CHAPTER THREE

Three days later the formalities were finished and the prefecture accepted Florent on Monsieur Verlaque's recommendation, almost without looking, as his replacement. Gavard had wanted to accompany Florent, and when they were alone again on the sidewalk, Gavard kept poking him in the ribs with his elbow, laughing without saying anything, winking his eye cunningly. The police he met on the quai de l'Horloge suddenly seemed absolutely ridiculous, and he tensed up slightly the way someone does to avoid laughing in a person's face.

The following morning, Monsieur Verlaque began to brief the new inspector on his duties. It was arranged that he would take Florent around for the next few days and introduce him to the stormy arena that he would have to oversee. Poor Verlaque, as Gavard called him, was a pale little man, who constantly coughed and walked on the spindly legs of a sickly child through the cool damp air and puddling water of the fish markets, wrapped in flannels, scarfs, and handkerchiefs.

The first morning, when Florent started at seven o'clock, he felt lost, his head pounding and his eyes dazed. Stall keepers were already stalking the auction pavilion, clerks arrived with ledgers in hand, and shipping agents with leather bags hung around their necks sat backward in chairs against the sales booths while they waited to get paid. The fish was being unloaded and unpacked in the enclosure, spreading out to the sidewalks, where there were piles of small baskets. Hampers, bins, and bags of mussels trailing water arrived without end. The auction checkers, very businesslike, leaped over the piles, yanked off the straw coverings, emptied the baskets, then tossed them aside with a sweep of the hand that shook up the fish in their two-handled round baskets and showed them to their best advantage. Once the baskets were all out, it looked to Florent as though a huge school of fish had run aground on the sidewalk, still quivering in opalescent pink, bloodred coral, milky pearl, all the greenish silken pastels of the sea.

Jumbled together by the chance scoop of a fishing net, in the mysterious depths the great sea had given up everything: codfish, haddock, flounder, plaice, dabs—common fish, murky gray with white splotches; eels—thick murky blue snakes with black slits for eyes, so slimy they seemed to still be alive and slithering. The wide, flat skates had a pale underbelly edged with soft red and an upper side marbled along a bumpy back down to the ribbing of the fins, a cinnabar red striped with Florentine bronze, in the somber palette of toads and poisonous flowers. There were roundheaded, horrible dogfish with their mouths gaping like Chinese gargoyles and short fins the shape of bat wings—fitting monsters to stand guard over treasures in ocean grottoes.

Then came the deluxe fish, displayed individually on wicker trays: the salmon, gleaming like well-buffed silver, each scale with its outline seemingly etched by a burin on a polished metal plate; the mullets with the cruder markings of larger scales; the large turbots and mullets with tight white patterns like curdled milk; the tunas, smooth and lustrous, like bags of sleek blackened leather; and roundish bass with huge mouths torn wide open, as though to let an oversize spirit escape at the agonizing moment of death. And everywhere there were soles, beige or gray in pairs. Stiff, slim sand eels looked like pewter shavings. The herring were slightly twisted, with the bruises on their bleeding gills showing against the silver skin. Fat porgies were tinged with a touch of carmine red, whereas the mackerel were golden with green-striped backs and sides with a mother-of-pearl glow, and the pink gurnard,¹ with their white bellies, lay with their heads in the center of the baskets so their tails radiated around and made an odd blossom of pearly white and vibrant red. There were also red mullets with exquisite flesh, with the blush of pink characteristic of the Cyprinid family, and the opalescent glow of boxes of whiting. And there were smelts in small, clean baskets like the pretty little ones used for strawberries, which released a strong scent of violets. Meanwhile, the little pink shrimp and the gray shrimp sharpened the softness of their piles with sharp little black dots of a thousand eyes. The spiny lobsters and the clawed lobsters striped black, still alive, made a grating sound as they tried to crawl off with their broken limbs.

Florent only half listened to Monsieur Verlaque's lengthy explanations. A sunbeam streamed through the glass roof of the covered lane, lighting up the rich colors, washed and softened by the waves, the iridescent hues of the shellfish, the opalescence of the whiting, the pearly mackerel, the gold of the red mullets, the lamé suits of the herring, the great silvery salmon. It was as though the jewelry boxes of a sea nymph had been opened there—a tangle of unimaginable baubles, heaps of necklaces, monstrous bracelets, gigantic brooches, huge barbaric gems of no imaginable purpose. On the backs of skates and dogfish seemed to be huge dull green and purple stones set in some dark metal, while slender sand eels and the tails and fins of smelts suggested the delicacy of fine jewelry.

But what struck Florent most was a fresh breeze, a whiff of the sea, that he recognized, bitter and salty. He recalled the Guianese coast and the fine days of his crossing. He half imagined staring at some bay in high tide with its algae baking in the sun, the bare rocks drying, and the strong breath of the sea. All around him, the fresh fish smelled good, with a sharp, bitter perfume that disturbed the appetite.

Monsieur Verlaque coughed. The dampness was going through him, and he wrapped himself more tightly in his muffler. “Now,” he said, “we're going to go by the freshwater fish.”

This pavilion, next to the fruit market, was the last one before rue Rambuteau. On either side of the auction space were circular tanks divided into compartments by iron gratings. Brass faucets in the shape of swans spouted thin streams of water. And the compartments were full. There was a tangled swarm of shrimp, constantly moving carp with black backs, and tangles of eels perpetually knotting and unknotting themselves. Monsieur Verlaque was taken by a stubborn coughing bout. The dampness was milder here, and there was a soft scent of rivers and of tepid water asleep on the sand.

That morning, a huge quantity of crayfish had arrived in crates and baskets from Germany. The market was also flooded with whitefish from England and Holland. Some workers were unpacking shiny carp from the Rhine, all bronzed in beautiful rust-colored metallic, each scale like a piece of cloisonné enamel; others with huge pike, the coarse iron gray brigands of the water with long, protruding savage jaws; or magnificent dark tench,² red copper stained with the blue green of corroded copper. Amid the glow of metallic skins, the baskets of gudgeon,³ perch, and trout—the dull flat-netted fish—took on a brilliant white appearance, the steel blue of their backs gradually fading away to the soft transparency of their bellies, and the fat snow white barbel⁴ providing the shimmer to this vast still life.

Bags of young carp were being gently emptied into the tanks; the carp flipped over, then remained still for an instant before darting away and disappearing. Little eels were dumped from their baskets in a clump and fell to the bottom of the boxes like a single knot of snakes, while the big ones, thick as a child's arm, raised their heads and then slid under the water, slick as snakes hiding in the brush. Meanwhile, the rest of the fish, whose agonizing death in the soiled wicker trays had been lasting the entire morning, at last perished with great silent gasps every few seconds, opening their mouths as though trying to suck in the humidity from the air amid the shouts and cries of the auction.

But Monsieur Verlaque had brought Florent back to the saltwater fish, where he walked him around and explained intricate details to him. Along three sides of the pavilion, where there were desks for nine salesmen, the crowd surged with swaying heads, and clerks appeared above them, perched in high chairs from which they marked entries in their ledgers.

“Are all these clerks working for the same salesmen?” Florent asked. In reply, Monsieur Verlaque took a detour along the sidewalk outside, which led him to one of the enclosures used for auctioning. He explained to him how the large office made of yellow wood, stained in splotches and stinking of fish, was staffed. At the top of the glassed-off room, the municipal fee collector took notes on the sale prices of the different lots of fish. A little lower down, seated on raised chairs with their wrists resting on high little desks, were two women clerks who monitored the transactions on behalf of the salesmen. At each end of a stone table in the front of the office was an auctioneer who brought out the straw trays and stated prices per lot or per fish, while above him the women clerks, pen in hand, waited to hear the final prices. Monsieur Verlaque showed Florent the cashier, a fat old woman outside the enclosure, shut up in another yellow wooden office, arranging piles of coins.

“You see,” said Monsieur Verlaque, “there's a double control, the Prefecture of the Seine and the Prefecture of Police. The latter licenses the salesmen and maintains the right of supervision over them, while the local prefecture has an interest in the transactions since they are taxable.”

He continued in his cold, feeble voice, explaining the competing interests of the two prefectures. But Florent was barely listening; his attention had been drawn to one of the female clerks in front of him on a high chair. She was a tall, brown-haired woman of about thirty with big black eyes and a great deal of composure. She wrote with outstretched fingers, like a young woman who had been carefully instructed.

But his attention was again diverted by the bellowing of the auctioneer holding a magnificent turbot.

“I hear thirty francs! That's thirty francs! Thirty francs … at thirty francs!”

He repeated these words in various voices, up and down a strange scale of notes with abrupt changes. Hunchbacked, with a crooked face and disheveled hair, he wore a huge blue apron with a bib. With eyes aflame and arms outstretched he shouted, “Thirty one! Thirty-two! Thirty-three! Thirty-three fifty! Thirty-three fifty!”

Then he paused to catch his breath and, turning the tray, shoved it farther over on the table. The women fish sellers bent forward and gently touched the turbot with their fingertips. Then the auctioneer began again, hurling figures at the buyers with a thrust of his hand and responding to the most subtle sign of a bid—a finger raised, an eyebrow arched, lips beginning to purse, an eye winking—and this with such a jumble of words and such speed that Florent, completely incapable of following it, felt uneasy when the hunchback, in a singsong voice like that of a priest chanting a psalm, said, “Forty-two! Forty-two! The turbot is sold at forty-two francs!”

It was the Beautiful Norman who made the final bid. Florent recognized her in the line of women selling fish pressed against the iron rail around the auction space. It was a cool morning. There was a row of fur stoles above the assortment of large white aprons, covering the plentiful stomachs and bosoms and formidable shoulders. With her bun twisted high on her head, adorned with curls, and her white, delicate flesh, the Beautiful Norman showed off her lacy bow amid the tangle of locks covered with dirty kerchiefs, the red noses of heavy drinkers, the scornful mouths and faces like cracked pottery.

The Beautiful Norman, for her part, recognizing Madame Quenu's cousin, was surprised to see him and started gossiping about him to the women around her.

The roar of voices became so loud that Monsieur Verlaque gave up on his explanations to Florent. Nearby, men were calling out deluxe fish with prolonged shouts that sounded as though they came out of bullhorns. One man bellowed out, “Mussels! Mussels!” in such a loud, hoarse voice that it vibrated the roofs of the market. Some of the bags of mussels were dumped upside down, the shellfish poured into hampers, while other bags were emptied with shovels. An unending parade of straw trays with skates, soles, mackerel, eels, and salmon were carried back and forth to the cackling cries of pushing fish women getting louder and louder and leaning so hard on the iron rails that they were starting to creak under the weight. The auctioneer, the hunchback, now in his stride, protruded his jaw and flailed the air with his thin arms. And then, as though driven wild by the avalanche of numbers that shot from his mouth, he leaped onto a stool, where, with his twisted mouth and his hair flying behind him, he could wrench nothing more from his parched throat than unintelligible hisses. Meanwhile, up above, a little old man, his voice muffled in a collar of fake astrakhan,⁵ the collector of municipal fees, sat with nothing but his nose showing from beneath a black velvet cap. The tall brown-haired clerk, with flashing eyes in her calm face, slightly reddened by the cold, sat on a high wooden chair, peacefully writing, apparently undisturbed by the commotion of the hunchback, who seemed to ripple the edges of her skirts.

“That man Logre is fantastic,” Monsieur Verlaque said softly with a smile on his face. “He's the best auctioneer in the market. He could sell a pair of shoe soles as a pair of choice flounder.”

Then he and Florent went back into the pavilion. Passing by the fresh fish auction where there was less passion to the bidding, Monsieur Verlaque explained that river fishing in France was not doing well. The auctioneer, a light-haired, sorry-looking man without hand gestures, was auctioning off some lots of crayfish and eels in a monotonous voice while his helpers kept him in supply by scooping out the tanks with short-handled nets.

Meanwhile, the horde gathering around the sales desk was still growing. Monsieur Verlaque conscientiously served as Florent's instructor, elbowing a path, guiding his successor through the most crowded sections where the major retailers congregated, quietly waiting for the best fish and loading the porters' shoulders with tuna, turbots, and salmon they had bought. At ground level the street merchants were divvying up the herring and dabs they had bought together. And there were a few upper-middle-class gentlemen, small property owners who had come at four in the morning from the far corners of the city in search of one truly fresh fish but had ended up with an entire lot bid down to them, forty or fifty francs' worth of seafood, and were spending their day trying to sell off the ones they could not use. From time to time some rough shoving would break out in one corner of the crowd or another. A saleswoman who had gotten too pressed in would push her way free, raising her fists and cursing ferociously. Then the crowd would re-form tightly. Florent, feeling suffocated, announced that he had seen enough and now he understood everything he needed to know.

While Monsieur Verlaque was helping him extricate himself, they found themselves face-to-face with the Beautiful Norman. She stood with her feet planted firmly in front of them and asked, with her regal air, “Is it definite, Monsieur Verlaque, that you're leaving us?”

“Yes, yes,” said the small man. “I'm going to rest in the country, in Clamart. It seems that the smell of fish is bad for my health … By the way, here's my replacement.”

With that he turned to show her Florent. The Beautiful Norman nearly choked. As Florent walked away, he thought he could make out her whisper to the women nearby, “Now we're going to have some fun, I think.”

The saleswomen were beginning to set up their stalls. There was a great rush of water from the faucets at the corners of the marble slabs. There was a gurgling sound, the hiss of jets of water sloshing along the edges of the tables with a line of drops rolling down with the hush of a stream, slopping into the alleys where little rivers coursed, filling holes and indents, turning them into miniature lakes and then into a thousand tributaries that ran downhill to rue Rambuteau. A haze, a dust cloud of rain, rose up, refreshing Florent's face, a breath of sea air, the air both bitter and salty, that he remembered well. He once more saw, in the fish that were being spread out, opalescent pinks, brilliant corals, and milky pearls, all the colors and pastels of the sea.

This first morning left him feeling uncertain. He already regretted having given in to Lisa. Ever since his escape from the fatty repose of the sleepy kitchen, he had been accusing himself of cowardice with such vehemence that he almost wept. But he could not go back on his word. He was intimidated by Lisa and could picture the curl of her lips, the silent reproach on her beautiful face. She seemed too imposing a woman and far too confident to argue with. Fortunately Gavard had given him a comforting idea. On the evening of the day on which Monsieur Verlaque had given him his tour, Gavard pulled him aside and explained to him hesitantly that “the poor devil” was not happy. Then, after tearing into the miserable government that worked its people to death without even assuring them the means to die well, he suggested that it would be a charitable thing to donate part of his salary to the former inspector. Florent agreed enthusiastically.

