CHAPTER FOUR

Marjolin had been found at the Marché des Innocents asleep on a pile of cabbages under an enormous white cabbage whose broad leaves had flopped over, hiding his rosy face. No one knew whose wretched hands had placed him there. He was already a sweet little boy of two or three when he was found, chubby and full of life, but so backward, so slow, that he barely managed a few words. All he could do was smile. When a vegetable seller found him underneath the big white cabbage, she let out a shriek that was so loud, her neighbors rushed over to see what was wrong and watched with wonder as the child, still in baby clothes and wrapped in a scrap of old blanket, reached out his arms to embrace her.

He wasn't able to say who his mother was. His eyes were wide with astonishment as he clung to the shoulder of the tripe merchant who had picked him up. He was the focus of the market until nightfall. He felt reassured and ate buttered bread, and he smiled for all the women. The hefty tripe seller took him for a while, then gave him to a neighbor, and a month later a third woman took him in.

When someone asked, “Where's your mama?” he would make an adorable gesture, a sweep of his hand that included every woman in sight. He was a child of the market, always clinging to the skirts of one woman or another, eating where he found a meal, clothed by the grace of God, and somehow he always had a few sous in the bottom of his threadbare pocket. A handsome redheaded girl who sold medicinal plants named him Marjolin, though no one knew why.

When Marjolin was nearly four years old, Mère Chantemesse happened to find a child, a little girl, on the sidewalk of rue Saint-Denis by the corner of the market. The little thing looked to be about two years old. She was already chattering like a magpie, strangling words in her incessant childish babble. But Mère Chantemesse was able to glean that her name was Cadine and that her mother had left her sitting in a doorway the night before with instructions to wait for her return.

The child had slept there and did not cry. She said that she had been beaten at home, and she seemed happy to follow Mère Chantemesse, enchanted by the large square full of so many people and so many vegetables. Mère Chantemesse, who sold retail, was a kind old witch, nearly sixty years old. She loved children and had lost three boys of her own when they were babies. She thought, “This little character is far too tough to die on me.” So she adopted Cadine.

But one evening, as Mère Chantemesse was leaving, holding Cadine's right hand, Marjolin came up and unceremoniously took the little girl's left hand.

“Well, young fellow,” said the old woman, stopping. “This place is taken. Have you given up Thérèse? You're getting a reputation as a flirt, you know.”

The boy looked at her, smiling and not letting go of the girl's hand. But he looked so pretty with his curly hair that she couldn't remain stern. “Well, come along then, you little rascal. I'll put you to bed too.”

And so she arrived at rue au Lard, where she lived, with a child in each hand. Marjolin made himself at home at Mère Chantemesse's. She smacked the two children when they got too noisy. She delighted in having them to shout at and get angry with and tuck into bed beneath the blankets. She had made them a little bed in an old street vendor's wheelbarrow with the wheels missing. It resembled a big cradle, a little bit hard and still smelling of vegetables that had long been stored there, cool and fresh under a damp cloth. And there, only four years old, Marjolin and Cadine slept in each other's arms.

They grew up together, always seen with their arms around each other's waists. At night Mère Chantemesse would hear them chatting softly. For hours Marjolin listened with gasps of astonishment to endless tales told in Cadine's melodious voice. She was very mischievous, inventing stories to scare him, telling him that the other night she had seen a man all in white at the foot of their bed staring at them and sticking out a large red tongue. Marjolin, breaking into a sweat, asked for details. Then she laughed at him, calling him a “big dodo.”

Other times they were silly and kicked each other under the bedding, Cadine snickering as she pulled her legs up to her chest so that Marjolin, striking with all his might, missed her and struck the wall. When that happened, Mère Chantemesse had to go and straighten out the covers, sending them both off to sleep with little smacks around the ears.

For a long time their bed was a playground. They took their toys into it along with stolen carrots and turnips. Every morning their adopted mother was surprised to find various strange objects there, including stones, leaves, apple cores, and dolls made of rags. On the most bitterly cold days, she would leave them there sleeping all day, Cadine's shock of black hair mingled with Marjolin's blond curls, their mouths so close to each other that they seemed to keep each other warm with their breath.

This room on rue au Lard was a big, shabby attic with only one window, which was clouded with rain spots. The children played hide-and-seek in the tall walnut wardrobe and under Mère Chantemesse's colossal bed. There were also several tables under which they would crawl on all fours. There was a charm to the place, dimly lit, its dark corners littered with vegetables.

