusion of other lights. A large white cloud nuzzled the horizon, so that Paris appeared to be sleeping in a glowing mist illuminated by all the lamps.

“I'm from Nanterre. My name is Madame François,” the woman said after a moment's silence. “Ever since I lost my poor husband, I go to Les Halles every morning. It's a hard life, but what can you do. And you?”

“My name is Florent, I come from far away,” the stranger replied awkwardly. “I'm really sorry, but I'm so exhausted that it's hard to talk.”

He did not want to say any more, so Madame François became silent too, letting the reins fall loosely on the back of Balthazar, who seemed to know every paving stone along the route.

In the meantime, Florent, staring at the broadening sparkle of Paris in the distance, contemplated the story that he had decided not to tell the woman. Sentenced to Cayenne¹ for his involvement in the events of December,² he had escaped to Dutch Guiana, where he had drifted for two years, filled with a passion to return to France but also afraid of the imperial police. He was about to enter the great city that he had so deeply missed and longed for. He told himself that he would hide there, returning to the peaceful existence he had once lived. The police knew nothing. Everyone would assume that he had died over there. He thought about his arrival at Le Havre, where he had landed with only fifteen francs hidden in the corner of a handkerchief. It had been enough for a coach to Rouen, but from there he had had to make his way on foot, having only thirty sous left. At Vernon he had spent his last two sous on bread. After that he couldn't remember anything. He thought he had slept in a ditch for several hours, and he might have shown a policeman the papers with which he had supplied himself. But these images danced vaguely in his head. He had come all the way from Vernon with nothing to eat, accompanied by fits of anger and sudden despondency that had made him chew the leaves on the hedges he passed along the way. He had kept walking despite stomach cramps, his belly knotted, his vision blurred, his feet advancing, unconsciously drawn by the image of Paris, so far away, beyond the horizon, calling to him, waiting for him.

On a very dark night, he finally reached Courbevoie. Paris looked like a patch of starry sky that had fallen onto a blackened corner of the earth. It had a stern look, as though angered by Florent's return. Then he felt faint, his wobbly legs almost collapsing as he walked down the hill. While crossing the pont de Neuilly he supported himself, clinging to the stone railings, and leaned over to look at the inky waves of the rolling Seine between the thickly grown banks. A red signal lantern on the water followed him with its bloodshot eye. Now he had to pull himself up to climb to Paris at the top of the hill. But the boulevard seemed endless. The hundreds of leagues he had already traveled seemed as nothing compared to this. In this last stretch he was losing faith that he would ever reach the top of the hill with its crown of lights.

The flat boulevard stretched before him with its lines of tall trees and squat houses. Its wide grayish sidewalks were blotchy with the shadows of branches. The darkened gaps where the boulevard met the side streets were all in silence and shade. Only the stumpy little yellow flames of the gas lamps standing straight at regular intervals gave some life to this desolate wasteland. And Florent seemed to be making no progress, the boulevard growing longer and longer and carrying Paris away into the depths of the night. In time he began hallucinating that the gas lamps on both sides of him were running away, carrying the road off with them, until, completely losing his bearings, he fell on a pile of paving stones.

And now he was gently tossing and turning on his bed of vegetables, which felt more like a soft feather bed. He raised his head a little to watch the incandescent mist spread over the black silhouettes of the rooftops just visible along the horizon. He was approaching his destination, being carried there with nothing more to do than absorb the slow-motion bumps of the wagon, and, freed from the pain of fatigue, he now suffered only hunger. But his hunger was reawakened and becoming unbearable. His limbs had fallen asleep, and he could feel only his stomach, cramped and twisted as though by a red-hot iron. The ripe smell of vegetables that surrounded him, the piercing freshness of the carrots, made him almost faint.

With all his might he pushed his chest into this deep bed of food, trying to pull in his stomach as tightly as he could to suppress its loud rumblings. Behind him, the nine other wagons piled high with cabbages, mountains of peas, heaps of artichokes, lettuce, celery, and leeks, seemed to be slowly gaining on him as though to overtake him as he was racked with starvation and bury him in an avalanche of food.

They came to a stop, and deep voices could be heard. It was customs inspectors examining the wagons. And so Florent, his teeth clenched, at last entered Paris, passed out on a pile of carrots.

“Hey, you up there!” Madame François abruptly shouted. As he didn't move, she climbed up and shook him. Florent propped himself up. As he had slept, the hunger pains had stopped, but he was disoriented.

The woman made him get down, saying, “Can you help me unload?”

He helped her.

A heavyset man with a walking stick and a felt hat, with a badge on the left lapel of his coat, was growing angry and tapping the tip of his stick on the sidewalk. “Come on, come on, faster than that. How many meters do you have there? Four, isn't it?”

He gave Madame François a ticket, and she took a large coin out of her canvas bag. He moved on to vent his anger and tap the tip of his stick farther down the line. The market woman took Balthazar by the bridle and backed him up until the wagon wheels were against the curb. Then she opened the back of the wagon, marked off her four meters of curb with pieces of straw, and asked Florent to start passing the vegetables down. She arranged them in her alotted space with an artistic flair, so that the tops formed a green wreath around the bunches. She arranged the display with dazzling speed in the dank morning light that made it resemble a tapestry with geometric splashes of color.

After Florent handed her a huge bouquet of parsley that he had found on the wagon floor, she asked him one more favor: “I would really appreciate it if you could keep an eye on my goods while I park the wagon. It's very close, at the Compas d'Or on rue Montorgueil.”³

He told her not to worry. In truth, he was happy to sit there because moving around had started to revive his hunger. He sat down, leaning against a mound of cabbages by Madame François's stand. He told himself that he would be just fine sitting there, waiting and not moving. His mind was a void, and he could not even say exactly where he was. In the beginning of September the early morning was already remaining dark. The lanterns around him flickered in the dusky shadows. He was sitting by the side of a major street, which he did not recognize. It vanished into the night's blackness. He could see hardly anything except the produce he had been entrusted to watch. Down the market lanes he could make out only the outline of other heaps like a flock of sheep. In the middle of the route, blocking the street, he could see the outline of carts. From one end to the other, he could smell what he could not exactly see, a line of horses breathing in the dark. Shouts, a piece of wood or an iron chain hitting the pavement, the thumping of vegetables unloaded from wagons, and wheels scraping as carts were backed against the curb—these sounds loaded the still air with the exciting promise of dawn awakening.

Turning his head, Florent noticed, on the other side of the cabbage, a snoring man wrapped like a package in his overcoat, his head resting on a basket of plums. A little closer on the left side, he could see a ten-year-old child with an angel's smile fast asleep between two stacks of endive. Looking down the pavement, he could see nothing that seemed awake except maybe the lanterns hanging from invisible arms, their light bouncing over all the sleeping vegetables and people spread out in piles, awaiting daybreak.

What was surprising was the glimpse of two enormous pavilions on either side of the street, with grand roofs that seemed to rise out of sight amid a flurry of lights. In his weariness he imagined he was seeing an array of palaces, huge and orderly and light as crystal with streaks of light filtering through endless rows of venetian blinds. Between slender pillars, ladders of light rose into the shadow of the lower roof and then soared above it to a higher roof, giving the outline of large square halls where gray, slumbering heaps gathered under the glare of brilliant gaslight.

Florent turned away, enraged that he could not grasp where he was, disturbed by this fragile but gigantic specter, and as he looked up he glimpsed the luminous clock dial of the massive gray Church of Saint Eustache. He was suddenly jolted by the realization that he was near Saint Eustache—he was at pointe Saint-Eustache!

Just then Madame François came back, vehemently arguing with a man who was carrying a sack on his shoulders and offering only a sou per bunch for the carrots.

“Come on, Lacaille, you're not being fair. You're going to sell them to the Parisians for four or five sous. I'll sell them to you for two.”