It was so perfectly fair. After all, he was supposed to be a temporary replacement for Monsieur Verlaque. Besides, Florent ate and slept at his brother's and didn't need anything. Gavard added that fifty francs out of a monthly salary of one hundred fifty francs would seem quite generous and added in a low voice that he wouldn't have to give it for very long because the man was consumptive to his bones. It was agreed that Florent would arrange everything with Verlaque's wife so as not to upset her husband.

This largesse made Florent feel better about the position, and he could now take it on as a way of helping someone else, reestablishing himself in his customary role. But he made the poultry dealer swear not to tell anyone about the arrangement, and Gavard, who was a bit afraid of Lisa, kept the secret.

Now the entire charcuterie was happy. Beautiful Lisa was very warm toward her brother-in-law. She made sure that he got to bed early so that he would get up good and early and she would have a hot breakfast waiting. And now that he wore his official braided cap, she was no longer embarrassed to be seen chatting with him in the doorway. Quenu, thrilled by all these positive signs, sat at the evening table between his wife and his brother, more content than ever. Dinner often continued until nine o'clock, with only Augustine manning the shop. They lingered over their digestion with neighborhood gossip and Lisa's opinionated judgments on the politics of the day. Florent was made to tell how things had gone at the fish market that day.

Bit by bit Florent succumbed and developed a taste for the stable life. The light yellow dining room's middle-class tidiness softened him whenever he crossed its threshold. Beautiful Lisa's care wrapped him in a warm comforter and softened both his body and mind. It was an atmosphere of mutual esteem and serenity.

But Gavard thought that things at the Quenu-Gradelles' were just a bit too sleepy. He forgave Lisa her fondness for the emperor because, he said, you cannot argue politics with women and the beautiful charcuterie woman was, after all, an honest person who managed her business well. Personally, he preferred to spend his evenings at Monsieur Lebigre's, where he had a circle of friends who shared his views. When Florent was named fish inspector, Gavard began to corrupt him, taking him away for hours, arguing that now that he had established himself he should start living the bachelor's life.

Monsieur Lebigre ran a handsome establishment done in the latest modern style. Located on the right-hand side of rue Pirouette with a view of rue Rambuteau, the doorway flanked by four Norwegian pines in green planters, it was a worthy neighbor to the big Quenu-Gradelle charcuterie. The interior could be seen through the clear windows that were decorated with paintings of leaves, vines, and grapes against a muted green background. The floor was covered in large black and white tiles. At the far end yawned the entrance to the basement, above which a spiral staircase draped in red curtains rose to the second-floor billiard room. The bar on the right looked especially luxurious, glittering like well-polished silver. The bulging border of the zinc hung over red-and-white marble, edged with rippling metal like embroidery. At one end, porcelain pots decorated with brass rings stood over gas burners, heating punch and wine. At the other end, an ornately sculpted marble fountain continually spilled a stream of water into a basin, flowing so perfectly that the water appeared to be motionless. In the center, surrounded on three sides by sloping zinc, was a cooling basin where partially emptied green bottles showed their necks. Armies of glasses, arranged in rows by size, stood on both sides—little eau-de-vie glasses, thick goblets for table wine, cups for fruit, absinthe glasses, beer mugs—the long stems upside down with their butts in the air, shining in the pale bar light. On the left, a metal urn bristled with a fan of spoons.

Usually Monsieur Lebigre was enthroned behind the counter, seated on a tufted red leather bench. The cut-glass liqueur decanters half concealed in the wells of a cabinet were within easy reach. His round back rested against a huge mirror that filled the entire panel behind him. Across the panel ran two glass shelves filled with an assortment of bottles and jars. One of the shelves held jars of preserved fruit—cherries, plums, peaches—in dark colors. On the other, between symmetrically arranged packages of cookies, were bright flasks—soft green, yellow, and warm red— suggesting unknown exotic liqueurs from flower extracts. On the glass shelf against the white glow of the mirror, these flasks seemed to be suspended in midair.

To give his establishment the ambience of a café, Monsieur Lebigre had placed two little tables and four bronzed metal chairs against the wall facing the counter. A chandelier with five lights in frosted globes hung from the ceiling. At the left, a gilded clock hung from a rotating mount on the wall. At the far end was a private section shut off by a partition of small squares of frosted glass. During the day a window let in a little light from rue Pirouette. In the evening a gaslight burned over the two tables, which were painted to resemble marble.

It was here that Gavard and his political friends met after dinner every night. They all felt perfectly at home there and had convinced the owner to reserve their spot. When Monsieur Lebigre closed the doors of the partition, they felt sealed from intrusion and spoke without reservation of “the big housecleaning.” No unauthorized customer would have dared intrude.

The first day, Gavard gave Florent some details about Monsieur Lebigre. He was a good man who sometimes came and had a coffee with them. You didn't have to be uneasy in front of him since he said that he had fought in '48. He didn't speak much and even seemed a bit stupid. As they passed in front of him to enter, each one grasped his hands in silence across the glasses and the bottles. Usually a small blond woman was at his side on the red leather couch, a girl he had hired to work at the bar along with the whiteaproned waiter who tended to the tables and the billiard room. Her name was Rose, and she was a sweet, obedient girl. Gavard winked as he told Florent how obedient she was with her employer. The men in the back room were served by Rose, who entered and exited with a humble, happy air in the middle of the most stormy political disputes.

The day the poultry merchant introduced Florent to his friends, the only one they found in the glassed-in room was a fiftyish man, who seemed quiet and thoughtful. He wore a somewhat seedy-looking hat and a long chestnut-colored overcoat, and he sat resting his chin on the ivory knob of a thick walking stick in front of a glass mug of beer. His mouth was hidden by a bushy beard, which gave his face a mute, lipless appearance.

“Robine, how are you?” Gavard asked.

Robine silently offered his hand without answering, but his face softened with a slight smile to greet him. Then he replaced his chin on the knob of his walking stick and looked at Florent over the top of his beer. Florent had made Gavard swear not to tell anyone his story for fear someone might be dangerously indiscreet, and he was not displeased to detect a little distrust in this gentleman with the thick beard. But in truth Robine was rarely any more talkative than he was just now. He was always the first to arrive just as the clock struck eight, always installing himself in the same corner, never letting go of his cane or removing his hat or overcoat. No one had ever seen Robine bareheaded. He sat there, listening to the others until midnight, taking four hours to empty one mug of beer, studying each speaker in his turn as though listening with his eyes. Later, when Florent asked Gavard about Robine, the poultry merchant seemed to have a high opinion of the man without being able to offer any reasons why but said that he was one of the government's most ardent opponents.

No one ever entered Robine's apartment on rue Saint-Denis, but Gavard claimed actually to have been inside it once. The polished floors were protected with green canvas runners. The furniture was covered, and there was a clock on alabaster pillars. He thought he had caught a glimpse of Madame Robine's back between two doors; she seemed to have been a very proper older woman with her hair done in English ringlets—but he couldn't be sure. It wasn't known why they lived in the commotion of a commercial district. The husband did absolutely nothing, spending his days who knew where, living on who knew what, and showing up every evening looking weary but excited by his journey to the pinnacle of the political scene.

“So,” said Gavard, picking up a newspaper, “have you read the speech from the throne?”

Robine shrugged. But the glass-paneled partition slammed noisily and a hunchback appeared. Florent recognized him from the market, now with washed hands and clean clothes, wearing a big red muffler, one end draped over his hump like the corner of a Venetian cape.

“Ah, here's Logre,” Gavard continued, “and he's going to tell us what he thought of the speech from the throne.”

Logre was furious. He almost yanked the hook off the wall as he hung up his hat and muffler. He sat down violently, banging the table with his fist and shoving away the newspaper as he demanded, “Did I read that pack of lies?” Then he exploded: “Did you ever hear of an employer treating his staff like this? I waited a good two hours. There were ten of us in the office biding our time. Finally, Monsieur Manoury arrived in his carriage, straight from some tramp, no doubt. Those agents do nothing but steal and cheat. And then the pig paid me with nothing but small change.”

Robine made a slight movement of his eyelids to show sympathy for Logre. The hunchback quickly found his victim. “Rose! Rose!” he called, leaning out of the room. When the girl was facing him, trembling, he snapped, “What's going on? You saw me come in. Where's my coffee?”

Gavard ordered two more glasses of black coffee. Rose hurried to serve the three under the glare of Logre, who seemed to be studying his coffee and the little trays of sugar. After a sip he calmed down a bit.

“Charvet ought to come have a seat,” he quickly said. “He's out on the sidewalk, waiting for Clémence.”

Just then Charvet entered, followed by Clémence. He was a tall, bony youth with a pinched nose and thin lips who shaved carefully and lived behind the Luxembourg Gardens on rue Vavin. He called himself a freelance teacher, and politically he was an hébertiste.⁶ With his long, curly hair and the wide lapels on his threadbare coat, affecting the manner of a politician, he would unleash a flood of bitter words and demonstrate such a strangely lofty erudition that it instantly defeated most of his adversaries. Gavard was afraid of him, though he didn't admit it. Instead he would declare, when Charvet wasn't there, that he thought he went too far.

Robine agreed to everything with a slight movement of his eyebrows. Logre would occasionally take on Charvet on the subject of salaries. But Charvet remained the despot of the group, the most authoritative and the best informed. For more than ten years Clémence and he had lived together under a mutual agreement strictly observed by the two of them. Florent, who was slightly thrown by the sight of the woman, finally remembered where he had seen her. She was none other than the tall, dark secretary at the fish market, who wrote with long, graceful fingers, like a well-taught young woman.

Rose appeared on the heels of these two newcomers and without saying a word deposited a stein of beer in front of Charvet and a tray in front of Clémence, who began preparing grog, pouring hot water over the lemon, which she crushed with a spoon, adding sugar and rum with a measure to avoid exceeding the correct amount.

Now it was time for Gavard to introduce Florent to the group, especially Charvet. He presented them to each other as fellow teachers and very capable men who would understand each other. But apparently Gavard had earlier let slip some indiscretion, for they all shook hands tightly, squeezing fingers in the manner of Masonic lodge brothers. Even Charvet was almost friendly.

“Did Manoury pay you in small change?” Logre asked Clémence.

She said that he had and showed a roll of one- and two-franc bills. Charvet looked at her and watched her movements as she rerolled the bundles of bills one by one in her pocket.

“We'll have to settle up,” he said in a half whisper.

“Sure, this evening,” she murmured. “I'd think this is about even. I had lunch with you four times, didn't I? But last week I loaned you a hundred sous.”

Florent, surprised, turned his head away so as not to intrude. Clémence, removing the last roll from view, took a sip of her grog, leaning against the glass paneling as she listened to the men talk politics. Gavard had again picked up the newspaper and was reading fragments of the speech from the throne that morning at the opening of Parliament, in a voice he tried to make sound comical. Charvet began to have fun at the expense of the official language. He didn't spare a line. They were particularly entertained by the sentence “We have every confidence, gentlemen, that, supported by your light and the conservative sentiments of the country, we shall succeed in increasing the public prosperity day by day.”

Logre stood up and pronounced this sentence, mimicking the emperor's drawling voice by speaking through his nose.

“Isn't it great, this prosperity,” said Logre. “Everyone's starving to death.”

“Trade is bad,” said Gavard.

“And what in the world is it supposed to mean, ‘supported by your light’?” continued Clémence, who prided herself on her literary background.

Even Robine released a little snicker from the depth of his beard. The conversation began to heat up. The group took on the Corps Législatif, tearing it apart. Logre did not let up. To Florent he was exactly the same as when shouting fish prices at the auction, his jaw stuck out, his waving hands hurling words into midair, and the posture of a snarling animal; he served up politics the way he would a tray full of sole.

Charvet, on the other hand, grew colder and quieter amid the pipe and gas fumes that were now filling the little room. His voice became dry and razor sharp, whereas Robine gently nodded his head without ever removing his chin from the head of his stick. Then Gavard turned the conversation toward women.

“Women,” Charvet declared authoritatively, “are the equal of men and being so ought not to inconvenience men with the daily affairs of life. Marriage is a partnership in which everything should be divided in half. Isn't that so, Clémence?”

“Of course,” the young woman answered with her head against the paneling, looking into space.

Florent noticed Lacaille the grocer and Alexandre the fort, the friend of Claude Lantier. The two men had been at the other table of the little room, apparently belonging to a different world from the other gentlemen. But at the mention of politics their chairs had drawn nearer until they became part of the group. Charvet, in whose eyes they represented “the people,” tried to indoctrinate them with his political theories, whereas Gavard played the prejudice-free shopkeeper, clinking glasses with them. Alexandre was a handsome cheerful giant who seemed like a happy child. Lacaille, embittered, already gray-haired, his shoulders stooped by his endless walking in the streets of Paris, sometimes cast a suspicious glance at all this bourgeois complacency, at Robine's good shoes and fine coat. Each of them was brought a small glass, and the conversation continued, more heated and tumultuous than ever, now that the social order was complete.

That evening, through the half-open door of their section, Florent glimpsed Mademoiselle Saget standing at the counter. She had pulled a bottle from under her apron and was watching Rose fill it with a great deal of black-currant liqueur and a touch of eau-de-vie. Then the bottle vanished back under her apron and Mademoiselle Saget, her hands hidden, chatted in the bright light of the counter in front of the mirror where bottles and jars hung like Viennese lanterns. In the evening all the crystal and metal gave the place a warm glow. The elderly woman, standing there in the gaudy light in her black skirt, looked like a strange large insect.

Florent noticed that Mademoiselle Saget was trying to entrap Rose in a conversation and cunningly suspected that she had noticed him through the half-open door. Since he had started working at Les Halles, he had seen her every time he took a step, dawdling in one of the covered streets and usually accompanied by Madame Lecœur and La Sarriette, the three of them studying him and completely confounded when he had become an inspector. But this particular evening Rose did not want to converse with the old lady, for she finally turned around, apparently planning to approach Monsieur Lebigre, who was playing piquet⁷ with a customer at one of the bronze tables. Sneaking softly along, Mademoiselle Saget at last managed to install herself beside the partition, where she was noticed by Gavard, who detested her.

“Would you close the door, Florent?” he said harshly. “Can't we have a little privacy?”

On leaving at midnight, Lacaille whispered a few words to Monsieur Lebigre. As Lebigre shook his hand, he slipped him four five-franc coins without anyone noticing. “Remember,” he said in his ear, “that we'll need twenty-two francs to pay tomorrow. The person who loaned the money wants it back in full. And remember that you still owe three days with the cart. And you have to pay it all off.”

Then Monsieur Lebigre wished all of them a good night. He was going for a good night's sleep, he declared with a yawn that showed his large teeth, while Rose looked at him deferentially. He gave her a little shove and told her to turn off the gas in the little room.