Rue au Lard was also fun. It was a narrow street with little traffic and a large arcade that opened onto rue de la Lingerie. Their house was actually right next to the arcade with a low doorway and a door that only half opened to show the greasy steps of a winding staircase. This gabled house, which swelled outward at every story stained dark with dampness and adorned with greenish casing around the drainpipes, was, to them, one more huge toy.

Cadine and Marjolin spent their mornings tossing stones up into the gutters and listening to the happy clanking as they fell down the drainpipes. But they broke two windows and clogged the gutters with rocks, so that Mère Chantemesse, who had lived in the building for forty-three years, was nearly thrown out.

Then Cadine and Marjolin moved on to the delivery vans, pushcarts, and wagons parked on the deserted street. They climbed on the wheels, balanced on the chains, and gallivanted among the piles of boxes and hampers. This was also the back lot of the commissioners on rue de la Poterie, opening onto huge, somber storage rooms that smelled of dried fruit, oranges, and fresh apples. When they had enough of all this, they went off to find Mère Chantemesse in the Marché des Innocents.

They arrived there arm in arm, laughing as they crossed the streets through the traffic without the least fear of being run over. They knew the pavement well, burying their little legs up to the knees in vegetable refuse but never slipping. They made fun of the heavy-booted porters who would slip on an artichoke stem and be sent sprawling on the ground. They were rosy-cheeked elves, habitués of the slimy streets, and they were seen everywhere.

When it rained, they walked somberly under a tattered parasol that had shaded Mère Chantemesse's stall for twenty years. Planting it at a corner of the market, they called it their house.

On sunny days they galloped with so much energy that by the end of the day they could barely move. They bathed their feet in the fountain, dammed up the gutters, hid themselves in piles of vegetables, and stayed there chatting away, just as they did in bed at night. People passing a huge pile of smooth-leaved lettuce or romaine often heard their muffled chitchat. And when the greens were removed, the two children would be revealed lying side by side on their salad couch, eyes glistening nervously like those of birds caught in a bush.

By this time Cadine could not bear to be without Marjolin and Marjolin cried if he was apart from Cadine. If they became separated, they looked for each other behind every vendor's skirt, behind every box, under every cabbage. It was most especially under the cabbage that they grew up and where they came to love each other.

When Marjolin was nearly eight and Cadine six, Mère Chantemesse started scolding them for their laziness. She told them that she would take them into her vegetable business and pay them a sou a day if they would trim the vegetables. At first the children were very enthusiastic. They set up on either side of the big basket, with slender knives and eagerly worked away. Mère Chantemesse specialized in peeled and trimmed vegetables. On a table spread with a damp black wool cloth, she lined up potatoes, turnips, carrots, and white onions, arranged in pyramids, three at the base and one on top, all ready to be tossed into the pot of a busy household. She also had bundles tied with string for pot-au-feu¹— four leeks, three carrots, one parsnip, two turnips, two ribs of celery. There were also thinly chopped vegetables laid out on sheets of paper, and quartered cabbages, piles of tomatoes, and slices of pumpkin looking like red stars and gold crescents next to all the other pale vegetables washed in running water.

Cadine proved to be much more skillful than Marjolin, even though she was younger. She could cut such a thin peel from a potato that you could see daylight through it. She tied the pot-au-feu bundles so prettily that they looked like bouquets of flowers. And she knew how to make a pile of vegetables look large even though it contained only three carrots and three turnips. Passersby would stop and laugh when she called out in her little waif's voice, “Madame, Madame, come over here. Only two sous a pile.”

She had her regulars, and her little piles were well known. Mère Chantemesse, seated between the two children, laughed a private laugh that made her bosom rise almost to her chin, to see them working away with such earnestness. She religiously paid them their daily sou. But in the end they grew bored with making the little pyramids. They were growing up and looking for more lucrative work. Marjolin remained a child for a long time, which tried Cadine's patience. “He has the brains of a cabbage,” she would say. And, if truth be told, it was pointless for her to come up with a money-earning plan for him, as he never earned any. He could not even do a simple errand. But she was extremely shrewd. When she was eight, she was hired by one of the women who sat on a bench in the Les Halles neighborhood with a basket of lemons and enlisted street children to work the area, hawking them. She held the lemons in her hands, selling them two for a sou, running after passersby shoving the merchandise under women's noses. When her hands were empty, she hurried back for more. She earned two sous for every dozen lemons she sold, and in good weather she could earn five or six sous a day.