As he left she said, “I swear, they act as though these things grow on their own. Let him go look for carrots at a sou a bunch. He'll be back, the drunk.”

She was saying this to Florent as she sat down next to him. “So, if you haven't been in Paris in a long time, you probably don't know the new markets. It's only been at most five years since they were built. Over there, you see, the pavilion next to us, that's for fruit and flowers. Further down is the fish market and poultry, and behind us, there, vegetables, then butter and cheese. There are six pavilions on this side and over on the opposite side, another four: the meat market, tripe and organs. It's huge, but the problem is that it's freezing in the winter. I heard they're going to tear down the buildings around the grain market and build another two pavilions. Did you know about all this?”

“No,” Florent answered, “I've been abroad. And this main street here, what's it called?”

“It's a new street called rue du Pont-Neuf. It starts at the Seine and goes all the way to rue Montmartre and rue Montorgueil. You could have figured it out in daylight.” She got up, seeing a woman eyeing her turnips. “Is that you, Mère Chantemesse?” she said pleasantly.

Florent looked down to the foot of rue Montorgueil. It was there that a group of sergents de ville had grabbed him on the night of December 4. He had been strolling boulevard Montmartre at about two in the afternoon, slowly ambling with the crowd, smiling at all the soldiers the government had posted in the streets so that it would be taken seriously, when suddenly the military had started making a sweep of the boulevard. It had gone on for a good quarter of an hour. Then someone had pushed him and he had been thrown to the ground at the corner of rue Vivienne. He wasn't sure what had happened after that because gunshots had rung out and the crowd had panicked and trampled him.

When he heard no more noise, he tried to get up but realized that a young woman in a pink bonnet was lying on top of him. Her shawl had slipped off her shoulders, and he could see her undergarment, a bodice tucked in little pleats. Just above her breasts were two holes where bullets had entered, and when he tried to move her gently to free his legs, two dribbles of blood had leaked out of the holes and over his hands. He had leapt to his feet and bolted, without a hat, blood moist on his hands. He had wandered around, delirious, until evening fell, constantly seeing the woman who had lain across his legs, her face so pale, her eyes so blue and large, her lips grimacing at the shock of being there, dead so soon.

At the age of thirty, he was a bashful young man who could barely bring himself to look a woman in the face, and now he would be seeing her face, carrying it in his heart and memory, for the rest of his life. It was as though she had been his beloved wife.

In the evening, his mind still blurred by the afternoon's horror, he had somehow, not really knowing how, found himself in a wine shop on the rue Montorgueil, where men were drinking and threatening to throw up barricades. He had gone with them, helping them pull up a few paving stones. He had sat on the barricade, worn out from wandering the streets, and he had vowed to himself that when the soldiers came he would fight. He wasn't even carrying a knife, and his head was still hatless. Around eleven o'clock, he nodded off, and in his sleep he saw the two holes in the white bodice staring at him like two bloodshot, tearstained eyes. When he woke up, he was being taken by four sergents de ville, who were beating him with their fists. The men at the barricade had all fled. The sergents had become enraged and almost strangled him when they found that he had blood on his hands. It was the young woman's blood.

Florent, lost in all these memories, looked up at Saint Eustache without noticing the hands of the clock. It was almost four o'clock. Les Halles was still asleep. Madame François was standing and arguing with Mère Chantemesse about the price of a bunch of turnips. Florent was remembering how he had almost been executed right there, against a wall of Saint Eustache. There a police detachment had just blown the heads off five unlucky souls, taken at a barricade on rue Grenéta. Five bodies had been piled on the sidewalk at a spot where he now saw what seemed to be a heap of bright pink radishes. He had avoided being shot only because sergents de ville carried only swords. They had taken him to the nearest police station and left him with the precinct chief, who was given a note written in pencil on a scrap of paper. It said, “Taken with his hands covered in blood. Very dangerous.”

He had been dragged from station to station until morning. Everywhere he was taken, the scrap of paper had accompanied him. He had been handcuffed and guarded as though he were a raving lunatic. On rue de la Lingerie, some drunken soldiers had wanted to shoot him and had already lit a lantern in preparation when the order had come to take him to the prison at police headquarters. Two days later he was in a dungeon at Fort Bicêtre. He had been suffering from hunger ever since. The pangs of hunger that had visited him in that dungeon had never left.

He had been one of a hundred men at the bottom of that cellar, where there was barely air enough to breathe, scrambling like captive animals for the few pieces of bread thrown to them. When he had been brought before the judge without any witnesses and with no opportunity to defend himself, he had been accused of belonging to an underground group, and when he swore that it was not true, the judge had pulled the scrap of paper from a file. “Taken with his hands covered in blood. Very dangerous.” That was all they had needed. He had been sentenced to deportation to the penal colony.

On a January night six weeks later, a guard had awakened him and taken him to a courtyard with about four hundred other prisoners. An hour later this first convoy had been marched in handcuffs between two columns of gendarmes with loaded rifles, to be shipped into exile. They had crossed the Austerlitz bridge and followed the boulevards to the Gare du Havre.

It was a festive carnival night. The windows of the restaurants along the boulevards were open. At the top of the rue Vivienne, right where he had found the dead woman—that unknown woman whose face he always carried with him—there was now a large carriage full of masked women, bare-shouldered and with laughing voices, irritated by being held up and appalled by “this interminable line of prisoners.”

From Paris to Le Havre the prisoners had not been given a drink of water or a mouthful of bread. Someone had forgotten to distribute rations before they left. For thirty-six hours they had had nothing to eat, until they were packed into the hold of the frigate Canada.

The hunger had never left him. Florent searched through his past and could not recall a moment of plenty. He had become dry and emaciated, with a shrunken stomach and skin that drooped from his bones. And now that he was back in Paris, it seemed to him to be fat, haughty, and overloaded with food, while surrounded by sadness. He had returned on a bed of vegetables, rolling into town on a huge wave of food that troubled him.

Had that festive carnival night continued all these seven years? Again he saw the open windows of the boulevard restaurants, laughing women, the city of gluttony he had left on that January day long ago. It seemed to him that everything had expanded and enlarged as though to keep up with the huge market, Les Halles, whose heavy breathing he was beginning to hear, still sluggish with yesterday's indigestion.

Mère Chantemesse had finally decided on a dozen turnip bunches. She gathered them up in her apron, pressing them to her midriff, which made her look even plumper than usual, and she stayed on to chat some more in her drawling voice. When she finally left, Madame François sat beside Florent again.

“Poor old Mère Chantemesse,” she said. “She must be at least seventy-two. I remember when I was a kid, her buying turnips from my father. And she has no family, only some little waif that she picked up God knows where, who gives her nothing but grief. But she gets by, selling a little and making a couple of francs' profit a day. If it were me, I could never spend all my days on the streets of Paris. She doesn't even have relatives.”

Seeing that Florent was not talking, she asked, “Do you have relatives in Paris?”

He seemed not to hear her. His old mistrust returned. His mind was swirling with old tales of police, their undercover agents on every street corner, and women selling the secrets they had pried loose from sad souls they took in. As he sat beside Madame François, she looked honest enough with her full, calm face and the black-and-yellow scarf around her head. She seemed about thirty-five, sturdy, with handsome good looks from her outdoor life. Her masculine bearing was softened by kind, soft dark eyes. She was a bit nosy, but it was a good-natured curiosity.

“I have a nephew in Paris,” she said, continuing the one-sided conversation, not the least offended by Florent's silence. “He hasn't turned out to be any good. Now he's enlisted … It's always good to have somewhere to go. I suppose your parents will be surprised to see you. It feels good to get home, doesn't it?”

All the while she talked, she never took her eyes off Florent, probably feeling sorry for him because he was so skinny. Then too, she guessed that there was a gentleman somewhere inside that tattered black overcoat, which was why she did not dare press a silver coin into his palm. But finally she did say, “You know, if you ever need anything—”

But Florent cut her off with clumsy pride, saying that he had everything he needed and knew exactly where he was going. This seemed to please her, and she repeated several times, as though to reassure herself, “Oh good, then you just have to wait for daybreak.”