Gavard stumbled and nearly fell on the sidewalk. But with a laugh he said, “Oh, darn, I should have supported myself on someone's lights.”

That made everyone laugh, and on that note they parted. Florent returned to lean against the glass paneling where he could still feel the silence of Robine, the outbursts of Logre, and the icy enmity of Charvet.

Even later, when he finally got home, he still did not go to bed. He liked his attic, this girl's room where Augustine had left bits of ribbon, sweet and frilly female things. A few hairpins were still on the mantel, along with gilded cardboard boxes of buttons and hard candies, some pictures clipped from publications, empty jars of lotion still smelling of jasmine. In the drawer of the sad white wood table were needles, thread, a prayer book, a tattered old copy of The Guide to Dreams.⁸ A yellow-dotted white summer dress hanging forgotten on a hook. Behind a water pitcher on the board that served as a dressing table there was a large stain from a spilled bottle of lotion. Florent might have been miserable in a woman's dressing nook, but this room, with its narrow iron bed, the two caned chairs, even the faded gray wallpaper, gave a sense of simple innocence, a sense of an awkward, childish girl. The whiteness of the curtains, the juvenile gilded boxes, the book on dreams, the clumsy coquettishness of the walls—it was all somehow refreshing, taking him back to his own youthful dreams. It would have been better had he not known Augustine with her frizzy hair, so that he could imagine himself in the room of a sister, a lovely girl whose budding womanhood shone in all the little things around him.

Another great pleasure of this room in the evening was to lean out the window, which cut a narrow balcony into the roof. It was enclosed by a tall iron balustrade where Augustine was cultivating a pomegranate plant in a window box. Since the weather had turned cold, Florent had taken the plant in at night and kept it by the foot of the bed. He would remain at the window for several minutes, deeply inhaling the fresh air from the Seine that blew in above the buildings on the rue de Rivoli. Below, the confusion of roofs of the Les Halles market spread into the grayness. They looked like sleeping lakes on which occasional lit windows cast the glow of a silvery ripple. In the distance the roofs of the meat market were dark shadows on the horizon. He delighted in the enormous stretch of sky before him, the great expanse of Les Halles, which seemed, amid Paris's strangled streets, like a faint vision of a seashore, the still, gray bay barely moving against the distant rolling tide. He would lose himself in this every night and imagine a new coastline. It saddened him to reflect on the eight wretched years he had spent away from France, but he nevertheless enjoyed the reflection. Then, shivering, he would pull the window shut. Often as he stood in front of the fireplace removing his collar, he was disturbed by the photo of Auguste and Augustine. As he undressed, he studied their bland smiles, standing there hand in hand.

The first few weeks in the fish market were extremely hard. He had run into the open hostility of the Méhudin family, which put him at odds with the entire market. The Beautiful Norman was determined to have her vengeance on Beautiful Lisa, and her cousin was the anointed victim.

The Méhudins came from Rouen. Louise's mother still told the story of how she had come to Paris with a basket of eels and had been in the fish business ever since. She had married a toll collector who later died, leaving her with two young daughters. It was she who had originally, with her ample hips and a wonderful ripeness, worn the nickname “the Beautiful Norman,” which her daughter had inherited. Today, she was a squat, shapeless sixty-five-year-old matron; the dampness of the fish market made her voice hoarse and gave her skin a bluish hue. A sedentary life had made her flabby and thick-waisted, and a rising tide of blubber from her bosom forced her head back. She had never been willing to renounce the fashions of her youth and still wore her flower-print dress, her yellow kerchief, and the turbanlike headgear once customary for fishmongers, which matched her loud voice and fast gestures as she stood, hands on her hips, a litany of standard market vulgarities flowing from her lips.

She missed the Marché des Innocents, reminisced a lot about the ancient rights of the women of the old market, told stories about brawls with police inspectors, described visits to the court in the times of both Charles X and Louis-Philippe, dressed in silk and carrying a large bouquet. Mère Méhudin, as she was called, was the long-standing standard-bearer of the Sisterhood of the Virgin at Saint Leu. For church processions she wore a dress and a tulle⁹ bonnet with satin ribbons and held high in her chubby fingers the fringed banner embroidered with the image of the Mother of God.

Mère Méhudin, according to neighborhood gossip, must have earned a large fortune, although this was evident only on holidays, when she appeared with solid gold jewelry around her neck, arms, and waist.

Later, her two daughters quarreled. The younger one, Claire, a lazy blonde, complained of the viciousness of her sister, Louise, saying in a leaden voice that she would never submit to being her sister's maid. Since this was going to end up with the girls coming to blows, the mother separated them. She gave Louise her stall in the fish market, and Claire, whom the smell of skates and herring gave coughing fits, set up a booth in the freshwater fish section. Although the mother then claimed to be retired, she would go from one stall to the other, getting involved with sales and continually annoying the daughters with her crude way of dealing with customers.

Claire was an unusual creature, very soft and yet somehow always fighting with everyone. She listened only to herself, people said. She had a dreamy, virginal face but a silent determination, an independent spirit that drove her to live by herself, never accepting anything from other people, exhibiting great righteousness one day and infuriating unfairness the next. Some days she would throw the market into chaos by suddenly raising or lowering her prices without explanation. By the time she reached thirty, her delicate build and fine skin, which the water in the tanks seemed to keep forever fresh, her small and undistinguished face, and her agile limbs would all thicken like those of a saint who had stepped down from a stained-glass window and was degraded by the company of market vendors. But at twenty-two she was a Murillo, to use Claude Lantier's term, among the carp and eels—a Murillo, however, with disheveled hair, clunky shoes, and badly cut dresses that rendered her shapeless. She was not a coquette and showed her contempt when Louise, all festooned in ribbons and bows, teased her about her clumsily knotted scarf. It was said that the son of a wealthy shopkeeper in the neighborhood had angrily taken off on a long trip after failing to get one word of encouragement from her.

Louise, the Beautiful Norman, was of a gentler nature. She had been engaged to marry a worker in the grain market, but the unlucky young man had died when a falling sack of flour broke his back. Seven months later Louise had given birth to a large baby boy. In the Méhudin circle, she was regarded as a widow. Her mother would sometimes say in conversation, “When my son-in-law was alive …”

The Méhudins were powerful. When Monsieur Verlaque had finished training Florent for his new position, he advised him to appease certain vendors if he wanted life to be bearable, and he was even so helpful as to share little tricks of the trade such as at which violations to wink, at which to fake extreme displeasure, and under what circumstances he should accept a small gift. A market inspector is both a policeman and a government official, maintaining both order and cleanliness and resolving in a conciliatory manner any disputes between vendors and customers. Florent, who was soft at heart, wore an artificial sternness when exercising his duties and generally overplayed his part. His somber nature, the result of long suffering, and his outcast mentality worked against him.

The Beautiful Norman's strategy was to find a way of dragging Florent into an argument. She swore that he wouldn't keep his job fifteen days.

“I'm telling you,” she said to Madame Lecœur, whom she ran into one morning. “If that fat Lisa thinks we want any of her leftovers … We have better taste than she does, and he's just awful, that man.”

After the auction, when Florent would begin his rounds, taking mincing steps along the dripping alleyways, he could clearly see the Beautiful Norman watching him and laughing defiantly. Her stall, in the second row on the left, near the freshwater fish section, faced rue Rambuteau. She would turn, never taking an eye off her victim, belittling him to her neighbors. And when he passed in front of her, slowly examining the stone slabs, she pretended to be uncontrollably amused, slapping the fish as she turned her jets of water on full blast and flooded the passage. But Florent remained impassive.

Inevitably, one morning war broke out. That day, when Florent arrived at the Beautiful Norman's stall, he smelled an unbearable stench. There on the marble slab were a magnificent salmon, cut into and showing its rosy flesh, some creamy white turbots, a few conger eels stuck with black pins to mark their sections, a few pairs of soles, some red mullets, some sea bass, a fine display of fresh fish. But in the midst of all these fish with clear, gleaming eyes and bright red gills lay a large skate, reddish with dark spots, extraordinary in its exotic markings, but unfortunately rotten. Its tail was falling off, and the bones on the wings were sticking through the skin.

“You have to throw this skate away,” said Florent, walking up to her.

The Beautiful Norman emitted a little chuckle. Florent looked up and saw her standing against a bronze lamppost that held the gaslight for the stalls in her row. She seemed very large because she was standing on boxes to keep her feet out of the puddles. Her lips were pursed, her hair set in tight curls, her head held at a devious slant, slightly lowered, and her hands a little too red against her white apron—and Florent thought she looked even more beautiful than usual. He had never before seen her so decked out in jewelry Long pendants hung from her ears, she wore a chain around her neck, there was a brooch, and an imposing collection of rings on two fingers of her left hand and one right-hand finger.

Since she continued looking slyly at Florent and not answering him, Florent said, “Did you hear me? You have to get rid of that skate.”

But he hadn't noticed Mère Méhudin sitting in a chair, like a pile in a corner. Now she got up, ready for combat, and, planting her fists on the marble slab, insolently said, “And why does she have to throw out this skate? I don't suppose you're going to pay her for it.”

Then Florent understood. The other market women began to snicker. He could feel a revolt building around him, and one wrong word would set it off. So he held himself in, picked up the waste bucket from under the slab, and dumped the skate in himself. Mère Méhudin had already planted her fists on her hips, but the Beautiful Norman broke into a vicious laugh as Florent sternly marched off amid jeers that he pretended not to hear.

Every day there was a new trap, and he had to stalk the alleys with the caution of someone in enemy territory. He was splattered with water from the sponges used to clean the slabs. He slipped and nearly fell on scraps deliberately placed in his path. Even the porters bumped the back of his neck with their baskets. One morning when he hurried to intercede between two women who were about to come to blows, he had to duck to avoid being slapped in the face by dabs that were being tossed overhead, which led to much laughter. Florent believed that the two women had conspired with the Méhudins. But his former trade as a teacher had taught him the patience of an angel. He knew how to maintain a magisterial coolness, even if anger was rising within him and his whole being shook with a sense of humiliation.

The waifs of rue de l'Estrapade had never had the ferocity of the women of Les Halles, the relentlessness of these huge women whose bellies and bosoms bobbed with the glee of giants whenever they could trick him in any way. They stared him down with their red faces. In the inflections of their hoarse voices, the swaying of their hips, the flips of their hands, he could read the obscenities being hurled at him. If Gavard had been confronted with these impudent and redolent females, he would have been perfectly comfortable, whacking a few posteriors here and there if they got too close. But Florent, who had always been intimidated by women, felt increasingly lost in a nightmare in which giant women of prodigious charms and enormous breasts surrounded him with their husky naked wrestler arms.

Among these savage women, Florent had one friend. Claire unabashedly declared that the new inspector was a good man. When he passed by, amid the abuse of the others, she smiled at him. She stood nonchalantly in her stall, her blond curls falling around her temples and neck, her dress on crooked. He usually saw her there, her hands submerged in the tanks, moving the fish from one tank to another, taking pleasure in repositioning the little copper dolphins that shot streams of water from their mouths. The streams of water gave her the quivering grace of a bather at the water's edge, albeit a sloppily dressed one.

One morning she was especially friendly. She called the inspector over to show him a huge eel that had amazed the entire market at the morning auction. She lifted the grating that she had cautiously placed over the basin. The eel, resting on the bottom, appeared to be asleep.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “Watch this.”

She put her naked arm into the water, a slightly skinny arm with silken skin revealing the blue of her veins. As soon as the eel felt her touch it began rolling itself in knots, filling the narrow tank with its glittering green rings. When it calmed down, Claire pestered it some more with the tips of her fingernails.

“It's huge,” Florent felt obliged to say. “I've hardly ever seen such a beauty.”

Claire admitted that at first she had been afraid of eels. Now she had learned how to tighten her grip so they could not slide away. She reached into the next tank and pulled out a smaller eel. The eel wriggled on both sides of her tightly closed hand. It made her laugh. She threw it back in, took another one, and stirred up the tank, agitating the mass of serpents with her slim fingers.

She stopped a minute to chat about business, which was not going well. The grain merchants down the way in the covered street were hurting them. Her bare arms were still dripping, refreshed by the coolness of the water. Large drops of water were falling from her fingers.

“Oh,” she suddenly said, “you have to take a look at my carp too.” She lifted off another grating and with both hands grabbed a carp that was lashing with his tail. She looked for a smaller one that she could hold with one hand. Its sides puffed out a little with each gasp. She decided that it would be funny to force her thumb into its panting mouth.

“It won't bite,” she said with a soft laugh. “It's not mean … It's like crayfish. They don't scare me at all.”

She had already plunged her arm back into the water and pulled up from a section chaotic with activity a crayfish that had grabbed her little finger with its claw. She shook it for a moment, but it seemed that the crayfish squeezed too hard, because her face turned red and she broke off its claw with an angry blow, all the while still smiling.

“On the other hand,” she said, trying to conceal her outburst, “I'd never trust a pike. He'd cut my fingers like a knife.” She pointed at an area on the scrubbed board where pikes were laid out sorted by size next to bronze-colored tench and piles of gudgeon. By now her hands were coated with slime from the carp, and she held them over the fish. She seemed enveloped in the scent of spawn, the thick scent that rises from reeds and water lilies when fish, dreamy in the sunlight, discharge eggs from their bellies. Still smiling, she wiped her hands on her apron. Her face had a peaceful cold-blooded look from the thrill she felt when playing heartlessly with river creatures.

Claire's friendliness was only a small consolation for Florent. Whenever he stopped to chat with her, it provoked even cruder treatment from the others. Claire would only shrug her shoulders and say that her mother was an old bat and her sister was worthless. The unfairness of the way the market people treated the new inspector outraged her. But the war grew more bitter every day. Florent longed to quit. He would not have lasted twenty-four hours were he not afraid of appearing cowardly to Lisa. He worried about what she might say or think. She was always up to date on the great battle of the fishmongers versus their inspector because it echoed throughout Les Halles and each move was discussed and interpreted by everyone in the neighborhood.

In the evening, after dinner, Lisa would often say, “Well, I'd bring them to their senses pretty quickly if it were me. They're a bunch of women I wouldn't touch with a pole, the sluts. That Norman is the lowest of the low. I'd give her my boot. You need to show them who's in charge, Florent. You deal with it completely wrong Take charge, Florent, and they'll get in line fast.”

The latest crisis was particularly bad. In the morning the maid of Madame Taboureau, the baker, went to the fish market to find a brill. After watching her wandering around for a few minutes, the Beautiful Norman sidled up to her.

“Come over and see me, I'll take care of you. Do you want a pair of soles? Maybe a beautiful turbot?”

When she finally did come over and started to examine a brill, wearing the sour face customers use when they are trying to lower the price, the Beautiful Norman went on, “Feel the heft of this,” and she put the brill, wrapped in a thick sheet of yellow paper, into the woman's hand.