The following year she sold bonnets for nine sous, which was an even better business except that she had to be on her guard because that kind of street vending was illegal without a license. But she could smell the police a hundred steps away, and the bonnets vanished under her skirts while she nonchalantly munched on an apple.

Then she started selling cakes, cookies, cherry tarts, almond croquets, little corn cakes, thick and yellow, on wicker trays. But Marjolin ate most of her inventory.

Finally, at the age of eleven, she carried out the big idea that she had long contemplated. She saved up four francs in two months' time and with it bought a basket to carry on her back, and she started selling chickweed.²

This was a lucrative business. She got up early in the morning and bought chickweed from the wholesalers—birdseed on stalks and seed cakes. Then she set out, crossing the river, touring the Latin Quarter from rue Saint-Jacques to rue Dauphine up to the Luxembourg Gardens. Marjolin went with her. She did not want him even to carry the basket. She said he was fit only to call out, so he shouted in his thick drawl, “Chickweed for the li'l birdies!”

Then Cadine, her voice melodious as a flute, would take up the call in a strange musical passage ending on a clear deep note, “Chickweed for the li'l birdies.”

They took to opposite sides of the street, both looking up in the air. At the time Marjolin had an oversize red jacket that went down to his knees. It had belonged to the late Monsieur Chantemesse, a cabdriver. Cadine wore a blue-and-white plaid dress, made from an old skirt belonging to Mère Chantemesse.

They were known to every canary in every garret of the Latin Quarter. As they passed by, repeating their call, all the cages started singing.

Cadine also sold watercress. “Two sous a bunch! Two sous a bunch!” Marjolin would run into the shops and offer “beautiful watercress, good for your health.”

The central market had just been built, and the two would stand and stare awestruck at the lane of flower vendors that ran through the fruit pavilion. There on both sides along the market stalls, like the edges of a garden, blossoms burst in huge bouquets. It was a perfumed harvest, a double hedge of roses, through which the neighborhood girls loved to pass, smiling, faint from the overpowering fragrance, with shelves of artificial flowers above, paper flowers with drops of glue that looked like dew, funeral wreaths with black and white pearly beads that gave off a bluish glow. Cadine widened her rosy nostrils with the sensuousness of a cat, stopping in the sweet air and soaking up all she could from the perfume. When Marjolin caught a scent of her hair, he would say that it smelled of carnations. She claimed that she no longer needed to use anything for her hair, she had only to pass down that alley.

She managed to land a job working for a flower vendor. Once she started the new job, Marjolin found that she had the most wonderful smell from head to toe. She lived among the roses, the lilacs, the lilies of the valley. He would playfully sniff at her skirts, pretending to reflect deeply, and finally pronounce, “Ah, yes, lily of the valley.”

Then he would rise to her waist, sniff even harder, and declare, “This smells of wallflowers.”

Then, at her sleeves and her wrists, “And this smells of lilacs.”

At the back of her neck and at her throat, her cheeks, her lips— “That smells of roses.”

Cadine laughed and called him a dodo, and cried out for him to stop because the tip of his nose tickled her. Her breath smelled of jasmine. She was a warm, living bouquet.

Now the young girl got up at four in the morning to help her employer with the purchases. Every morning they went to suburban gardens to buy armfuls of flowers, packages of moss, and bunches of ferns and periwinkle branches with which to surround bouquets. Cadine was enthralled by the daughters of the wholesale gardeners of Montreuil, with their jewels and lace, surrounded by bouquets.

On the most popular saints' days—Mary, Peter, and Joseph— sales started at two o'clock. More than a hundred thousand francs in cut flowers were sold on the street, and a vendor could make two hundred francs in a few hours. On those days all that could be seen of Cadine was a frizz of hair above the bouquets of pansies, mignonettes, and daisies. She was drowned, lost under the flowers. All day long she was hanging flower arrangements on bamboo sticks.

In only a few weeks she had mastered a skill with her own graceful style. Her bouquets did not suit everyone's tastes. They could make you smile, or they could upset you with an unintended savageness. Reds dominated, mingled with blues, yellows, and purples, creating a barbarous charm.