A huge bell at the corner of the fruit market, right above Florent's head, started ringing. Its slow, regular notes seemed to awaken the market little by little. The carts kept coming with the growing ruckus of shouting wagoneers, the cracks of their whips, the iron wheel bands and horseshoes grinding into the stone pavement. The wagons, unable to move forward except in sudden jolts, lined up and slowly faded into the distant gray. All along rue du Pont-Neuf the carts unloaded, pulled close to the sidewalk, where the horses stood motionless in a line as though at a horse fair.

Florent examined a cart filled with magnificent cabbages. It had been backed up to the sidewalk with great care and effort, and its leafy pile rose above a gas lamp whose light fell on the large leaves, making them look like crimped pieces of green velvet. A young farm girl of about sixteen, wearing a blue linen coat and cap, climbed up on the cart and was up to her shoulders in cabbages. She began tossing them one by one to someone hidden in shadow below. Every now and then the girl would slip and disappear in a cabbage avalanche. Then her pink nose would be seen sticking out of the green and she would be heard laughing as the cabbages were tossed between Florent and the gaslight. He counted them automatically until the cart was empty, which left him feeling somehow disappointed.

The piles of vegetables were now spilling into the road, with narrow paths between them so that people could pass. The sidewalk was covered end to end with the dark vegetable mounds. But in the flicker of lantern light, you could barely make out the lush fullness of a bouquet of artichokes, the delicate green of the lettuce, the flush coral of carrots, the soft ivory finish of turnips. Flashes of the bright colors skipped across the mounds with the flickering of the light.

A crowd had awakened, and people were starting to fill up the sidewalk, scrambling among the vegetables, sometimes stopping, at times chattering, occasionally shouting. A loud voice could be heard in the distance screaming, “Chicory!”

The gates of the vegetable pavilion had just been opened, and the retailers who had stalls there, white caps on their heads, shawls knotted over their black coats, and skirts pinned up to protect them from getting dirty, began gathering their day's provisions in roomy baskets that stood on the floor. These baskets were seen darting in and out between the road and the pavilion, bumping into the heads of bystanders in the thick crowds, the bystanders expressing their displeasure with coarse complaints that were lost in the growing clamor of increasingly hoarse voices.

They could spend a quarter of an hour fighting over one sou. Florent was surprised at the calm of the marketers with their plaid clothing and tanned faces in the middle of the long-winded haggling of the market.

Behind him on the sidewalk of the rue Rambuteau, fruit was being sold. Hampers and smaller baskets were lined up, covered with canvas or straw giving off a strong odor of overripe mirabelle plums. After listening for some time to a soft, slow voice, Florent had to turn his head and look. He saw a charming woman, small and dark, sitting on the ground and bargaining.

“Oh, come on, Marcel,” she said. “You can take a hundred sous, won't you?” She was speaking to a man who kept his coat closely wrapped around him and did not answer. After about five very long minutes the woman went back on the attack. “Come on, Marcel, one hundred sous for that basket there and four francs for the other one. That'll make nine francs I owe you.”

More silence.

“All right, what's your price?”

“Ten francs, as you well know because I already told you. And what have you done with your Jules this morning, La Sarriette?” The young woman started laughing as she grabbed a fistful of small change from her pocket.

“Oh,” she said, “Jules is having his beauty rest this morning. He claims that men are not made for work.”

She paid for the two baskets and carried them into the newly opened fruit pavilion. Les Halles was still wrapped in artfully lit dankness, with thousands of stripes from jalousies beneath the awnings of the long covered street already heavily trafficked with pedestrians, while the distant pavilions were still deserted. At the pointe Saint-Eustache the bakers and wine merchants were busy taking down their shutters; their red shops, gaslights aglow, were brilliant against the grayness that still covered the other buildings. Florent looked at a boulangerie⁴ on the left-hand side of rue Montorgueil, all full and golden with a fresh batch of bread, and he thought he could smell the fragrance of warm bread. It was 4:30 in the morning.

Meanwhile, Madame François had sold all her produce. When Lacaille reappeared with his bag, only a few carrot bunches were left.

“How about a sou for that?” he asked.

“I knew I'd be seeing you again,” she answered quietly. “Go ahead. Take the rest. There are seventeen bunches.”

“So that makes seventeen sous.”

“No. Thirty-four.”

They settled on twenty-five. Madame François was in a hurry to leave. Once Lacaille had wandered off with the carrots in his bag she said to Florent, “See that, he was watching me. The old bastard drifts around the market. Sometimes he waits till the last second to buy four sous' worth of goods. Oh these Parisians! They'll bicker over a few sous and then empty their pockets drinking at the wine shop.”

When Madame François spoke of Paris, her voice was full of irony and disdain. She talked about it as though it were a distant city so ridiculous and contemptible that she condescended to set foot there only in the dark of night.

“Now I can get out of here,” she said, sitting down next to Florent on a neighbor's vegetable pile.

Florent bowed his head. He had just stolen something. Just as Lacaille had left, Florent had spied a piece of carrot lying on the ground, picked it up, and was grasping it tightly in his right hand. Behind him, celery stalks and parsley bunches gave off a smell that was nauseating him.

“I'm going to get out of here,” Madame François repeated. This stranger touched her, and her senses told her that he was suffering, sitting there on the sidewalk motionless. She offered again to help him, but he again refused with an even more biting pride. He even stood up and remained on his feet to prove that he had regained his strength. Then, as Madame François turned away, he stuffed the carrot into his mouth. But despite his terrible longing to sink his teeth into it, he was forced to take it out of his mouth again, because she started examining his face again. She started to question him further with a kindhearted curiosity. Florent simply answered with nods and head shakes. Then, slowly, he began to eat the carrot.

She was finally about to leave when a powerful voice right behind her exclaimed, “Good morning, Madame François!”

The voice came from a skinny young man with big bones and a huge head. His face was bearded, with a delicate nose and sparkling clear eyes. He wore a rusty, beat-up black felt hat and was buttoned up in an enormous overcoat, once a soft chestnut but now discolored with long greenish streaks from the rain. Somewhat bent and shaking with nervous energy that seemed chronic, he stood in a pair of heavy laced shoes, the shortness of his pant legs revealing his blue hose.

“Oh, hello, Monsieur Claude,” she responded cheerfully. “You know, I was expecting you on Monday, and when you didn't show up I took care of your canvas for you, hanging it on a nail in my room.”

“Oh, Madame François, you're too kind. I'll finish that study of mine one of these days. I wasn't able to make it Monday. Does your big plum tree still have all its leaves?”

“Absolutely.”

“I wondered because I wanted it for a corner of my painting. It would be perfect by the side of the chicken coop. I've been thinking about it all week … Ah, what beautiful vegetables this morning! I came down very early this morning, looking for the rays of a beautiful sunrise landing on the cabbages.” He demonstrated with a sweep of his arm that took in the full length of the sidewalk.

Madame François answered, “Well, I'm leaving. Good-bye. See you soon, Monsieur Claude.” As she was leaving she introduced Florent to the young painter. “This gentleman seems to have come from far away. He's no longer at home in your pigsty called Paris. Maybe you could fill him in a bit.”

At last she was off, happy to have left the two of them together. Claude studied Florent with interest; his gaunt, diffident face seemed to Claude to be an original. Madame François's introduction was all he needed, and with the familiarity of a street hustler experienced in chance encounters, he calmly said, “I think I'll join you. Where are you going?”

Florent was still awkward. He did not open up so quickly. On the other hand, he had had a question on his lips ever since his arrival. Deciding to risk it, though he feared a disagreeable response, he asked, “Does the rue Pirouette still exist?”