The maid, a meek little woman from the Auvergne, felt the weight in her hand, opened the gills, still wore the sour face, and said nothing. Then, in a reluctant tone, she asked, “How much is this?”

“Fifteen francs,” the Beautiful Norman answered.

The other woman quickly put the fish back on the slab. She seemed anxious to escape, but the Beautiful Norman detained her. “What's your price?”

“No, it's too expensive.”

“Make an offer anyway.”

“If you want. How about eight francs?”

This seemed to wake up Mère Méhudin, who gave a menacing chuckle. What did people think, that they stole the fish? “Eight francs for a brill of that size? We'll give you one, sweetie, just to keep your skin soft at night.” The Beautiful Norman turned away as though offended. The servant twice offered nine francs and then went up to ten.

After that it seemed the maid was really going to walk away, so the Beautiful Norman said, “All right, give me the money.”

The maid stood in front of the stall, chatting amicably with Mère Méhudin. Madame Taboureau was so difficult. She was having a lot of people to dinner tonight, cousins from Blois, a notary and his wife. Madame Taboureau's family was very respectable. Even she herself, the wife of a baker, had a good education.

“Can you clean it for me?” she asked, interrupting her own story.

With the thrust of a finger the Beautiful Norman gutted the brill and tossed the entrails into a bucket. She slid a corner of her apron into a gill to remove a few grains of sand. Then she placed the fish in the maid's basket herself.

“There it is, honey, to be presented with my compliments.”

But after a quarter of an hour the maid ran back, red in the face. She had been crying, and her little body shook with anger. She threw the brill on the slab and showed a long gash across the belly that cut the flesh to the bone. A flood of disjointed words poured from her throat, which was still constricted from crying.

“Madame Taboureau doesn't want it. She said she couldn't serve it. And she said I was an idiot who let everyone rob me. Look at it! It's ruined! I didn't turn it over. I trusted you … Give me back my ten francs.”

“You can look at the merchandise before you buy it,” the Beautiful Norman answered calmly.

Then, since the maid was about to raise her voice again, Mère Méhudin got up and said, “Why don't you shut your mouth? We don't take back fish from people's homes. Who's to say you didn't drop it and damage it yourself?”

“Me! Me!” She was choking on her words. Then she started crying. “You're a couple of thieves, yes, two thieves. Madame Taboureau warned me.”

Then matters grew even worse. Mother and daughter, wild with anger, fists raised, hurled abuses. The little maid, lost and confused, trapped between a hoarse voice and a screeching one and batted back and forth like a ball, sobbed ever louder.

“Get out of here! Your Madame Taboureau ought to be half as fresh as this fish is. Are we supposed to patch it up for her?”

“A whole fish for ten francs! That's enough out of you!”

“How much did those earrings cost? I bet you earned that lying on your back.”

“You bet she did. She probably works the corner of rue de Mondétour.”

The market guard fetched Florent, who arrived at the height of the quarrel. The pavilion was in revolt. The fishmongers, who would tear at each other over two sous' worth of herring joined ranks when challenged by a customer. They chanted a popular song: “The baker's wife has pots of gold that cost her almost nothing.” They were stamping their feet, egging on the Méhudins, as if urging dogs to attack, and some, from the other end of the alley, jumped out of their stalls, as though they were about to leap at the little maid's hair. And the maid was lost, drowning in the enormity of her mistreatment.

“Give the young lady back her ten francs,” Florent ordered sternly when the situation was explained to him.

But Mère Méhudin was in a state. “As for you, you little nothing, I am going … the hell with it. This is how I'm giving back the ten francs.” As she spoke she hurled the brill with all her might at the little maid from Auvergne, and it smacked her full in the face. Her nose started bleeding as the brill became unstuck and fell to the ground with the sound of a wet dishcloth. Florent was enraged by the brutality of this act. The Beautiful Norman became frightened and stepped back as he shouted, “I'm suspending you for eight days! I'll have your license suspended, do you hear me?”

Booing broke out behind him, but he spun around with such a menacing look that the fishmongers tried to look innocent. After the Méhudins gave back the ten francs, he had them close up their stall immediately. The mother suppressed her anger. The daughter remained silent and pale. She, the Beautiful Norman, driven from her stall! Claire said in her calm voice that it served them right, which almost brought the two sisters to blows at home on rue Pirouette.

After eight days, when the Méhudins came back to the market, they were correct, pulled in, very curt with an icy anger. They found the market calm and orderly. From that day on, the Beautiful Norman nurtured thoughts of terrible vengeance. She felt that the blow had come from the hand of Lisa. She had run into her the day after the fight, and Lisa had held her head so high that she vowed to make her pay for that look of triumph.

Endless debates took place in the market with Mademoiselle Saget, Madame Lecœur, and La Sarriette. But when they were at last worn out by tales of Lisa's carryings-on with her cousin and hairs found in Quenu's andouilles, they couldn't really go any further with it. She was looking for some cruel blow that would strike her rival in the heart.

The Beautiful Norman's child was growing up wild in the fish market. He had been brought there when he was only three and spent his days squatting on a rag surrounded by fish. He slept as though he were a brother of the great tunas, and he woke up among mackerel and whiting. The ragamuffin smelled so fishy that people almost wondered if he hadn't emerged from the belly of some giant fish. For a long time his favorite game when his mother wasn't looking was to build walls and houses of herring. He also had play soldiers arranging gurnard on the marble slab in opposing front lines, pushing the fish against one another, battering their heads into one another, while imitating trumpets and drums with his lips, after which he would throw all the fish back into a pile and pronounce them all dead. Later, he started hanging around his aunt Claire's stall for the purpose of gathering pike and carp bladders, which popped when he smashed them on the ground. That was great fun for him.

At the age of seven, he ran through the alleyways, crawled under the stalls, clambered over the tin-lined boxes, and was the spoiled pet of the fish women. Whenever they showed him something new to amuse him, he would clap his hands and stammer, “That's so muche!”¹⁰ The word “muche” stuck to him: “Come over here, Muche.” “Over there, Muche.” It was what everyone called him. He turned up in every cranny, in the recesses of the auction office, between stacks of baskets, among buckets of fish guts. He was like a rosy white barbel gliding through deep water. He was drawn to running water like a small fish. He splashed through puddles in the alleys and stood under drips from tables. Often he would surreptitiously turn on a faucet to have the pleasure of a stream of water. But most of all, when his mother went to find him in the evening, she knew to look by the springs beneath the cellar stairways. She would lead him away, soaked, his skin blue, and his shoes, even his pockets, filled with water.

The seven-year-old Muche was a solid little boy pretty as an angel and crude as a wagon driver. He had curly chestnut hair, beautiful soft eyes, and a sweet, innocent-looking mouth out of which came language that even a policeman wouldn't use. Raised amid the trash of Les Halles, he could recite the vocabulary of the fish trade with his hands on his hips just like Mère Méhudin when she was angry. So “slut” and “whore” and worse danced off his tongue in a sweet, crystalline voice fit for a boys' choir. He tried to make his voice sound gruff even though he looked the smiling babe in the Virgin's arms. The fish women laughed until they cried, which so encouraged him that he would not say more than two words without belching out “goddamn it.” But there was something lovable about him, the way he didn't understand his own vulgarity and the breezes and strong smells of the fish market kept him healthy. He recited his repertoire of curses with deep pleasure, as though they were prayers.

Winter was coming, and Muche was bothered by the cold. As soon as the chill set in, the inspector's office became his hangout of choice. It was located at the left-hand corner of the pavilion on the rue Rambuteau side. It was furnished with a table, a filing cabinet, an easy chair, two other chairs, and a heating stove. For Muche the attraction was the stove. When Florent, who adored children, saw the small child, his legs dripping wet, staring longingly from the window, he invited him to come in. His first conversation with the boy shocked him. It was in front of the stove, and the boy said in his gentle voice, “I'll just warm up my paws, okay? It's goddamn freezing out there.”

Then after a laugh he said, “My aunt Claire looks a little off this morning. Hey, mister, is it true that you warm her feet for her at night?”

Florent was both shocked and fascinated by this waif. The Beautiful Norman remained curt to him but said nothing about her son visiting him. Florent took this as permission to receive him and encouraged him to come visit in the afternoons, thinking he could civilize the child a bit. It was almost as though his brother, Quenu, had become small again and they were in their room on the rue Royer-Collard once again. It was Florent's nature to be at his happiest with some young person who would never grow up, whom he could go on teaching forever, and through whose innocence he could feel love for mankind.

On the third day of his relationship with Muche he brought an alphabet primer to work, and he was thrilled to note a great deal of intelligence in the boy. Muche learned his letters with the quick mind characteristic of Paris street urchins. The boy found the alphabet tremendously entertaining.

He also found many other amusements in Florent's office. The stove remained the grand attraction, an object of endless pleasure. It was good for cooking potatoes and chestnuts, but that got a bit dull. Then he stole some gudgeons from his aunt Claire, which he roasted one by one by hanging them on a string in front of the roaring mouth of the fire. He ate these delicacies without bread. One day he tried a carp, but he could not get it to cook and it sent out such a foul odor that he had to open the window and door. When the smell became too strong, Florent threw the fish out into the street. But most of the time he just laughed. After about two months, Muche could write fairly well.

At night the boy talked his mother's head off about his adventures with his good friend Florent. His good friend Florent had drawn him pictures of trees and of men in huts. His good friend Florent waved his hand like this when he said that people are better off if they know how to read. Eventually the Beautiful Norman came to feel almost an intimacy with this man she dreamed of strangling. She made Muche stay home one day so that he could not go see the inspector, but he cried so hard that the next day she gave in.

Despite her broad build and air of toughness, she did not have a strong will. When the boy came home and told her how warm and cozy the office had been and his clothes were dry, she felt a vague gratitude, a satisfaction in knowing that he was protected, his feet in front of a warm fire. Later, she was moved when the boy read her a passage from a torn piece of newspaper wrapped around a slice of eel. Slowly she began to realize, though never admitting it, that Florent was not such a bad man. She respected his education and had a growing curiosity to look at him more closely and see what he was about. Then, suddenly, she told herself that some pretext to get closer to Florent was part of her plan to exact revenge. Wouldn't it be fun to befriend Florent and turn him against that fat Lisa?

“Does your good friend Florent ever talk about me?” she asked Muche one morning while dressing him.

“No, he doesn't,” Muche answered. “We just have fun.”

“Well, you can tell him that I have no more bad feelings toward him and I very much appreciate his teaching you to read.”

From then on the child was sent each day to the inspector with a message and back to his mother with a friendly message from the inspector, answers and requests that the boy repeated without understanding. He could have been entrusted with the most sensitive communications. But not wishing to appear shy, one day the Beautiful Norman went to the inspector's office and sat herself down on the second chair while Florent was giving Muche his writing lesson. She was very sweet and complimentary, and Florent ended up more embarrassed than she was. When Florent said that he was afraid they might not be able to go on giving lessons in his office, she invited him to come to her house in the evening. She also mentioned payment, but he blushed and insisted that he wouldn't come over if there were any mention of that. So the Beautiful Norman resolved that she would give him fresh fish.

And so there was peace. The Beautiful Norman even took Florent under her protection. But even without this, the new inspector was becoming accepted in the market. The fish women decided that he was better than Monsieur Verlaque, despite his spooky-looking eyes. Mère Méhudin shrugged, keeping her grudge against “the big beanpole,” as she liked to refer to him unkindly.

One morning Florent stopped by Claire's freshwater tanks with a smile. Claire dropped the eel she was holding and turned her back, so angry her face was red. Florent was so surprised that he asked the Norman about this.

“Just forget it,” she said. “She's crazy. She always wants to do the opposite of everyone else. She just does it to make me mad.”

The Norman was triumphant. She strutted around her stall, more coquettish than ever, with elaborate hairstyles. Running into Beautiful Lisa one day, she returned her look of disdain. Then she burst into laughter right in her face. The certainty that she would drive the mistress of the charcuterie into despair by winning over her cousin gave her a happy, melodious laugh, a laugh from the diaphragm that rose up and jiggled her plump neck. On a whim she decided to dress Muche fancily with a little Scotch jacket and a velvet bonnet. Muche had never worn anything but a worn-out old shirt. By an unfortunate coincidence, at about the same time, he had renewed his interest in the water faucets under the stairs. The ice had melted, and the weather was mild. So he gave his Scotch jacket a bath, turning the faucet on full and letting the water run down his arm from his elbow to his hand. He called this game “gutters.” When his mother found him, he was with two other strays watching two little white fish, which he had stolen from his aunt Claire, swimming around in his hat, which he had filled with water.

For almost eight months Florent lived in Les Halles, in a constant state of sleepiness. After seven years of suffering, he had fallen into such a state of calm, in a life so perfectly ordered, that he barely felt alive. He simply drifted mindlessly, each morning caught by surprise to find himself in the same armchair in his cramped office. He enjoyed the bare little room. Here he found a quiet refuge, far from the world, amid the ceaseless racket of the market that made him dream of a swelling sea surrounding him and isolating him. But little by little, an uneasiness began to eat at him. He became dissatisfied, accusing himself of all sorts of indefinable faults, and began to rebel against both a physical and a mental emptiness. And the putrid smells of the fish market started to nauseate him. Gradually he was disintegrating. His vague distress was turning into raging anxiety.

All his days were the same, passed among the same sounds and smells. In the morning the shouts of the auction rang in his ears like distant bells. Sometimes when some of the fish deliveries were delayed, the auction would continue until late. On such days he stayed in the pavilion until noon, disturbed at every interval by arguments and fights that he tried to resolve fairly. It could take hours to dispatch some petty crisis that consumed the entire market. He would pace up and down amid the pushing and shouting of the selling, slowly strolling the alleys, occasionally stopping at a fish stall along rue Rambuteau. There were a great pile of shrimp, red baskets of little cooked langoustines¹¹ with their tails curled under, and live lobsters crawling on the marble as they died. He would watch affluent men in silk hats and black gloves bargaining with the fish women and eventually leaving with a cooked lobster wrapped in a newspaper stuffed in a coat pocket. Farther away he would recognize the neighborhood women, their heads bare, always shopping at that hour at the movable stalls, where the less deluxe fish were sold.

Sometimes his attention would be drawn to a well-dressed lady dragging her lacy petticoats over damp stones, a maid with a white apron following behind. He would follow her at a distance and watch how the fish women would shrug off her haughtiness. The bedlam of baskets, leather bags, and hampers, the frenzy of skirts swirling through damp alleys, held his interest until lunchtime. He was happy to be around running water and breezes that blew, as he passed the bitter odor of shellfish and the biting smell of salt fish. He always finished his inspection at the cured fish—cases of pickled herring, Nantes sardines on beds of leaves, rolled salt cod, which made him dream of distant voyages in need of these salted provisions—all displayed by fat, dull saleswomen.