“It certainly does,” the painter answered. “That street is a curious corner of old Paris. It bends and turns like a dancer, and the houses have huge bellies like fat women … I did a pretty good etching of it. I'll show it to you when you come by my place … Is that where you're going?”

Florent, heartened by the news that the rue Pirouette still existed, admitted that it was not his destination and that in fact, he had no place to go. But his distrust was reawakened by Claude's insistence. “Who cares?” said Claude. “Let's go to rue Pirouette anyway. It's the most wonderful color at night … Let's go, it's just a short hop.”

Florent had to follow him. They walked side by side, like two old friends, stepping over baskets and piles of vegetables. On the pavement at rue Rambuteau, there were mounds of gigantic cauliflowers, stacked with surprising orderliness like cannonballs. The delicate white cauliflower flesh opened like enormous roses, surrounded by large green leaves, so that the mounds resembled bridal bouquets on display on a flower stand. Claude stopped and emitted little whimpers of appreciation.

Then, in front of them, was the rue Pirouette, where he pointed to the houses, one by one, with stories and information about them. One gas lamp burned by itself in a corner. The peeling houses crammed together, their overhangs protruding above the ground floor, as the painter had said, like the bellies of fat women, while the gables above them tilted back as though leaning on their neighbors for support. Three or four others, placed farther back at the edge of the shadows, leaned forward as if about to fall on their faces. The gas lamp lit one house, making it appear very white, newly whitewashed, but still resembling a decrepit old woman freshly powdered and made up to look young. The other houses stretched into the darkness, cracked and green-streaked from the rain in the gutters, in such a hodgepodge of different colors and attitudes that it made Claude laugh.

Florent had stopped at rue de Mondétour, in front of the next to last house on the left. All three stories, each with two shutterless windows neatly covered by white curtains, appeared to be asleep. On the top floor, a faint light could be seen through the curtain moving back and forth.

The shop beneath the overhang seemed to have a tremendous effect on Florent. It was starting to open, a shop with prepared greens. At the far end, shiny bowls could be seen, while on the display shelf in front, round domes and conical towers of spinach and chicory were placed in bowls, each notched in the back to leave space for flat serving spatulas, showing only their white metal handles.

Florent felt as though he had been struck motionless, riveted to the pavement by this sight. He did not recognize the shop. Reading the merchant's name on a red sign, Godebœuf, he felt even more dismayed. With his arms hanging limp at his sides, he studied the cooked spinach with the air of a cursed man.

From the opened window above, a little old woman leaned out and looked up at the sky and then at the market in the distance.

“Ah, Mademoiselle Saget is an early bird,” said Claude, looking up. And he added, turning to Florent, “I once had an aunt living in that house. That place is a nest of gossip. Ah, now the Méhudins are starting to stir. There's a light on the second floor.”

Florent was about to ask Claude a question, but there was something unnerving about him in his baggy, faded overcoat. Florent followed him without saying a word while Claude went on about the Méhudins. They were fishmongers; the elder woman was superb. The younger one, who sold freshwater fish, resembled a virgin in a Murillo painting, this blonde among all the carp and eels. Then he started asserting, with growing anger, that Murillo was a third-rate painter. Suddenly he stopped in the middle of the street and asked, “So where are you going?”

“At the moment, I'm not going anywhere,” Florent said wearily. “We can go wherever you like.”

As they were leaving rue Pirouette, a voice called out to Claude from the wine shop on the corner. Claude entered, with Florent behind him. They had still taken off the shutters on only one side. The gas burned in the shop's still-sleepy air. A forgotten dish towel and cards from a game the night before were scattered on the table, while a breeze from the wide-open door blew freshness into the stale warm smell of wine. The owner, Monsieur Lebigre, was serving a customer in his long-sleeved waistcoat, with his sloppy beard and fat, even features still pale with sleep. Men with deepset eyes were standing in groups drinking at the counter, coughing, spitting, and trying to wake themselves up with white wine and eau-de-vie.⁵ Florent recognized Lacaille, whose sack was now bursting with vegetables. He was on his third round with a friend, who was telling a story at great length about the acquisition of a basket of potatoes. Then, after emptying his glass, he went to chat with Monsieur Lebigre in a small glassed-in office in the back where the gas had not yet been lit.

“What'll you have?” Claude asked Florent.

When they had entered, Claude had shaken hands with the man who had called out to him. He was a fort,⁶ a handsome young man of no more than twenty-two, clean-shaven except for a trim mustache, with a hearty demeanor, wearing a broad-brimmed chalk-covered hat and a wool scarf with floppy laces for tightening his blue work shirt. Claude called him Alexandre, clapped him on the arm, and demanded to know when they were going back to Charentonneau. Then they reminisced about the great boat trip they had made together on the Marne. That evening they had eaten rabbit.

“So what are you drinking?” Claude asked Florent again.

Florent stared at the counter, feeling embarrassed. At the end were brass-ringed pots of punch and mulled wine, simmering over a gas burner's short blue-and-pink jets of flame. Finally, he admitted that he would love to have a hot drink. Monsieur Lebigre served them three glasses of punch. Near the pots was a basket of little butter rolls that had just been brought in and were still steaming. But the others didn't take any, so Florent just drank his glass of punch. He felt it falling into his stomach like a drizzle of molten lead.

Alexandre paid.

“He's a good guy, Alexandre,” said Claude after the two of them were back on the rue Rambuteau. “He's a lot of fun when we go to the country. He does amazing feats of strength. What a build, the oaf. I've seen him stripped. If he would only pose for me nude in the open air … Now, if you'd like, we could do a little tour through the market.”

Florent followed passively. The glow of light at the end of rue Rambuteau announced daybreak. The great voice of Les Halles grumbled in the distance; the occasional peal of bells⁷ from some far-off pavilion competed with the rising bedlam. Claude and Florent turned into one of the covered streets between the fish and poultry pavilions. Florent looked up into the vaulted roof overhead, at the glistening wooden beams in between the black iron struts. As they turned onto the main thoroughfare, he imagined being in some unknown town with its various neighborhoods and suburbs, its boulevards and roads, plazas and intersections, all suddenly sheltered from a rainy day by a huge roof dropped into place as though by the whimsy of some giant.

The shadows that lingered in the crevices of the roof multiplied the forest of pillars and expanded the delicate ribbing, the fretwork balconies, the slatted windows. And there, high above the town, nestled in the shadows, was an immense metal jungle, with stems and vines and tangled branches covering this little world that resembled the foliage of an age-old forest.

Some sections of the market were still sleeping behind iron gates. The butter and poultry stands had long rows of trellised stalls that the gas lighting showed to be deserted. The fish pavilion was opening, and women were scurrying among the white stone slabs, which were littered with baskets and forgotten rags. The noise and activity were slowly picking up over at the vegetables, the fruit, and the flowers. Little by little morning was coming, from the working-class neighborhood, where the cabbage was piled at four in the morning, to the lazy, privileged zone, which began hanging its chickens and pheasants at eight.

The main covered passageways teemed with life. All along the sidewalks there were many produce sellers, including small-scale gardeners from the outskirts of Paris showing their little harvests of vegetable bunches and fruit bundles from the previous night. In the midst of the crowd's incessant comings and goings, carts pulled in under the vaulted roof, the clop of the horses' hooves slowing down. Two of the wagons blocked the intersection, and in order to get around them Florent had to press against some shabby bundles that looked like coal sacks and were so heavy that they bowed the axle of the wagon carrying them. They were damp and gave off a scent of seaweed, and huge black mussels were spilling out of the split end of one sack.

At every step they took, Claude and Florent were forced to stop for something. The seafood was arriving, and, one after another, railroad carts pulled up with tall wooden cages loaded with the bins and hampers that had been shipped by train from the coast. Trying to get out of the way of the fish carts, which were coming with increasing urgency, Claude and Florent practically dived under the wheels of the wagons filled with butter, eggs, and cheese, huge yellow chariots drawn by four-horse teams and decorated with colored lanterns. Workers were bringing down cases of eggs and baskets of cheeses and butter, which they carried into the auction room, where men in caps made entries in notebooks by gaslight. Claude was enthralled by the scene, lost in admiration for the lighting on a group in overalls unloading a cart. Finally they moved on.

Still traveling down the main route, they walked in a heady fragrance that surrounded them and seemed to follow them. They were in the midst of the cut flower market. On the ground, to the right and left, women sat with square baskets in front of them filled with bunches of roses, violets, dahlias, and daisies. Some bunches were darker, like bloodstains; others brightened into delicate, silvery grays. A lighted candle near one of the baskets gave the surrounding blackness a sudden burst of color, the bright plumage of the daisies, the bloodred of the dahlias, the rich blueness of violets, the brilliant tints of roses. And nothing was more like spring than the tenderness of this perfume on the pavement after the biting breath of seafood and the pungent scent of butter and cheese.

The two men went on their way meandering among the flowers. Out of curiosity they stopped in front of the women selling bunches of ferns and vine leaves, neatly tied-up bundles with twenty-five pieces in each. Then they went down a nearly deserted alley, where their footsteps echoed as though they were in a church. There they found a small cart the size of a wheelbarrow with an undersized donkey hitched to it, which was probably bored because when he saw them, he began braying so loudly that his groans echoed in the great vaulted roofs of Les Halles, which seemed to shake from the sound. The horses answered with neighing, then a stamping and scraping of hooves, a distant fracas that swelled, rolled, and then faded.

In front of Claude and Florent on rue Berger they saw, in the glow of gaslight, bare retail shops, open on one side, with baskets and fruit surrounded by three grimy walls covered with arithmetical calculations scribbled in pencil. As they stood there they saw a well-dressed woman curled up with an air of weary contentment in the corner of a cab that looked misplaced in the procession of carts as it made its way along.

“There's Cinderella heading home without her slippers,” said Claude with a smile.

They chatted now as they went back to the market. Claude, his hands in his pockets, whistled and expounded on his love for this great mountain of food that rose up every morning in the heart of Paris. He roamed the streets every night dreaming of colossal still lifes, extraordinary works. He had even begun one. He had made his friend Marjolin and that slut Cadine pose, but it was hard. Those damn vegetables and the fruit and fish and meat—it was all too beautiful!

Florent listened to the artist's exuberance with his own belly aching from hunger. It was obvious that it had not occurred to Claude at that moment that all those beautiful objects were there for people to eat. He loved them for their colors. But suddenly he stopped talking and tightened the long red belt that he wore under his greenish coat, an old habit. Then he continued with a sly look.

“And here, this is where I have my breakfast, at least with my eyes, which is better than nothing at all. Sometimes when I forget dinner the night before, I work myself into indigestion the next morning by watching the carts come in here, filled with all sorts of good things. On such a morning I love my vegetables more than ever. Oh, the thing that exasperates me, the real injustice of it, is that those good-for-nothing bourgeois actually eat all this.”

He remembered a dinner that a friend had bought him at Baratte's⁸ one glorious day. They had had oysters, fish, and game. But Baratte's had gone under and all the carnival life of the old Marché des Innocents was now buried, and everything had been replaced by the huge central market, a steel giant of a new town. “Fools can say what they like, but this was the quintessence of the era.”

At first Florent could not decide if he was criticizing the picturesqueness of Baratte's or its cheerful atmosphere. But Claude was on a rant against romanticism. He preferred his piles of cabbage to the rags of the Middle Ages. And he wound up by denouncing the weakness of an etching he had done of rue Pirouette. “All those grubby old places ought to be torn down and replaced by modern ones.”

“Listen,” he said, stopping. “Look over there in the corner. Isn't that a ready-made painting, infinitely more human than all their beloved pretentious paintings?”

Along the covered street women were selling coffee and hot soup. In a corner a crowd of customers had gathered around a man selling cabbage soup. The galvanized tin bucket full of broth was steaming on the little heater, whose holes emitted the pale glow of embers. The woman, armed with a ladle, took thin slices of bread out of a cloth-lined basket and dipped yellow cups into the soup. She was surrounded by tidy saleswomen, farmers in overalls, forts with coats stained by the foods they had carried and their backs bent by the weight of the loads, poor ragged drifters—the entire hungry early-morning crowd of Les Halles, eating, scalding themselves, sticking their chins forward so that the trickle from their spoons would not stain their clothes.

And the passionate painter blinked his eyes, thrilled by the scene, looking for the best vantage point, working out the painting's best composition. But the goddamn cabbage soup smelled impressive.

Florent turned his head, unable to watch the customers emptying their soup cups in silence like a cluster of distrustful animals feeding. Claude himself was overwhelmed by pungent steam rising from someone's spoon that struck him in the face.

He tightened his belt, smiling as though he was annoyed. Then, as they continued their stroll, he alluded to the punch Alexandre had bought them, saying in a low voice: “It's a funny thing, but have you ever noticed that you can always find someone to buy you a drink but there is never anyone who will pay for something to eat?”

It was daybreak. The houses at the end of rue de la Cossonnerie along boulevard Sébastopol were still black, but above the clean line of their slate roofs, a patch of blue sky framed in the arches of the covered street shone like a half-moon. Claude, who had been bending down to look through some ground-level gratings, peering down into the glimmering gaslight of deep cellars, glanced up at the opening between the pillars, as though studying the dark roofs on the edge of the clear sky. Then he stopped again, this time to inspect an iron ladder, one of those that connected the two levels of roofing. Florent asked him what he was looking at up there.

“It's that bastard Marjolin,” said the painter, not in answer to Florent's question. “You can bet he's lying in some gutter, unless he spent the night with the animals in the poultry cellar. I need him to do a study.”

And he told the story of how his friend Marjolin had been found by the market women one morning on a pile of cabbages and how he had grown up wild on the neighborhood streets. When they wanted to send him to school, he would suddenly become ill and they had to take him back to the markets. He knew the most hidden nooks and loved them as if they were his family moving with squirrellike agility through his ironwork forest. What a pretty couple they made—he and the slutty Cadine, whom Mère Chantemesse had picked up one night at the old Marché des Innocents. He was beautiful, this big oaf, golden as a Rubens with a reddish down that caught the light; she was a little thing, lithe and slender, with an odd face beneath a tangle of frizzy black hair.

Claude, engrossed in his talk, walked quickly, bringing his companion to the pointe Saint-Eustache. But Florent, whose legs were starting to buckle again, finally collapsed on a bench near the horse trolley station. There was a cool breeze. At the bottom of the rue Rambuteau, a bright pink light was streaking the milky sky, which higher up was cut by broad gray patches. With the dawn came such a sweet balsamic scent that for a minute Florent thought he was sitting on a hillside in the country. But Claude pointed out to him that on the other side of the bench was the herb market. All along the walkway, around the triperie⁹ there were, in a manner of speaking, fields of thyme, lavender, garlic, and shallot. The merchants had adorned the young plane trees all along the walkway with long branches heavy with bay leaves as thick and green as a victor's wreath. The strong perfume of bay leaf dominated.

The luminous face of the clock on Saint Eustache turned pale, a night-light surprised by the dawn. One by one, the gaslights in the wine shops in the neighborhood were extinguished, like stars faded away by a bright sky. And Florent looked at the huge market emerging from the shadows, coming out of a dreamland in which they had been held, the palaces sprawling along the streets. They seemed to solidify into a greenish gray color with their columns holding up an endless expanse of roof. They rose in a geometrical mass, and once all the lights had been extinguished and the matching square buildings were bathed in dawn light, they seemed like some kind of oversize modern machine, a kind of steam engine with a cauldron designed to serve all mankind, a huge riveted and bolted metal belly built of wood, glass, and iron with the power and grace of a machine with glowing furnaces and dizzily spinning wheels.