Then, in the afternoon, Les Halles would calm down and get sleepy, and Florent would retire to his office, make out his reports, and enjoy the best hours of the day. If he went out and crossed the fish market, he would find it nearly deserted. The crushing, the pushing, the commotion of ten in the morning had vanished. The fish women sat behind their stalls, leaning back and knitting, while a few late housewives stalked around, casting sideways glances at the remaining fish, looking slowly, with thoughtful eyes and pursed lips, calculating the cost of dinner.

Finally twilight came, with the sound of boxes being moved. The fish was iced down for the night, and then, after watching the gates being closed, Florent left and seemed to carry the fish market with him, in his clothes, his beard, his hair.

For the first few months he had not been bothered by the penetrating odor. It had been a harsh winter; the ice had turned the alleys into mirrors and icicles had formed lacy edgings on the tables and water faucets. In the morning little heaters had to be lit under the faucets to get water. The frozen fish had twisted tails, dull and hard like unfinished metal, and when you snapped one, it made a ringing sound like a sheet of iron. The pavilion remained in this sorry state until February, deserted and wrapped in a spiky shroud of ice. But come the thaw, the milder months, the fog and rain of March, the fish also softened, drowning in the melt, the smell of rot blending with the dull scent of mud wafting in from the streets, still only an unpleasant hint in the air, tempered by the humidity clinging to the ground. But in the blazing June afternoons, a foul stench rose up and the air was weighted with a hazy pestilence. The upper windows of the market were opened and enormous gray canvas shades were drawn to block the burning sky. A rain of fire fell on Les Halles and heated it like an oven, and there was not a breath of air to sweep away the fishy smell. Steam rose from the stalls.

Florent was upset by the magnitude of food that he lived with. The sense of disgust he had felt at the charcuterie returned even more forcefully. He had experienced smells this bad before, but not associated with the stomach. His own stomach, the small stomach of a thin man, was turned when he passed the heaps of wet fish, which decayed at the first sign of warm weather. They filled him with their powerful odors, suffocated him. The smells alone gave him indigestion. Even shutting himself in his office, he could not escape this discomfort, for the insidious odor crept through the woodwork of the window and door. When the sky was gray and heavy the little room was dark and the day was like a long twilight in a fetid swamp. He often felt attacks of anxiety in which he had a strong urge to walk, and then he would descend into the cellars by the broad stairway in the middle of the pavilion. In the stuffiness down there, in the dim light of sporadic gas lamps, he found the pure, cool water to be refreshing. He would stand in front of the large tank where the stock of live fish was kept and listen to the continual melody of streams of water falling from each corner and then spreading into a broad stream that glided beneath the grating of the locked tanks in a soft, endless flow. This underground spring, this stream rippling the shadows, calmed him.

In the evenings he enjoyed the beautiful sunsets that silhouetted the frilly steelwork of the pavilions black against the red glow of the sky, the evening light of five o'clock, the dust drifting in the last sunbeams, pouring in through the windows, through the shutters. It was like a luminous but cloudy window on which pillars like thin fishbones, the elegant curve of the girders, the geometrical patterns of the roof were drawn with Chinese ink. Florent feasted his eyes on the glowing parchment and recalled his old dream of a colossal machine with cogs and levers and balances, only half visible in the burning embers of a dark oven. Every hour the changing light would alter the shape of Les Halles—the forceful blue sky of morning, then the black shadows of noon, the flames of a setting sun that died in the gray ashes of dusk. But on the flaming-sky evenings, when the stink rose, crossing the bright beams of sunlight like warm smoke, he was again shaken by an ill feeling and his dreams would go awry, and he would imagine giant ovens where human fat was being melted down.

Nor was he comfortable in this vulgar neighborhood, among crass people whose every word and gesture seemed to have absorbed the smell of the place. He tried to be open-minded and avoid false modesty, but these women embarrassed him. He felt comfortable only around Madame François, whom he happened to see again. She was very pleased to see that he had a good job and that he was happy and out of trouble, as she put it, and that touched him. But Lisa, the Beautiful Norman, and all the others worried him with their laughter. There was no irony in the way Madame François laughed. She had the laugh of a happy woman who enjoyed the good fortune of others. And she was just as tough, she worked a hard job—even harder in the frost of winter or the rain.

Florent saw her some mornings when it had been raining hard since the day before. Between Nanterre and Paris the cart wheels had sunk up to the axle in mud, and Balthazar was encrusted in it up to his belly. She would take pity on him and wipe him down with old aprons.

“These animals are very fragile,” she said. “It takes nothing for them to get sick. Oh, my poor old Balthazar. When we were crossing the pont de Neuilly it was raining so hard I thought we were going to fall into the Seine.”

Balthazar went to the stable at an inn, but Madame François stayed out in the downpour to sell her vegetables. The road had become a sea of liquid mud. The cabbage, the carrots, the turnips, were pelted by gray water, drowned in the muddy deluge that rushed down the sidewalk. There was no trace of the dazzling greens that were there on a clear morning. The market men huddled in their heavy coats and cursed the market authorities, who, after looking into the matter, had decided that rain did not harm vegetables and therefore there was no need to build a shelter for them.

Those rainy mornings depressed Florent. He thought about Madame François and always slipped away for a brief exchange with her. She was never melancholy. She shook herself like a poodle and declared that she was used to such weather and, after all, it was not as though she were made of sugar and would melt in a few raindrops. But he made her duck under one of the covered ways for a few minutes and often took her to Monsieur Lebigre's for a mulled wine together. When she looked at him warmly with her tranquil face, he was charmed by the healthy smell of the fields that she carried with her into the foul air of Les Halles. She smelled of the earth, the hay the fresh air and wide-open sky.

“My boy you must come to Nanterre,” she said, “and see my garden with borders of thyme everywhere. My God, Paris has an evil smell.”

Then she was off, dripping wet. Florent always felt rejuvenated when he left her. He resolved to try to use work to fight off his depression. He was a very methodical man, and once he had devised a plan for the allotment of his time, it became an obsession. He locked himself away two nights a week to work on an exhaustive study of Cayenne. He found his little room to be an excellent place to work. He lit his fire, checked that the pomegranate at the end of the bed was doing well, then sat down at the little table and worked there until midnight. He had pushed the prayer book and the book on dreams back in the drawer and little by little filled the drawer with his notes, memos, and manuscript pages.

The work on Guiana barely made progress because he was constantly distracted by other projects, plans for grand, ambitious projects that he sketched out in a few lines. He drafted a plan to reform the administrative system of the markets, a scheme for transforming the fees the city charged for produce as it entered Paris into a tax on sales at the market. He also devised an improved system for provisioning the poorest neighborhoods and a humanitarian law— the idea was still not fully formed—for managing the food that arrived each day in a way that would guarantee a minimum of nutrition to every Paris household. Sitting there bent over the table, immersed in these weighty issues, his figure cast a dark shadow on the gentle little garret. And sometimes a finch Florent had rescued one snowy day in the market would mistake the lamplight for daybreak and interrupt the silence with its chirp, the only interruption in the scratching noise of Florent's pen on paper.

As was his destiny, Florent returned to politics. He had been through too much not to make it his life's preoccupation. If things had gone differently, he might have been a very good provincial schoolmaster, content in the peace of a small town. But having been treated like a savage animal, he felt marked by exile to engage in some great struggle. His depression was a result of his years of yearning in Cayenne, the bitterness he felt due to having suffered so deeply for no reason, and the vows he had secretly made to avenge people who had been beaten and justice that had been trampled underfoot. The giant market with its mountains of food had hastened the crisis. To Florent it was a metaphor for some satiated, gluttonous beast, a bloated Paris wallowing in fat and propping up the empire. He felt surrounded by oversize bosoms and bloated faces, which continually attacked him for his thinness and his unhappy face. It was the belly of shopkeepers, the belly of ordinary people puffing themselves up, celebrating in the sunshine, declaring that everything was for the best, since passive people had never been so well fattened.

As Florent had these thoughts he clenched his fist, ready for the struggle, angrier about his years of exile than he had been since his return to France. He was overtaken by hatred. He often put down his pen and began to dream. The dying fire cast a hot light on his face, the lamp smoked, and the finch fell back asleep on one foot with his head tucked under a wing.

Sometimes, at eleven o'clock, Auguste, seeing the light under the door, knocked on his way to bed. Impatiently Florent would open the door. The charcuterie apprentice would sit down in front of the fire, barely speaking and never explaining why he had come. All the while, his eyes would remain fixed on the picture of Augustine and himself all dressed up. Florent decided that he liked to come to the room because it used to be occupied by his girlfriend. One day Florent asked him if he was right.

“Well, maybe,” answered Auguste, surprised by discovering this about himself. “I never thought of that before. I came to see you without really knowing why … Well, if I tell Augustine, she'll laugh … when you're going to get married, you don't think about such things.”

When he was feeling talkative, his singular theme was the charcuterie he was going to set up with Augustine in Plaisance. He seemed so perfectly certain that everything would work out exactly the way he planned it that Florent couldn't help but feel a certain respect for him, albeit mixed with irritation. The young man was resolved. Though every bit as stupid as he looked, he went straight for his goal and would probably attain it without problems.

Once Florent had had one of these visits from the young apprentice, he could not settle back to work again until he admitted the thought “What a dummy this Auguste is.”

Every month Florent went to Clamart to see Monsieur Verlaque. These visits were almost a pleasure for Florent. The poor man still hung on, to the amazement of Gavard, who had predicted six months at most. Every time Florent went, the sick man told him that he was feeling much better and was hoping to go back to his job. But the days slipped by, and Verlaque had serious relapses. Florent would sit by his bed, chat about the fish market, and try to cheer him up. He would place the fifty francs he paid him every month on the pedestal table, and though it was prearranged, the former inspector would invariably protest and seem not to want to take the money. Then they would change the subject and the coins would remain on the table.

When Florent left, Madame Verlaque would accompany him to the front door. She was a small, kindly woman with a tearful manner. Her only conversational subject was the expenses incurred from looking after her husband: the high price of chicken broth, red meat, Bordeaux, medicine, and the doctor. Florent was embarrassed by this sad conversation, and for the first few visits, he failed to grasp its meaning. But finally, since the poor woman was always crying and carrying on about how happy they had been when her husband had brought home his full salary of eighteen hundred francs a year, he meekly offered to give her a regular sum, which her husband was not to know about. But she turned down the offer, paradoxically insisting that the fifty francs was enough. Yet during the month, she would regularly write to Florent, calling him their “savior.” In her small, fine handwriting, she would manage to fill three pages with meek pleas for the loan of ten francs, and she did this often enough that most of Florent's hundred and fifty francs made its way to Verlaque. Her husband doubtless knew nothing of this, though the wife kissed Florent's hands. But this charity gave Florent great pleasure, and he concealed it as though it were a prohibited act of self-indulgence.

“That Verlaque is making a fool of you,” Gavard sometimes said. “He's living easy now that you are paying all the bills.”

Finally one day Florent said, “We've worked it out. I'm only giving him twenty-five francs from now on.”

After all, Florent didn't have any needs. He got his room and board free from the Quenus. He needed only a few francs so that he could go to Monsieur Lebigre's some evenings. Little by little his life became set like a clock. He worked in his room, continued his lessons with Muche twice a week between eight and nine o'clock, left one night free for Beautiful Lisa so as not to anger her, and passed the rest of his time in the glass-paneled room with Gavard and his friends.

When he went to the Méhudins', he kept a professorial distance. He liked the old house on rue Pirouette. On the ground floor he passed the bland odors of the cooked-vegetable seller. Large pans of spinach and sorrel were cooling in the little backyard. Then he climbed a dark, greasy staircase with worn, warped steps twisted at frightening angles. The Méhudins occupied the entire second floor. Even after they could afford it, the mother always refused to move, despite the pleas of her daughters, who dreamed of life in a new house on a wide, handsome street. The old woman could not be moved on this issue. She said that she had lived there and intended to die there. Besides, she was perfectly happy in her dark closet, leaving the more spacious bedrooms for Claire and the Beautiful Norman. The Norman, by right of being the older, had taken the room with a street view, the largest and best. Claire, annoyed by this, refused to take the adjoining room overlooking the yard and instead insisted on staying across the landing in little more than a garret, which she did not even have whitewashed. She maintained her independence by having a separate key, and whenever she was displeased she could lock herself in her room.

Florent generally arrived just as the Méhudins were finishing dinner. Muche would leap on him, and Florent would take a seat while the boy was still clinging to him and chattering away. Once the oilcloth table covering had been cleaned, they began the lesson at a corner of the table. The Beautiful Norman welcomed him. She would knit or mend linen, seated at the table working by the same light as the lesson, and she would often stop working to listen to it, as she found it intriguing. She soon began to feel a warm appreciation for this clever man, who could speak to her child with the gentleness of a woman and showed the patience of an angel in repeating the same material over and over again. She no longer considered him unattractive and even felt a little jealous of Beautiful Lisa. She would pull her chair even closer and study Florent with an embarrassing smile.

“Mama, you're bumping my elbow and I can't write,” Muche would say irritably. “There's the blot you made me do. Can't you move back?”

More and more, the Beautiful Norman said mean things about Beautiful Lisa. She claimed that she lied about her age, that she laced her corset so tight that she couldn't breathe, that if she appeared in the morning so perfectly put together without a hair out of place, it must be because she looked horrendous before she got dressed. Then the Norman would raise her arms to show that she was not wearing a corset. She would smile as she puffed out her breasts, round and alive, under a thin, badly fastened camisole. Florent would listen and even laugh, thinking what funny creatures women were. How the rivalry between the Beautiful Norman and Beautiful Lisa entertained him.

Muche, meanwhile, had finished his page of writing. Florent, who had good penmanship, wrote large, round letters on pieces of paper. He chose long words that took an entire line, with a notable preference for such words as “tyrannically,” “liberticide,” “unconstitutional,” and “revolutionary.” He sometimes had the boy copy such sentences as “The day of justice will come” or “The suffering of the just man is the condemnation of the oppressor” or “When the hour strikes, the guilty will fall.” In preparing these writing samples, he was simply following the ideas that were swirling in his mind. He forgot about Muche, the Beautiful Norman, everything around him. Muche would have copied The Social Contract¹² had he been told to copy it. He filled pages, line after line, with “tyrannically” and “unconstitutional,” carefully tracing each letter.