Claude had enthusiastically leapt to his feet on the bench and forced his companion to admire daybreak on the vegetables. There was a sea of vegetables between the rows of pavilions from pointe Saint-Eustache to rue des Halles. At the two intersections at either end the seas grew higher, completely flooding the pavement. Dawn rose slowly in soft grays, coloring everything with a light wash of watercolors. The mounting piles, like a swelling sea, the river of greenery rushing through the streets like an autumnal torrent, took on delicate shadows and hues: tender violet, milk-blushed rose, a green steeped in yellows—all the soft, pale hues that change the sky into silk at sunrise. Step by step the fire of dawn rose higher, shooting up bursts of flame at the far end of rue Rambuteau as the vegetables brightened and grew more distinct from the bluish darkness that clung to the ground. Lettuce, escarole, and chicory, with rich earth still stuck to them, opened to expose swelling hearts. Bundles of spinach, bunches of sorrel, packets of artichokes, piles of peas and beans, mountains of romaine tied with straw, sang the full greenery repertoire from the shiny green lacquered pods to the deep green leaves—a continuous range of ascending and descending scales that faded away in the variegated heads of celery and bundles of leeks. But the most piercing note of all came from the flaming carrots and the snowy splotches of turnips, strewn in ample quantities all along the market and lighting it with their colors.

At the intersection of rue des Halles were mountains of cabbages. There were enormous white cabbages that were hard and compact like metal balls, curly savoys whose great leaves made them look like basins of greening bronze, and red cabbages that the dawn seemed to change into exquisite flowery masses the color of wine, crimson and deep purple. At the other end, where pointe Saint-Eustache intersects rue Rambuteau, the route was blocked by swollen-bellied orange pumpkins crawling across the ground in two lines. The varnished brown of onions shone here and there in baskets and the bloodred heaps of tomatoes, the muted yellow of cucumbers, and the deep purple of eggplants, while thick black radishes in funereal drapes still held memories of the night amid this vibrant, jubilant new day.

Claude clapped his hands at the sight. He found something extravagant, crazy, and sublime in all the jaunty vegetables. He insisted that they were absolutely not dead but, after being pulled from the earth the day before, were awaiting the next sunrise to make their farewells from the cobblestones of Les Halles. He saw them as alive, their leaves wide open, as though their roots were still embedded in warm, well-manured soil. He also claimed to hear in the market the death rattle of all the little gardens on the outskirts of the city.

A crowd of white caps, black jackets, and blue overalls was converging in the narrow passages between piles. The forts' huge baskets made their way slowly over the heads of the crowd. The saleswomen, grocers, and fruit sellers were doing a brisk business. A group of corporals and a few nuns were huddled around mountains of cabbages, and institutional cooks were hunting for bargains. The unloading continued, the carts tossing their loads to the ground as though they were shipments of cobblestones, adding more and more waves to the sea of produce that was now spreading to the opposite pathway. And from the far end of the rue du Pont-Neuf, carts kept coming in a line without end.

“It is phenomenally beautiful,” cooed the enraptured Claude.

But Florent was in pain. He believed himself to be tested by some supernatural temptation and turned to look at the side facade of Saint Eustache, unable to look at the market any longer. From this view it seemed washed in sepia against the blue sky with its rosettes and broad arched windows, its bell turret and slate roof. Then his eyes rested on the somber depths of rue Montorgueil, where gaudy signs stood out. On the corner of rue Montmartre, gilded balconies gleamed in the sunlight. When he looked back at the intersection, his eyes were drawn to other signboards with inscriptions such as DRUGGIST AND PHARMACY and FLOUR AND DRIED BEANS in large red and black letters on dull backgrounds.

By now the households in the corner buildings with their narrow windows were waking up, and the airy new rue du Pont-Neuf was showing a touch of the remaining facades of old Paris, yellowing and sturdy. Standing at the empty windows of the large store at the corner of rue Rambuteau, smart-looking attendants in tight pants with large cuffs were arranging their displays. Further away, in the Maison Guillout, severe as a barracks, cookies in gilded wrappers and ornate petits fours were artistically set out in glass cases. All the shops were now open, and workers in white smocks carrying tools under their arms were hurrying up the street.

Claude was still standing on the bench on his tiptoes, trying to see farther down the streets. Suddenly, coming from the crowd that he was not even focusing on, he caught a glimpse of a head draped in blond hair, followed by a smaller one covered in frizzy black curls.

“Hey, Marjolin! Hi, Cadine!” he shouted.

Since his voice was lost in the noise of the crowd, he jumped off the bench and took off. Then he remembered that he had left Florent behind and came back. “You know, I live at the end of the impasse des Bourdonnais,” he said. “My name's written in chalk on the door: Claude Lantier. Come and see my etching of the rue Pirouette.”

Then he vanished. He did not even know Florent's name. After having offered him his views on art, he disappeared in the street the same way he had appeared.

Now Florent was alone. At first he welcomed this solitude. Ever since Madame François had picked him up on avenue de Neuilly he had been moving in a world part sleep and part pain, which had kept him from completely grasping anything. Finally he was free to do exactly what he felt like and to shake himself free of this nightmare of overflowing food following him everywhere. But his mind remained blank, and he could find nothing within him except a vague sense of fear. The day had brightened, and everything could be seen clearly now. He looked at his pants and his pathetic coat. He buttoned the first, dusted off the second, and attempted to straighten himself up, afraid that his black rags would scream out from where he had come. He was seated in the middle of a bench alongside some homeless people who had settled there to wait for sunrise. The nights at Les Halles are good to drifters and vagabonds.

Two sergents de ville, still in night uniforms with their greatcoats and képis,¹⁰ paced back and forth on the sidewalk, side by side, with their hands folded behind their backs. Each time they passed the bench, they cast a glance at the prey whose presence they could sense. Florent thought they recognized him and were about to arrest him. Anxiety overtook him, and he was gripped by a mad compulsion to run. But he didn't dare and had no idea how to get away. The frequent glances shot at him by the sergents de ville, their slow and icy perusal, kept him on the verge of panic. Finally he got up from the bench and, fighting the urge to flee as fast as his long legs would carry him, managed to stroll away quietly, though his shoulders trembled with the fear that at any second he would feel a rough hand grabbing the back of his collar.

Now he had but one thought, one idea, and that was to get away from the market as fast as he could. He would put off his research until later, when the area had emptied out. The three streets that intersected here, rue Montmartre, rue Montorgueil, and rue de Turbigo, worried him. They were blocked by all kinds of vehicles, and the sidewalks were clogged with vegetables. Florent continued until rue Pierre-Lescot, but there he ran into the watercress and potato markets, and it seemed to him there was no way past them. It looked better to take rue Rambuteau. But once he reached boulevard Sébastopol he ran into such a barricade of carriages, wagons, and carts that he turned off to rue Saint-Denis. But there he was back with the vegetables. Retailers had just set up their stands—thick planks propped up on tall baskets—and the flood of cabbages, carrots, and turnips started again. Les Halles overflowed. He tried to escape the flood, but it ran after him. He tried rue de la Cossonnerie, rue Berger, the square des Innocents, rue de la Ferronerie, rue des Halles. He was trapped, disheartened, afraid that he was unable to hop off this carousel of vegetables, which would end up prancing around him, thin vines wrapping around his legs.

The eternal trail of carts and horses stretched all the way to rue de Rivoli and place de l'Hôtel de Ville. Huge vans were hauling away supplies for all the district's grocers and fruit sellers. Large covered wagons with straining, groaning flanks were starting for the suburbs. In rue du Pont-Neuf, Florent became completely disoriented. He stumbled upon a row of handcarts where numerous vendors were arranging their goods. Among them, heading off down rue Saint-Honoré pushing a cart of carrots and cauliflower, he sighted Lacaille.