The whole time Florent was there, old Madame Méhudin would circle the table, fidgeting. She continued to nurse a fearsome grudge against him. According to her, it was ridiculous to make a child work at night at an hour when he should be in bed. She almost certainly would have thrown the big beanpole out the door if the Beautiful Norman, after a tempestuous fight, had not threatened to move to another home if she were not allowed to choose her guests. After that, the same fight started up every night.

“Say what you want,” said the old woman, “he has shifty eyes. Besides, you can't trust skinny people. A skinny man will do just about anything. I've never met a good one yet. His stomach looks like it slipped into his butt, that's for sure, because he's flat as a board. And he's ugly. I may be past sixty-five, but I still wouldn't want him by my night table.”

She said all this because she could see what was happening. Then she started praising Monsieur Lebigre, who in fact showed a great interest in the Beautiful Norman. Aside from the huge dowry that he imagined she would bring, he thought the young woman would be fantastic for his business. The old woman never missed a chance to praise him. At least he wasn't skinny as a rail. He was strong as a Turk. She even praised his calves, which, actually, were a bit fat.

But the Norman only shrugged and said sourly, “I don't care about his calves. I don't need anybody's calves. I do as I like.”

If the old woman pushed too hard, her daughter would say, “It's none of your business, and besides, it isn't true. And if it were true, I wouldn't need your permission, so just leave me alone.” With that she would go to her room and slam the door. In the household she had achieved a certain measure of power that she was now abusing. At night, if the old woman imagined she heard an odd noise, she would get up and walk barefoot to her daughter's door and listen, trying to hear if Florent was in there with her.

But Florent had an even more vehement enemy in the Méhudin household. As soon as he arrived, Claire would get up without saying a word, take a candle, and go to her room on the other side of the landing. She could be heard locking her door in a fit of icy anger. One evening when her sister invited the teacher to dinner, Claire fixed her own food on the landing and ate it in her room. Often she closed herself in so adroitly that she wasn't seen for a week. She usually remained soft and easygoing in appearance, but sometimes she turned to iron, her eyes glaring under her pale, wild locks like the stare of a distrustful animal. Mère Méhudin, thinking she would be free to express her feelings about Florent in Claire's presence, only enraged her when she talked about him. So the exasperated old woman would tell people how she would have liked to have gone off by herself but was afraid that her daughters would devour each other without her supervision.

One evening as he was leaving, Florent passed in front of Claire's door, which was wide open. She was looking at him, which made his face turn bright red. The girl's hostility saddened him, and it was only his shyness in front of women that kept him from demanding an explanation. On this particular evening, however, he would probably have walked into her room if he hadn't noticed Mademoiselle Saget's small white face peeking over the banister of the floor above. So he continued on his way out and had not taken ten steps when Claire's door slammed shut behind him so violently that it rattled the entire staircase. It was then that Mademoiselle Saget reached the conclusion that Madame Quenu's cousin slept with both Méhudin girls.

But Florent barely thought about those two beautiful women. His usual attitude toward women was that it was a field at which he was not very good. He had wasted his virility on dreaming. Yes, he had come to feel a real friendship for the Beautiful Norman, who had a good heart when she wasn't putting on airs. But that was as far as he would ever go. In the evening, when she pulled her chair to the lamp as though to lean across Muche's page of writing, he did feel a certain uneasy sensation from her warm, powerful body next to his.

She seemed colossal, weighty, troubling, with her great breasts. He withdrew his pointy elbows and thin shoulders, fearing that he would inadvertently stab this flesh. His thin bones felt anguish in contact with her fat bosom. He lowered his head and shrank even thinner, incapacitated by the strong scent that rose from her. When her camisole was open a bit, he thought he saw the breath of health and life rise up between her two white breasts and pass over his face, still warm as if mingling for an instant with the stench of Les Halles on a hot July evening.

It was an insistent perfume, clinging to smooth, silken skin, a sea sweat running from her fine breasts, her regal arms and supple waist, bringing a strong, distinct dimension to her womanly scent. She had tried all kinds of aromatic oils, but as soon as the freshness of bathing wore off, her blood carried to her very fingertips the bland scent of salmon, the violet musk of smelts, and the pungency of herring and skates. The swing of her skirts released this mist. She walked as though through an evaporation of slimy seaweed. She was, with the body of a goddess, with her fantastic paleness and purity, like a fine ancient marble statue rolled in the sea and brought back in a sardine net. Florent suffered from it, but he did not desire it. His senses had been revolted by afternoons in the fish market. He found it upsetting, too salty, too bitter with a beauty that was too grand and smelled too strong.

Mademoiselle Saget, on the other hand, swore by all the gods that he was the Beautiful Norman's lover. She was still holding a grudge against her over ten sous' worth of dabs. Since that clash, she had become extremely friendly with Beautiful Lisa, hoping to become acquainted with what she termed “the game plan” of the Quenus. Since Florent continued to avoid her, she felt like a body without a soul, as she put it, without letting on about the cause of this grief. A young girl desperately chasing after a boy could not have been more upset than this horrid old woman feeling the secret of the cousin slipping from her fingers. She spied on the cousin, followed him, mentally undressed him, looked him up and down, furious because her overstimulated curiosity could not be sated.

Since he had begun visiting the Méhudins, she no longer moved from the stairs. Then she realized that Beautiful Lisa was very annoyed at the way Florent was always visiting “those women.” So she made a point of dropping by the charcuterie every morning with news from rue Pirouette. In cold weather she would walk in, shriveled by frost, and warm her hands on the heating stove. Thawing her fingers, standing by the counter but buying nothing, she would say, in her reedy voice, “He was at their place again yesterday. He barely seems to leave anymore. Oh, and the Norman called him ‘my dear’ when they were on the stairway.”

She would embellish in order to linger at the heater a little longer. The morning after the evening when she had heard Claire slam her door on Florent, she managed to spend a good half hour stretching out her story. What a disgrace, the cousin hopping from one bed to another!

“I saw him,” she said. “When he's had enough of the Norman, he tiptoes over to the little blonde. Yesterday he was leaving the blonde, no doubt going back to the big brunette, when he spotted me and changed course. It goes on all night. And the old lady sleeps in a closet between the two daughters' rooms.”

Lisa showed her contempt. She said very little, and Mademoiselle Saget was encouraged by the silence. But she listened closely. When the details were too sordid, she would mutter, “No, no, it's not acceptable. I can't believe that there are women like that.”

Then Mademoiselle Saget would answer, “My God, did you think all women were as decent as you?” Then she would feign great understanding for Florent. Men chase every skirt that passes their way. And maybe he's not even married? She slipped the question out without appearing to question. But Lisa refused to be judgmental about her cousin. She just shrugged her shoulders and pursed her lips. After Mademoiselle Saget had left, she would look with disdain at the spot on the metal heater where the old lady had left a mark with her grubby little hands.

“Augustine!” she shouted. “Bring a rag to wipe off the heater. It's disgusting.”

The rivalry between Beautiful Lisa and the Beautiful Norman intensified. The Beautiful Norman fantasized that she had snatched away a lover from her enemy, and Beautiful Lisa was furious that this lowlife, by luring Florent to her home, would end up compromising the standing of her entire family. Each pursued the conflict in a manner suiting her own temperament. One was calm and contemptuous, with the demeanor of a woman who hikes up her skirts to avoid soiling the hem. The other swaggered, flouncing down the street with the defiance of a duelist, daring someone to challenge her. The slightest skirmish between them would be the topic of the fish market gossip for an entire day. When the Beautiful Norman sighted Beautiful Lisa in the charcuterie doorway, she would go out of her way to walk by her, brushing her apron against her; then the two would glare at each other like two swords crossing with the flash and thrust of sharpened steel.

For her part, when Beautiful Lisa went to the fish market she always approached the Beautiful Norman's stall wearing an expression of disgust. Then she would make a major purchase, a turbot or a salmon, at the neighboring stall, spreading her money out on the marble slab, an act that she noticed greatly pained the “lowlife,” who would stop laughing. Listening to the two rivals, one would have had the impression that they sold nothing but rotten fish and tainted sausages.

The principal combat took place with the Beautiful Norman at her stall and Beautiful Lisa at her counter, glaring ferociously at each other across rue Rambuteau. They were enthroned in their great white aprons, coiffed and bejeweled. Battle commenced at dawn.

“Look at that, the cow has stood up!” shouted the Beautiful Norman. “She's encased as tight as her sausages, that woman. Oh my, she's wearing the same collar she wore on Saturday. And she's still wearing that poplin dress.”

At the same moment, on the other side of the street, Beautiful Lisa was telling her shopgirl, “Just look at that creature over there, staring at us. The kind of life she leads is beginning to show on her. See those earrings she's wearing. I think they're those big pears, aren't they? What a shame, such jewels on a girl like that.”

“Just think what they must have cost,” answered Augustine, playing along.

Any time one of them had a new piece of jewelry it was a victory and the other nearly died of chagrin. Every morning they would count and analyze each other's customers and become irritable if it seemed that “The big thing across the way” was doing a better business.

Next came lunchtime espionage. Each knew the other's eating habits in detail, down to digestion. In the afternoon, the one seated among prepared meats and the other among her fish, they posed, taking great pains to be devastating in their beauty. The Beautiful Norman embroidered, choosing the most delicate and demanding needlework, which exasperated Beautiful Lisa.

“She'd be better off,” Lisa said, “mending her son's socks so he wouldn't go barefoot. Just look at that fine lady with her red hands stinking of fish.”

Lisa, on the other hand, usually knit.

“She's still on the same sock,” the other one commented. “She eats so much that she dozes off while working. I feel sorry for her poor cuckolded husband if he's waiting for those socks to warm his feet.”

Into the evening the two remained implacable, each noting the other's customers with keen eyes down to the most minute details, while other women said they could see none of this at such a distance. Mademoiselle Saget could not help but admire Madame Quenu's extraordinary eyesight when she noted a scratch on the left cheek of the fish vendor one day. “With eyes like those,” she said, “you could see through a door.” Often night fell without a decisive victor. Sometimes one was clearly down, but the next day she would get her revenge. Neighbors started waging bets, some putting their money on Beautiful Lisa and others on the Beautiful Norman.

They ended up forbidding their children to speak to each other. Pauline and Muche had been good friends despite Pauline's stiff petticoats and perfect-little-lady demeanor and Muche's foul mouth and tendency to act like a wagon driver. When they played together on the sidewalk by the fish market, Pauline always pretended to be a handcart. But one day when Muche went to Lisa's house looking for his playmate, with no idea that there was a problem, Lisa sent him away, saying that he was a street tramp.

“You never know what children brought up like that might do,” she said. “He's such a bad example that I worry what his influence might be on my child.”

The child was seven years old.

Mademoiselle Saget, who happened to be there, said, “You're absolutely right. He's always running around with little girls in the neighborhood. Once he was found in a basement with the coal seller's daughter.”

When Muche came home crying, the Beautiful Norman was furious. She wanted to run over to the Quenu-Gradelles' and wreck their shop immediately. Instead she gave Muche a beating. “If you ever go back there,” she shouted in a rage, “you'll answer to me for it!”

But the real victim of these two women was Florent, who in truth was the one who had set off this war. They wouldn't even be fighting if it wasn't for him. Ever since he had arrived, things had gone badly. He was the one who had compromised, angered, and disturbed this world, which until then had been sleepily peaceful. When he spent too much time with the Quenus, the Beautiful Norman wanted to claw him. Simply because of her rivalry with Lisa, she had to win Florent over. Meanwhile, Beautiful Lisa presented a judicial bearing when confronted with her brother-in-law's bad conduct, allowing his relationship with the Méhudins to become a neighborhood scandal. She was extremely annoyed, though she tried not to let her jealousy show. It was an odd jealousy, considering her disapproval of Florent and the appropriate coldness toward him that decency required. Yet she became exasperated every time he left the charcuterie to go to rue Pirouette, and she imagined the forbidden pleasures that he tasted there.

Dinner at the Quenus' became less cordial. The prim dining room took on an acidic character. Florent could sense reproach, a kind of condemnation in the white oak setting, the too-polished lamp, the too-new carpet. He could barely bring himself to eat for fear of dropping bread crumbs. Still he had a bright-eyed simplicity that prevented him from seeing clearly. He still told everyone how sweet Lisa was, and in fact, on the surface, she did still appear to treat him with great kindness.

One day she said to him with a smile as though she were about to tell a joke, “It's funny, you've been eating fairly well but you don't get any fatter. The food isn't doing you much good.”

Quenu laughed loudly and patted his brother's stomach, claiming that all the food in the shop could pass through Florent's stomach and not leave enough fat to cover a small coin. But in Lisa's inquiry the distrust and dislike of thin people could be heard, the same sentiment that Mère Méhudin expressed more harshly. There also was a subtle allusion to the wayward life she imagined Florent to be leading. But she never referred directly to the Beautiful Norman in front of him. Quenu alluded to her in a joke one evening but Lisa's response was so icy that the good-natured husband dropped the subject. They lingered at the table after dessert. Florent, who had noticed his sister-in-law's displeasure when he left too soon after dinner, tried to start a conversation. He was right next to her. He did not find her warm and alive with a scent of the sea, tasty and spicy. Instead she smelled of fat—the blandness of good meat. There was no thrill to her tight-fitted bodice, which showed not a wrinkle. Contact with the firm presence of Lisa threw him even more than the tender approaches of the Beautiful Norman. Gavard once told him, in strict confidence, that Madame Quenu was most certainly a beautiful woman but he liked them “less armored than that.”

Lisa avoided talking about Florent with Quenu. Usually she made a great show of being patient. But she also believed that it was not a good idea to come between the two brothers without a serious reason to do so. As she liked to say, she could put up with a lot but should not be pushed too far.

She was in her tolerant mode with a blank expression and a severe politeness, an affected indifference, carefully avoiding even hinting at the fact that though he ate and slept there, they had never seen his money, not that they would dream of accepting any payment whatsoever because she was certainly above such a thing, though he could at least go somewhere else for his lunch. One day she mentioned this to Quenu, saying, “We're never alone anymore. If we want to speak in private now, we have to wait until we go to bed.”

And one night she whispered in his ear, “Doesn't he earn a hundred fifty francs? Isn't it strange he can't put a little aside to buy some linen? I just had to give him a few more old shirts.”

“Aw, that's not a big problem,” said Quenu. “My brother's easy. Let him keep his money.”

“Oh, sure,” said Lisa, not wanting to push too hard on the subject. “I didn't mean to say … How he spends his money is his business.”

She became convinced that he must be spending his salary at the Méhudins'. One time she lost her composure, the calm that was partly her natural temperament and partly a calculated tactic. The Beautiful Norman had given Florent a magnificent salmon. Florent, embarrassed by the gift but not daring to refuse it, had brought it to Beautiful Lisa.

“You could make some kind of terrine with it,” he said ingenuously.

Lisa stared at him, her lips turning pale, and in a voice that she struggled to control said, “Do you think we don't have enough food here? My God, there's plenty to eat around here. Take it back!”

“But couldn't you cook it for me?” asked Florent, surprised by her sudden anger. “I'll eat it.”

Then she exploded. “This house is not an inn. Tell whoever gave it to you that she can cook it. I'm not about to smell up my frying pan with it. Take it back. Do you hear me?”

She was about to throw it into the street.

Florent took it to Monsieur Lebigre's, where Rose was ordered to prepare a salmon terrine. And so one evening in the glass-paneled room, they ate it. Gavard bought everyone oysters.

Florent went there more and more, until he hardly ever left the glass-paneled room. He found there an overheated atmosphere where he could vent his political rage freely. Sometimes when he shut himself in his attic to work, he became impatient with the peacefulness of the room. His study of the theory of freedom was not enough, and he had to go down to Monsieur Lebigre's to steep himself in Charvet's sweeping statements and Logre's tirades.

At first, the uproar, the deluge of words, had been disturbing. He still had a feeling of emptiness, but also a need to be slapped into excitement, to be swept away by some extreme resolution that could calm his troubled soul. The smell of the room, the smell of alcohol warmed by tobacco smoke, intoxicated him, raising him to an ecstatic state where he could lose himself and accept the most radical ideas without question. He grew attached to those he met there and anxiously awaited their arrival with the pleasure of a growing habit. Robine's gentle, bearded face, Clémence's grave profile, Charvet's lean pallor, Logre's hump, and Gavard, Alexandre, and Lacaille—they all entered his life and were playing an ever-larger role.

Florent took a sensual pleasure in these meetings. The moment his fingers wrapped around the little copper knob of the room, it seemed alive, warmed his fingers, turned of its own accord. It would not have been a more stimulating sensation if his fingers had been touching the supple palm of a woman's hand.

In truth, serious things were going on in that little room. One evening Logre, who had been railing on even more violently than usual, pounding his fist on the table, declared that if they were really men, they would bury this government. He added that they should come to an understanding without delay, to be ready for action when the time came. Then they all bowed their heads and, in hushed voices, formed a little group that would be ready. From that day on, Gavard considered himself a member of a secret conspiratorial society. The circle was not in complete agreement, but Logre promised to put them in touch with other circles that he knew, and then, once all of Paris was within their grasp, they would make the crowd at the Tuileries dance. Then a series of endless discussions began and continued over a period of several months; questions of organization, questions of ends and means, questions of strategy and of the future government. As soon as Rose had brought Clémence's grog Charvet's and Robine's beer, coffee for Gavard and Florent, and little liqueur glasses for Lacaille and Alexandre, the door was carefully secured and the meeting began.

Charvet and Florent were the most compelling and most listened to. Gavard could not hold his tongue and little by little revealed the entire story of Cayenne, which cast Florent in the glory of martyrdom. His words became testaments of faith. One day the poultry merchant, angry at hearing his friend, who happened to be absent, attacked, shouted, “Lay off Florent! He went to Cayenne!”

But Charvet was annoyed that Florent had this advantage and muttered through his teeth, “Cayenne, Cayenne. Turns out they were not so badly off there.” And he tried to make a case that exile was easier than staying in the country under oppression, mouth gagged in the face of a triumphant despot. Besides, if he hadn't happened to be arrested on December 2, that was not his fault. He implied that those who had let themselves be caught were imbeciles.

This underlying jealousy led to a systematic opposition to Florent. The discussion always ended with the two of them facing off for hours while the others sat in silence and neither one ever admitting defeat.

One of their favorite topics was the reorganization of the country after victory.

“We're the victorious ones, aren't we?” Gavard would begin. And, no one doubting the victory, each gave his opinion on the next step. There were two camps. Charvet, who claimed to be an hébertiste, was supported by Logre and Robine. Florent, always lost in his dream of humanitarian utopia, labeled himself a socialist and was backed by Alexandre and Lacaille. As for Gavard, he did not back off from advocating violence, but since he was often teased about his fortune with sarcasm, which annoyed him, he declared himself a communist.

“We have to wipe the slate clean,” Charvet would say as though delivering a chop with a cleaver. “The trunk is rotten, and we have to cut it down.”

“Yes, yes,” declared Logre, standing up to appear taller and shaking the paneling with the excited motion of his hump. “Everything will be leveled to the ground. Remember, I said it first. Then we will decide what to do.”

Robine waved his beard in agreement. His silence seemed to imply delight whenever violent revolution was proposed. His eyes showed a soft glow at the mention of the word guillotine. He half closed them as though staring off at the machine itself and was filled with a pleasant feeling from this sight; then he would rub his chin against the knob of his cane and purr with contentment.

“However,” Florent pointed out, taking his turn, his voice still revealing a hint of sadness, “if you cut down the tree, you have to save some seed. Personally, I think the tree should be spared in order to graft new shoots. The political revolution has already happened. Today we have to think of the laborer, the worker. Our movement must be a social movement. I challenge you to embrace the demands of the people. The people are weary. They want their share.”

These words thrilled Alexandre. His face beaming, he confirmed that it was true. The people were weary.

“And we too will have our share,” declared Lacaille, in a more threatening tone. “All revolutions advance the middle class. We've had enough of that. The next one is going to be for us.”

Now there was no more consensus. Gavard offered to divide up his property, but Logre declined, swearing that he had no interest in money. Then Charvet gradually got control of the bedlam, until his was the only voice heard.

“The self-interest of the different social classes is the great strength of tyranny,” he said. “The selfishness of the people is wrong. If you work with us, you will get your share. But why should I fight for the workers if the workers won't fight for me? That's not the question. It will take ten years of revolutionary government to accustom a country like France to the ways of liberty.”

“All the more reason,” said Clémence bluntly, “why the workingman is not ready and needs to be directed.”

She seldom spoke. This tall, serious girl, lost among all those men, had a professorial way of listening to political discussion. She leaned against the partition, sipping her grog, studying the speakers with a furrowed brow and enlarged nostrils, using them to silently indicate her approval or disapproval, demonstrating that she understood and held opinions on everything. Occasionally she would roll a cigarette, blowing thin streams of smoke from the corners of her mouth while intensifying her scrutiny of the debate. It was as though she were judging the debate and would award a prize to the winner after it was over. She believed in keeping her place as a woman, holding back her opinions and not growing agitated when the men did. But now and then she would let a word or two escape to “drive home the nail,” as Gavard liked to say. In her heart, she believed herself to be far ahead of the men. She had no respect for any of them, accept Robine, and she would watch his silence with her large black eyes.

Neither Florent nor any of the others paid any special attention to Clémence. To them she was one of the boys, and they shook her hand so roughly it nearly dislocated her arm. One evening Florent was present at one of the chronic settling of accounts between Charvet and her. They lived together with a mutual understanding, each controlling their own earnings and responsible for their own expenses. That way, they said, no one owed anything and they were not slaves. Rent, food, laundry, entertainment, everything was written down and added up. On this particular night, after checking the accounts, Clémence proved to Charvet that he still owed five francs. Then she handed him the ten he wanted to borrow and said, “Make a note that you now owe me fifteen. You can pay me back on the fifth, when you get paid for teaching little Léhudier.”

When it came time to pay Rose for the drinks, each would pull out a few sous. Charvet joked that Clémence was an aristocrat because she drank grog. He said that she was trying to humiliate him because he earned less money, which in fact was true. Underneath the joke was a note of protest that she was better off, for despite his theory of sexual equality, he felt wounded by this.

Though the discussions never accomplished much, they did help them to vent. This produced a great deal of noise in the little room, and the frosted glass vibrated like drum skins. Sometimes it became so loud that Rose, languidly serving a customer a drink outside, would turn her head nervously.

“Good God, it's getting rough in there,” the customer would say, putting his glass back down on the zinc counter and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Nothing to worry about,” said Monsieur Lebigre calmly, “it's just some gentlemen having a discussion.”

Monsieur Lebigre, normally very strict with his other customers, let these debaters shout to their heart's content and never said a word about it. He would sit for hours in his vest on the bench behind the counter, his big head nodding drowsily against the mirror, watching Rose uncorking bottles and wiping the counter with a towel. When he was in a good mood and she was in front of him, plunging glasses into the washbowl, her hands bare, he would pinch the fleshy parts of her legs without anyone being able to see him, and she would accept it with a pleasant smile. Even when he pinched her almost to the bone, she did not betray the familiarity with a sudden jump. She simply said that she wasn't ticklish.

Amid the scent of wine and warm liquors, he would turn his ear toward the ruckus coming from the little room. When he heard them getting loud, he would get up and walk over to lean against the divider. Sometimes he even pushed open the door, walked in, and sat down for a moment, giving Gavard a friendly slap on the leg. It was his nod of approval for everything said in the room. The poultry merchant said that Lebigre was not much of an orator, but he could be counted on when the time came.

One morning at the market a terrible quarrel erupted between Rose and a fish vendor when Rose accidentally knocked over a basket of herring with her elbow and was called a “sneak” and a “police stooge.” After Florent restored calm, he got an earful of tales about Monsieur Lebigre. The fish woman said that he worked for the police and everyone in the neighborhood knew it. Before Mademoiselle Saget was a customer of his, she had run into him walking into the prefecture to give his report. It was also asserted that he was a money-grubber, a usurer, and lent petty cash by the day to grocers and hired carts out to them, all at scandalous interest rates.

Florent was deeply shaken. That very evening in a low voice he whispered to the others what he had heard. They shrugged and laughed.

“Poor Florent,” said Charvet a little maliciously. “Because he was in Cayenne he imagines the entire police force dogging his heels.”

Gavard swore on his word of honor that Lebigre was “good and true.” But Logre was angry. His chair creaked as he babbled agitatedly that it was not possible to go on like this. If everyone was going to be accused of being with the police, he would rather just stay home and forget about politics. He reminded them that even he had once been accused of being mixed up with the police, he who had fought in both '48 and '51 and had twice escaped deportation only narrowly. As he proclaimed all this he stared at the others, his jaw jutting forward as though he wanted to hammer them with his conviction that he was not working for the police. Under his angry glare the others made gestures of protest. But when Lacaille heard Monsieur Lebigre accused of usury, he silently lowered his head.

The discussion continued, and the incident was forgotten. Ever since Logre had called for a conspiracy, Monsieur Lebigre had been particularly friendly to the regulars in his little room. The truth was that he didn't make much money from them because they never ordered more than one round of drinks. When they were ready to leave, they drank the last drops, having been careful even in the throes of the most heated political and sociological debates to make sure that they never completely emptied their glasses.

Farewells, in the damp night, were done with a great deal of shivering. They lingered a moment on the sidewalk, eyes burning and ears deafened, as though taken aback by the darkness of the street. Behind them Rose was putting up the shutters. After each one had shaken everyone's hands, exhausted and unable to find one more word to say, they went their separate ways, still chewing over the debate and regretting that they had not been able to do a better job of jamming their own beliefs down the others' throats. The rounded shoulders of Robine vanished in the direction of rue Rambuteau, while Charvet and Clémence went side by side along the market to the Luxembourg Gardens, their heels ringing out a martial beat, continuing to discuss some point of politics or philosophy and never taking each other by the arm.

The plot slowly ripened. At the beginning of summer they had only agreed that they should attempt to strike a blow. Florent, who at the beginning had approached the plot with mistrust, ended up believing in the possibility of a revolutionary movement. He took it all very seriously, taking notes, making written plans. The others just talked. Little by little he focused his whole life on this one idea, and he battered his brain with it every evening. He even took Quenu with him to Monsieur Lebigre's, doing it as though this were the most natural thing in the world to do. He still treated him like his student and tried to guide him in the right direction.

Quenu was completely new to politics. But after five or six evenings, he was agreeing with them. He was docile and, if Lisa was not present, showed great respect for his brother's ideas. But what appealed to him most was the bourgeois debauchery of walking out of his charcuterie and shutting himself up in a small room of shouting men, and the presence of Clémence provided a forbidden and delicious undertone. Now he would hurry through his andouille to get there sooner, not wanting to miss a single word of argument that seemed to him deep, even though he was sometimes unable to follow it. Beautiful Lisa was quick to notice his hasty departures, but she said nothing. When Florent led him off, she would stand in the doorway, slightly pale, a stern look in her eyes, and watch them go off to Monsieur Lebigre's.

One evening Mademoiselle Saget looked out the casement window of her garret and recognized the shadow of Quenu on the frosted glass of the tall window on rue Pirouette. She had found herself an excellent observation post. She faced the milky glass window on which the gaslight showed the silhouettes of the men with their sharp noses, the sudden thrusts of their jaws, huge arms stretching out with no sign of a body attached. This unexpected dislocation of limbs, the silent angry profiles, betrayed to the outside world the ferocity of the discussions in the little room. It riveted the attention of Mademoiselle Saget behind her muslin curtain until the transparency turned black. She suspected that something was amiss. By studying carefully, she had come to recognize the various shadows of hands and hair and clothes. As she observed the bedlam of clenched fists, enraged heads, and swaying shoulders, they seemed to have become detached, bobbing around one on top of the other. She would shout, “Oh, there's that big dodo of a cousin, there's that cheapskate Gavard, there's the hunchback, there's that maypole Clémence.”

Then, when the shadows became more lively and they all seemed to have lost their self-control, she felt an irresistible urge to go downstairs and take a look. So she bought her black-currant liqueur at night, claiming that she was feeling under the weather and needed to have a few sips to get out of bed in the morning. The evening that she identified Quenu's giant head crossed by the nervous thrusts of Charvet's skinny arm, she showed up at Monsieur Lebigre's out of breath. Stalling for time, she made Rose rinse out her bottle but was finally about to return to her room when she heard the voice of the charcutier say with naive candor, “No, we won't take it anymore. With one blow we'll drive them all out, that gang of clowns, the deputies and the ministers, at last send them all running.”

The next day Mademoiselle Saget was at the charcuterie at eight o'clock sharp. There she found Madame Lecœur and La Sarriette, their noses diving into the heating stove as they bought warmed sausages for their lunch. Since the old woman had dragged them into the feud with the Beautiful Norman over the ten sous' worth of dabs, they had befriended Beautiful Lisa again. Now that fishmonger wasn't worth a brick of butter. And they derided the Méhudins as worthless girls who were interested only in men's money. The truth was that Mademoiselle Saget had let Madame Lecœur believe that Florent sometimes shared the Beautiful Norman and her sister with Gavard and that the four of them had nighttime orgies at Baratte's, arranged at the poultry dealer's expense. Madame Lecœur was visibly upset, her eyes yellow and watery.