Florent followed him, hoping he would help him find his way out. Even though the weather was dry, the pavement was very slippery, and discarded artichoke stalks and leaves of all kinds made walking a bit perilous. He slid with each step. He lost track of Lacaille in rue Vauvilliers and, heading into the grain market, once again found his route blocked by vehicles. He no longer tried to fight. Les Halles had defeated him, the tide had overtaken him. Slowly he worked his way back to pointe Saint-Eustache.

Now he heard the loud rumbling of the wagons setting out from the market. Paris was dispersing the mouthfuls that would feed its two million inhabitants. These markets were like a huge central organ, furiously pulsating and pumping the blood of life through the city's veins. The uproar from all the stocking and provisioning was like the chomping of the jaws of a colossus, at one end the cracking of whips of the big buyers driving their wagons to the local markets, at the other the plodding clogs of the poor women who sold lettuce from door to door carrying off their baskets.

Florent entered a covered passage on the left between a group of four pavilions, which, he had noticed when it was nighttime, had no lights on. There he hoped to find refuge, some corner in which he could hide. But now these pavilions were as packed and lively as everywhere else. He went to the end of the street. Wagons were arriving at a quick rate, congesting the market with cages of live poultry and deep square baskets in which dead birds were laid. On the opposite sidewalk, other wagons were unloading whole calves, lying on their sides like children wrapped in shrouds so tailored that only the bloody stumps of their chopped-off legs were showing. There were also whole sheep and sides of beef, legs and shoulders. Butchers in long white aprons stamped the meat, carried it off, weighed it, and hung it on hooks in the auction room.

With his face close to the grating, Florent studied the rows of hanging cadavers—the red cattle and sheep, the pale calves flecked with the yellow of fat and tendons and with gaping bellies. Then he passed along the sidewalk by the triperie with its calves' feet and heads, the rolled tripe neatly packed in boxes, the brains fastidiously laid in flat baskets, the bloody livers, the purplish kidneys. He paused to inspect long two-wheeled carts covered with a round tarpaulin loaded with halved pigs hung on either side over a bed of straw. Seen from behind, the inside of the cart looked like a tabernacle lit by the rows of naked flesh. On the straw were tin cans catching the dripping blood.

Florent was gripped by a fever. The bland smell of the butchers and the pungent smell of the tripe agitated him. He got out of the covered passageway, preferring the open air of rue du Pont-Neuf.

He was in misery. Shuddering suddenly in the morning air, his teeth chattering, he was afraid that he was about to faint. He looked for but could not find even a corner of a bench to sit on, a place to sleep, even if it meant being awakened by the sergents de ville. About to pass out, he propped himself against a tree, his eyes closed, and a humming sound filled his ears. The raw carrot he had eaten, barely chewing it, was now wrenching his stomach, while the punch befuddled his head. He was drunk with illness, exhaustion, and hunger. Once again a flame burned in his chest, and he clutched at his body as though trying to block an opening through which his entire being might slip away. The pavement seemed to be listing sharply. His pain grew so unbearable that he tried to keep walking in order to distract himself. He walked straight ahead and became lost in the vegetables. He followed one narrow path, turned down another, tried to retrace his steps, but took a wrong turn and was once again lost in the greens. The heaps were piled so high that people were walking between two walls of bundles and bunches. Only their heads could be seen over these battlements, white or black depending on the color of their hats, gliding by while enormous swinging baskets, at the same height as the top of the piles, looked like wicker boats adrift on a stagnant mossy lake.

Florent stumbled over a thousand obstructions—forts hefting their loads and market women arguing in coarse voices. He slipped on a bed of discarded leaves and stalks lying thickly on the sidewalk and nearly choked on the scent of crushed greens. At last falling into a stupor, he stopped and gave in to the shoving and insults, reduced to flotsam adrift on ocean swells.

Cowardice was breaking his spirit. He could easily have stooped to begging, and he was infuriated by his stupid pride of the night before. If he had accepted the charity of Madame François, if he had not been so foolishly intimidated by Claude, he would not now be at nearly his last breath, here among the cabbages. What particularly annoyed him was that he had not questioned the painter about rue Pirouette. And now he might very well drop dead on the pavement like a stray dog.

For the last time he raised his eyes and looked at the market glittering in the sun. Bright sunshine was streaming through the covered passageway from the other end, splitting the pavilions with a beam of light, while fiery shafts poured down on the distant expanse of roofs. The great iron framework grew less clear and turned bluish, a mere silhouette outlined against the flaming sunlight. High above, a windowpane caught fire and flame dripped down the sloping zinc roof all the way to the gutter. Below, the tumultuous metropolis was lit by a cloud of golden dust.

The day's awakening was spreading from the snoring of the market gardeners, wrapped in their thick coats, to the rolling wagons, more active than ever. Now the entire city had opened its gratings, the sidewalks were humming, the pavilions were abuzz. The air was thick with voices. It was as though the mutterings Florent had heard in the shadowy early hours from four o'clock on were now blossoming into full sentences.

To the right, to the left, everywhere, the shrill cries sent the treble notes of a flute into the bass rumble of the crowd. It was the sound of seafood, butter, poultry, and meat being sold. The pealing of bells sent added vibrations through the noisy market. All around Florent, sunlight set vegetables on fire with color. The pale water-color he had seen at dawn had vanished. The ample hearts of lettuce were aflame. The hues of the greenery had turned brilliant, the carrots glowed bloodred, the turnips turned incandescent in the triumphal sunlight.

Loads of cabbage were being unloaded to the left of Florent. He turned away and saw in the distance even more wagons being unloaded on rue de Turbigo. The tide was still rising. At first he had felt it around his ankles, then at stomach height, and now it was threatening to rise over his head. Blinded, drowning, his ears ringing, his stomach demolished by all that he had seen and guessing that there were even greater, unfathomable depths of food to come, he asked for mercy. Mad sorrow gripped him at the thought that he would starve to death here at the heart of glutted Paris, in the midst of the market's resplendent daybreak. Fat, hot tears dripped from his eyes.

Now he reached one of the wider alleys. Two women, a small elderly one and a tall withered one, walked by him, headed toward the pavilions.

“So you have come to do your shopping, Mademoiselle Saget?” the tall withered one asked.

“Well, Madame Lecœur, if you can call it shopping. You know how it is for a woman alone, living on almost nothing. I wanted a nice little cauliflower. But it's too expensive. What about the butter, how much is that today?”

“Thirty-four sous. I have some that is very nice. Come with me and I'll show you.”

“Yes, well, I don't know. I still have a little lard left …”

Florent, with a supreme effort, followed the two women. He remembered having heard Claude mention the little elderly woman. He told himself that after she left the tall woman, he would go up and question her.

“And how is your niece?” Mademoiselle Saget asked.

“La Sarriette does what she wants,” Madame Lecœur answered bitterly. “She's decided to go off on her own, and her business is no longer my problem. When all her boyfriends have cleaned her out, don't expect me to give her a bite of bread.”

“You were so good to her. She ought to be doing well this year. Fruits are getting good prices. And how is your brother-in-law?”

“Oh, he—” Madame Lecœur bit her lips and did not seem to want to say anything else.

“The same as always, huh?” Mademoiselle Saget continued. “He's a decent man. But I've heard it said that he goes through money …”

“Who knows how he spends his money?” Madame Lecœur said abruptly. “He's very secretive and also stingy. You know, he's the kind of man who would let you drop dead before he'd loan you a hundred sous. He knows perfectly well that butter, not to mention cheese and eggs, have not had a good season. He's selling poultry as fast as he can get them. But never, not once, not one time, has he offered to help me. Of course, I'm too proud to accept it, you understand, but I would have appreciated the gesture.”

“Oh, look, here he is now,” said Mademoiselle Saget in a low voice.

The two women turned around to look at someone crossing the street to enter the covered passage.

“I'm in a hurry,” Madame Lecœur muttered. “I left my shop with no one watching it. But also, I don't want to talk to him.”