That morning it was Madame Quenu the old girl was aiming for. She looked around the counter, and then, in a sweet voice, she murmured, “I saw Monsieur Quenu last night. I must say, they seem to enjoy themselves in that little room. They certainly make noise.”

Lisa had turned toward the street, listening carefully but trying not to show it. Mademoiselle Saget paused, hoping for a question. Then, lowering her voice, she added, “They had a woman with them. Oh, I don't mean Monsieur Quenu. I'm not saying that, I don't know …”

“It's Clémence,” La Sarriette interrupted. “A cold fish who puts on airs because she went to boarding school. She lives with a shabby-looking teacher. I've seen them together. They always look like they're turning each other in to the police.”

“I know, I know,” said the old woman, who knew both Charvet and Clémence well and was only trying to upset Lisa.

But Lisa did not flinch. She gave the impression that she was watching something tremendously interesting in the market. So the old woman had to use more drastic means. She turned to Madame Lecœur. “I want to tell you that you would be wise to advise your brother-in-law to be more careful. They shout alarming things in that room. Men aren't rational once they start on politics. If they were overheard, it could be very bad for them.”

“Gavard does what he wants,” sighed Madame Lecœur. “He doesn't worry about it. But I will die of worry if he is ever thrown in prison.” And a spark shot out of her foggy eyes.

La Sarriette laughed, shaking her head, her little face as fresh as the morning air. “Jules is the one,” she said, “who takes care of anyone who says anything bad about the empire. They should all be thrown in the Seine, because, as he explained it to me, there isn't one good man among them.”

“Oh,” said Mademoiselle Saget, “it doesn't do any harm if an imprudent remark is overheard by someone like me. I'd sooner have my hand cut off. You know that. For example, last night Monsieur Quenu was saying …”

She stopped again, detecting a slight movement in Lisa.

“Monsieur Quenu was saying that the deputies and ministers, the whole gang, ought to be shot.”

This time Lisa turned abruptly, her face turned white, her hands gripping her apron. “Quenu said that?” she asked curtly.

“And other things that I don't remember. You understand, it was just me who heard them. No need to worry about it, Madame Quenu. You know that with me nothing goes any further. I'm old enough to understand the harm that could be done if something like that got out. It stays between us.”

Lisa regained her equilibrium. She took pride in a happy home, and she would not acknowledge the least shadow of a disagreement between herself and her husband. She just shrugged her shoulders and said with a smile, “Silly stories for children.”

As soon as the three women were out on the sidewalk, they all agreed that Beautiful Lisa had looked peculiar. This whole business with the cousin, the Méhudins, Gavard, Quenu, and their stories, which no one understood, was all going to end badly. Madame Lecœur asked what they did to people who were arrested for their politics. All Mademoiselle Saget knew was that they were never seen again, never. This led La Sarriette to say that they were probably thrown into the Seine, just as Jules had told her. At the charcuterie, during both lunch and dinner, Lisa avoided any reference to the matter. In the evening, when Florent and Quenu started off for Monsieur Lebigre's, she seemed to have lost the hard look in her eyes. It happened that this same evening, the question of the new constitution was being discussed, and it was one in the morning before the debaters managed to leave the little room. The shutters were already in place, and they had to exit by a small door, ducking down one at a time to clear the door frame.

Quenu returned home with a troubled conscience. He opened the three or four doors on the way to his bedroom as quietly as he could. He tiptoed across the living room with his arms stretched out to avoid bumping into furniture.

Everyone was asleep. When he reached the bedroom, he was annoyed to find that Lisa had left the candle burning. It burned in silence, with a tall, sullen flame. As Quenu slipped off his shoes and placed them on a corner of the rug, the clock struck half past one with such a clear ring that he turned in panic, almost afraid to move, and saw, glaring with a look of reproach, the gilded Gutenberg standing there with his finger on a book.

He could see only Lisa's back. Her head was buried in a pillow. But he could sense that she was not asleep, and her eyes were probably wide open, staring at the wall. Her broad back, chubby at the shoulders, was pale and smooth. He exhaled and remained motionless, aware of the accusation for which he had no response.

Unnerved by the back that seemed to accuse him with the somber face of a judge, he slipped under the covers, blew out the candle, and lay motionless. He lay at the edge of the bed to avoid touching his wife. He could have sworn that she was awake. Then he slipped into sleep, in despair over her silence and not even daring to say “good night.” He was pinned helplessly against this massive back, which blocked his apologies from crossing to the other side of the bed.

He slept late the next morning. When he woke up, he was spread across the middle of the bed, the eiderdown comforter pulled up to his chin. He saw Lisa sitting at the desk, putting papers in order. In the deep sleep brought on by the previous night's debauch, he had not stirred when she got up. He mustered the courage to speak from the depth of the alcove. “Well! Why didn't you wake me up? What are you doing?”

“I'm organizing these drawers,” she said calmly in her ordinary voice.

He felt relieved. But Lisa added, “You never know what will happen. If the police were to come …”

“The police? Why the police?”

“Why not, since you have become political.”

He sat straight up in bed, completely thrown by this harsh, unforeseen attack.

“I've become political? All right, I've become political. But it doesn't have anything to do with the police. I'm not in any trouble.”

“Oh no,” Lisa answered, shrugging her shoulders. “You just talk about having everyone shot.”

“Me! Me!”

“And you shout this at a wine shop … Mademoiselle Saget heard you. Now the whole neighborhood knows you're a red.”

He lay back in the bed. He was not yet awake. Lisa's words echoed back from the door of the bedroom, as though he were already hearing the stamping of policemen's boots. He studied her, enclosed in her corset, her hair done, her usual circumspect self, and was even more thrown by finding her so carefully composed for such a dramatic moment.

“You know,” she said, “I leave you free to do what you want.” She went on arranging her papers and, after a pause, continued, “I don't want to wear the pants, as the saying goes. You're the master of your household. You can put us in danger, damage our credit, ruin us … As for me, I only look after Pauline's interests.”

He started to protest, but she cut him off with a hand gesture. “I'm not saying a thing. I'm not starting an argument or even asking for an explanation. If only you had asked my advice, if we had talked about it together. It's wrong to think that women don't understand politics … Do you want to know what I think, what my politics are?”

She stood up and walked from the bed to the window, removing specks of dust with her finger from the polished mahogany armoire and the dressing table. “It's the politics of respectable people. I support the government when my business is going well, when I can earn my living peacefully, and when I can sleep undisturbed by gunshots. That was a fine time in '48, wasn't it? Uncle Gradelle, a good man, showed us his books for that period. He lost more than six thousand francs … Now that we have the empire, everything's going well, business is prospering. You can't say that it's not. So what do you want? What more will you have after you have shot everyone?”

She stood with her hands folded in front of the night table opposite Quenu, who had disappeared under the quilt. He tried to explain what his colleagues wanted, but he stumbled over the political and social systems of Charvet and Florent. He spoke of little-understood principles, the advent of democracy, and the regeneration of societies, jumbling it all up in such a strange way that Lisa shrugged her shoulders without understanding. Finally he extricated himself by attacking the empire as a regime of debauchery, scandal, and armed robbery.

“You see,” he said, remembering a phrase used by Logre, “we're the victims of a gang of pirates who plunder, rape, and murder all of France … They have to go!”

Lisa still only shrugged.

“Is that all you have to say?” Lisa responded in her cold-blooded splendor. “What does that have to do with me, those things you're talking about? And even if they were true, what next? Am I urging you to be dishonest? Do I tell you not to pay your bills or to cheat the customers, and hoard ill-gotten money? You're going to make me mad! We're good people, and we don't plunder or murder anyone. That's enough. I don't care what others do. They can be as bad as they want.”

She was spectacular and triumphant. She started pacing the room again, puffing out her chest. “To please those who have nothing, are we supposed to give up earning a living? Of course I take advantage of every opportunity, and I support a government that's good for business. If they commit acts of evil, I don't want to know. As for me, I know that I don't commit them, and I have nothing to fear from finger-pointing in the neighborhood. It's just too stupid to be charging at windmills. Remember during the elections Gavard said that the emperor's candidate had gone into bankruptcy and was involved in all kinds of unsavory affairs? That might have been true, I'm not saying it wasn't. But still you voted for him, and you were right to do so because that wasn't the point. You weren't being asked to go into business with him or lend him money but to show the government that you were happy to see the charcuterie prospering.”

Meanwhile Quenu remembered another phrase, this time from Charvet, who had declared that “The bloated bourgeoisie, the fattened shopkeepers who support government by gluttony, should be the first to be taken to the wall.” It was thanks to them, thanks to their selfish worship of the belly, that despotism had seized hold of the nation. He was trying to get to the end of the statement when Lisa cut him off, full of indignation.

“Enough of this. My conscience is not troubled. I don't owe one sou, I'm not involved in any swindles, I buy and sell good merchandise, I don't charge any more than my neighbors. What you say may apply to our cousins, the Saccards. They pretend not to even know that I'm in Paris, but I have more pride than they have, and I don't care about all their millions. They say that Saccard is involved in destroying other businesses, that he steals from everyone. That wouldn't surprise me, he was already headed that way. He loves money so much he wants to roll around in it, throw it out the window like an idiot. I agree with criticizing people like that, who build up fortunes that are too large. That I understand. Personally, if you want to know, I have little regard for Saccard. But we who live quietly, working fifteen years to make a comfortable living, never getting involved in politics, wanting only to raise our daughter in peace and have our business prosper—you must be joking. We're honest people.”

She came and sat on the edge of the bed. Quenu was shaken.

“Listen to me carefully,” she said in a deeper voice. “You don't want, I imagine, to have your shop raided, your cellar cleaned out, your money stolen? If those men at Monsieur Lebigre's won, do you think that the next day you would be warmly snuggled in your bed the way you are now? And when you went down to the kitchen, do you think you would merrily start making your galantines like you will in a few minutes? No, you wouldn't, would you? So why do you talk about overthrowing the government that protects you and lets you prosper? You have a wife and a daughter. You should put them first. You would be to blame if you risked their well-being. It's only the people without hearth and home, with nothing to lose, who want the shooting to start. You don't want to be anyone's clown, do you? Then stay home, you big dope, sleep well, eat well, make money, keep a pure conscience, and let France work out her own problems, even if she is troubled by the empire. France does not need you!”

Then she laughed a lovely laugh, and Quenu was completely convinced. She was right, after all, and she was a beautiful woman, sitting on the edge of the bed, even so early in the morning, so clean and fresh and crisp in her white linen. While listening to her, his eyes fell upon their portraits on either side of the fireplace. Of course they were honest people. They had an aura of respectability, dressed in black and framed in gold. The bedroom too was the room of notable people. The lacy antimacassars gave the chairs an air of respectability. The rug, the curtains, the porcelain vases with country scenes bespoke their hard work and their taste for a good life. He wriggled deeper under the quilt, where he warmed himself as though taking a hot bath. It seemed to him that he had barely escaped losing all of this at Monsieur Lebigre's—his huge bed, his cozy bedroom, his charcuterie, to which his thoughts now returned with a sense of remorse. And from Lisa, from all the lovely things around her, arose a suffocating—but pleasant—sense of well-being.

“What a fool,” said his wife, seeing that she had won the argument. “Look at the path you were taking. But you see, you could have gone down that road only by trampling us, Pauline and me. Now, don't worry about judging the government. In the first place, all governments are the same. If you don't support one, you end up supporting another. It's inescapable. The main thing, when you grow old, is to spend your earnings in peace, with the knowledge that you came by the money honestly.”

Quenu nodded in approval. He wanted to explain himself. “It was Gavard …”

But she became serious and abruptly interrupted him. “No, it isn't Gavard. I know who it is. And he would do well to look after his own safety before compromising the security of others.”

“Are you talking about Florent?” Quenu timidly asked after a long pause.

She did not respond right away. She got up and turned to her desk, as though trying to control herself. Then in a clear voice she said, “Yes, Florent. You know how patient I am. I wouldn't make trouble between you and your brother for anything in the world. Family ties are sacred. But I have come to the end of my rope. Since he came here, things have steadily gotten worse. Besides … no, I won't say any more. I better not.”

Silence fell again. Then, while her husband stared at the ceiling in embarrassment, she continued more aggressively, “The truth is that he seems not to understand how much we've done for him. We've put ourselves out for him. We gave him Augustine's bedroom, and the poor girl sleeps in a stuffy closet without a complaint. We feed him morning and night and look after his every need. But no, he just takes it all as his due. He earns money, but no one knows what he does with it—or rather, everyone knows all too well.”

“He's entitled to a share of the inheritance,” Quenu hazarded. It was painful for him to hear his brother attacked.

Lisa suddenly turned straight as a pole as though jolted, and her anger left. “You're right, the inheritance. There's the account in that drawer. He didn't want it. You were there, don't you remember? That alone proves that he is both aimless and brainless. If he had anything going on in his head, he would have done something with that money by now. If it were up to me, I would not still have it, I would gladly be rid of it. I've told him so twice, but he refuses to listen to me. You ought to talk to him about it.”

Quenu responded with a grunt. Lisa, believing she had done what she had to, did not press him further.

“No, he's not like other men,” she started up again. “He's not a comfortable person to have around. I wouldn't have said this if you hadn't brought it up. I don't concern myself about his conduct even though it causes the entire neighborhood to gossip about us. The fact that he eats and sleeps here doesn't bother me. I can accept it. What I cannot tolerate is him dragging us into his politics. If he tries to lead you astray again or in any way put us in danger, I'm warning you, I'll get rid of him. I'm warning you, you understand!”

Florent had been denounced. It was with great effort that she restrained herself, holding back her rancor. Florent and his ways irritated her every instinct. He wounded her, scared her, and made her unhappy.

“This is the disreputable record of a man who has never managed to make a home. I understand why he wants to hear gunshots. He can go stand in their path for all I care, but let him leave decent folk and their families alone. Then too, I just don't like him. At night at the table he smells of fish. I can't eat my food. He, on the other hand, never skips a bite, for all the good it does him. His bad instincts feed on him so that he can't even gain a few pounds.”

While she was speaking, she went to the window. And now she saw Florent crossing rue Rambuteau on his way to the fish market. A huge shipment of fish had arrived that morning. Baskets were filled with rippling silver, and the auction room roared with the commotion of selling it all. Lisa kept her eyes fixed on her brother-in-law's bony shoulders as he made his way through the overwhelming smells of the market, stooped by the nauseating odors. Her stare as she followed his steps was that of a fighter ready for combat and determined to win.

When she turned around, Quenu was getting up. Still warm from the pleasant shelter of the quilt, he sat at the edge of his bed in his nightshirt, his feet resting on the fluffy rug. He looked pale and upset by the misunderstanding between his wife and brother. But Lisa gave him one of her loveliest smiles. And he was moved when she handed him his sock.