Florent too had mechanically turned to see the man. He was a short, burly man with a cheerful demeanor and grayish stubble for hair. He carried a fat goose under each arm with their heads hanging down and bumping into his legs. Suddenly Florent opened his arms in pleasure and, completely forgetting his exhaustion, ran after the man. When he caught up with him, he shouted, “Gavard!” and slapped him on the back.

The other man looked up and, caught by surprise, studied this tall black figure whom he did not recognize.

Then, all of a sudden, he shouted, “It's you!” Seemingly confused, he added, “Is it really you?”

He almost dropped his fat geese. He still could not control his amazement. But then, seeing his sister-in-law and Mademoiselle Saget, who were observing the encounter from a distance with interest, he continued walking.

“Don't stand there. Come on. There are too many eyes and tongues around here.”

Once under the covered passage, they began talking. Florent told how he had gone to the rue Pirouette, which seemed to amuse Gavard greatly. Then he told Florent that Florent's brother, Quenu, had moved his charcuterie¹¹ nearby, to rue Rambuteau, across from Les Halles.¹² What amused him even more was that Florent had just spent the morning walking around with Claude Lantier, an oddball who by chance was the nephew of Madame Quenu. Gavard was going to take Florent to the charcuterie, but when Florent told him that he had entered France with false papers, he became very serious and secretive. He tried to keep about five steps ahead of him so as not to attract attention. After passing by the poultry pavilion, where he dropped off his two geese on a counter, he crossed rue Rambuteau with Florent following close behind. Stopping in the middle of the street, he glanced knowingly at a large, handsome charcuterie.

Diagonal sunbeams struck rue Rambuteau, lighting up the fronts of the buildings, with the entrance to rue Pirouette in the center of the block appearing like a black hole. At the other end, the great hulk of Saint Eustache glittered in the sunlight like a sparkling casket. In the middle of the crowd, an army of street sweepers emerged from a distant intersection, marching forward in a line and swinging their brooms in unison. At the same time, cleaners were picking up trash on their forks and tossing it into carts that stopped every twenty paces with a sound like smashing pottery. But Florent noticed nothing but the sight of the large charcuterie sparkling in the sunlight.

He was almost at the corner of the rue Pirouette, and the shop was a joy to behold. It was filled with laughter and bright light and brilliant colors that popped out next to the white of the marble countertops. There was a sign; a painting covered with glass with the name QUENU-GRADELLE in large gilded letters framed in leafy branches. The two side panels of the storefront, also glass-covered paintings, depicted chubby cupids frolicking amid animal heads, with pork chops and garlands of sausages, and these still lifes, adorned with rolls and rosettes, were such pretty paintings that the raw meat looked like reddish fruit preserves. Within this lovely frame was the window display on a bed of delicately shredded blue paper, with a few well-placed sprigs of fern making plates of food look like bouquets with greenery. It was a world of good things, mouthwatering things, rich things.

First of all, close to the windowpane, was a row of crocks full of rillettes¹³ alternating with jars of mustard. The next row was nice round boned jambonneaux¹⁴ with golden breadcrumb coatings. Behind these were platters: stuffed Strasbourg tongues all red and looking as if they had been varnished, appearing almost bloody next to the pale sausages and pigs' feet; boudin¹⁵ coiled like snakes; andouilles¹⁶ piled two by two and plump with health; dried sausages in silvery casings lined up like choirboys; pâtés,¹⁷ still warm, with little labels stuck on them like flags; big, fat hams; thick cuts of veal and pork whose juices had jellied clear as crystal candy. In the back were other dishes and earthenware casseroles in which minced and sliced meats slept under blankets of fat. Between the plates and dishes, on a bed of blue paper, were pickling jars of sauces and stocks and preserved truffles, terrines of foie gras, and tins of tuna and sardines. A box of creamy cheeses and one of escargot, wood snails with parsley and butter, were casually strewn in opposite corners.

At the top of the window display, draped with symmetry on a bar armed with sharp wolves' teeth, were links of sausages, dried saucissons¹⁸ and cervelas,¹⁹ their lacy membranes hanging like cords and tassels. On the highest rung in this gourmand's chapel, amid the membranes and between two bunches of purple gladioli, the window was crowned by a small, square aquarium decorated with rocks and housing two goldfish that never stopped swimming.

The sight gave Florent goose bumps. He noticed a woman in the doorway standing in the sunlight. She had a prosperous, contented look that went with the cheerful displays of fat food. A handsome woman, she nearly filled the doorway not too large but full-busted and ample for a woman of only thirty. It was early in the morning, but her hair was well brushed and arranged over her temples— a tidy-looking woman. She had that fine shine and milky pink complexion of people who spend their days around fats and raw meat. She had a slightly grave demeanor, very calm and slow, with eyes that smiled while her lips remained serious. A white starched collar encircled her neck, white cuffs reached up to her elbows, and a white apron covered her to the tips of her shoes, all of which allowed only an occasional glimpse of her black cashmere dress, round shoulders, and ample bosom. The sun glared on all this white. But despite the glow from her bluish black hair, her pink complexion, and her glaring sleeves and apron, she never blinked. She bathed herself in the morning sun, her soft eyes taking in the overflowing Les Halles. The woman was visibly respectable.

“That's your brother's wife, your sister-in-law, Lisa,” Gavard told Florent. He had acknowledged her with a slight nod but then ducked down an alleyway, continuing to take every precaution, not wanting Florent to enter the shop even though it was empty. He was clearly thrilled to be having this slight adventure, enjoying the intrigue.

“Wait here,” he said. “I'll go see if your brother is alone. When I clap my hands, you can come in.”

He pushed open a door at the end of the alley. But the minute Florent heard his brother's voice behind the door, he bounded in. Quenu, who adored him, threw his arms round Florent's neck. They kissed like children. “Oh my God, it's really you!” Quenu stammered. “I can't believe it. I thought you were dead! Just yesterday I was saying to Lisa, ‘Poor Florent’”

He stopped, turned his head toward the shop, and shouted, “Hey, Lisa! Lisa!” Then he turned to a little girl hiding in a corner. “Pauline, go find your mother.”

But the little girl did not move. She was a beautiful five-year-old with a chubby round build, who looked very much like the beautiful charcuterie woman. She held in her arms an enormous tabby cat, which had contentedly surrendered to the child's embrace, its paws hanging loose while the little girl squeezed it tightly in her little arms, as though afraid that this badly dressed man would try to steal her pet.

Slowly Lisa came over to them.

“This is Florent. My brother,” Quenu repeated.

Lisa addressed him as “Monsieur” and welcomed him. She quietly studied him from head to foot without showing any unpleasant surprise. Only her lips showed a slight downward curl. She just stood there until she started to smile at the way her husband was embracing him. As Quenu calmed down, he noticed Florent's emaciated, wretched appearance.

“Oh, poor fellow,” he said. “That place didn't agree with you. Look at me, you see how I've fattened up.”

He was fat, too, quite fat for a man of only thirty. He was bursting out of his shirt and apron, all wrapped up in white linen like a big stuffed doll. His clean-shaven face was sticking out, slightly resembling the snout of one of the pigs he was with all day. Florent had barely recognized him. Seated, Quenu cast a glance at the lovely Lisa and little Pauline. They looked brimming with good health, solidly built, fit, and trim. The two in their turn looked at Florent with that uneasiness that fleshy people always feel in the presence of someone who is extremely skinny. Even their cat was puffed up with fat and stared at Florent suspiciously with dilated yellow eyes.

“You can wait until we have breakfast, can't you?” asked Quenu. “We eat early, about ten o'clock.”

The shop was filled with the smells of cooking. Florent thought back on the horrible night he had just passed, how he had arrived with the vegetables, his agony in the heart of Les Halles, drowning in the endless sea of food that he had just escaped. Then, in a low voice with a sweet smile, he said:

“No, I can't wait. You see, I'm really hungry.”