On mornings when she pinched Marjolin, teased him to the brink of tears, she made ferocious bouquets, the bouquets of an angry girl, with strong perfumes and garish colors. Other mornings, when she felt sad or joyful, her bouquets showed silvery gray, subtle with a soft perfume. Other times she used roses, bloody as a heart slashed open, swimming in a lake of white carnations with irises sticking out wildly like flames among the greens, like a Smyrna carpet with a complicated pattern created flower by flower, like painting a canvas, spreading out with the delicacy of lace. There would be a bouquet of an engaging purity, then a plump nosegay, whatever could be dreamed of, for the hand of a fish seller or a marquise, the awkwardness of a virgin and the sensuality of a girl. In other words, her bouquets revealed all the endearing and quaint fantasies of a twelve-year-old girl in whom womanhood was dawning.

There were only two flowers that Cadine respected: white lilacs, which in winter cost fifteen to twenty francs for a bunch of eight or ten branches, and camellias, which were even more expensive and came in boxes of a dozen on a bed of moss covered with cotton wool. She handled them the way you would handle jewels, gingerly, without breathing, afraid of wilting them with a sigh, and with painstaking care attached their short stems to bamboo sticks. She spoke of them with great gravity.

She told Marjolin that a good white camellia, without any rust spots, was a rare and beautiful thing. One day she held one up for him to admire, and he said, “Yes, that's nice, but I would rather have that spot under your chin there, right there. It's prettier and more delicate than your camellia. The blue and pink veins are like the veins in a flower petal.”

Then he touched her with his fingertip and sniffed her. “Funny. Today you smell of orange blossoms.”

Cadine had a difficult personality. She was not suited for the role of employee. Finally she managed to set up her own business. She was then only thirteen years old and couldn't even dream of having a large-scale enterprise such as her own stall along the flower alley. So she sold bouquets of violets for a sou apiece, which she displayed on a bed of moss in a bamboo tray that hung from her neck. She wandered all day in Les Halles and the neighborhood, carrying her little garden.

That was her joy this perpetual roaming, which exercised her legs after the long hours sitting on a low chair with her knees folded, making bouquets. Now she could bunch her violets as she walked, wrapping them in her fingers with incredible dexterity, counting out six or eight flowers depending on the season, adding a leaf, wrapping a string around it, then cutting the string with her sharp little teeth. She performed this trick so rapidly that the little bouquets seemed to grow on their own out of the moss on the tray. Along the streets, amid the bustling crowds, her swift fingers sprouted flowers without her even glancing at them. Her face was instead raised defiantly, surveying the shops and the passing people.

Occasionally she rested in the shelter of a doorway. There she would bring to the rushing gutters, greasy with dishwater, a touch of spring and blue-flowered woods. Her bouquets reflected her bad moods and her soft moments, some shaggy and prickly, wrapped angrily in an untidy paper cone, others peaceful and amorous, smiling from a crisp paper collar. Wherever she passed she left behind a sweet scent.

Marjolin followed her, mesmerized. Now she smelled of only one thing from head to foot. When he took hold of her and sniffed from her skirt to her bodice, from her hands to her face, he said that she was nothing but a violet, a huge and most lovely violet. He buried his face in her and repeated, “Remember the day we went to Romainville? It's all like that. Especially in your sleeve. Don't ever change work again. You smell too good.”

And she never did change. It was her final choice. But the two children were growing up. Often she neglected her tray of violets just to run around the neighborhood. The construction of Les Halles was an object of endless adventures. They climbed into the construction site through a crack in the wooden fencing. They climbed down into the excavations of the building foundations. And they scaled the first steel scaffolding to go up.

They left a little bit of themselves and their games in every hole that was dug and every structure that was raised. The market was built under their little hands. From this sprang an enduring affection for Les Halles, and the market returned their affection. They were intimate with the buildings, old friends whose every bolt they had seen driven in. They had no fear of the monster and patted its enormity with their skinny fists, treating it like a well-behaved child or a friend with whom they were comfortable. And Les Halles seemed to be smiling at these two ragamuffins, who were an ode to footloose freedom, an idyll that sprang from the market's great belly.

Cadine and Marjolin did not sleep together in the vegetable wagon at Mère Chantemesse's anymore. The old woman, who continued to hear them chattering into the night, made up a separate bed for the boy on the floor in front of the wardrobe. But the next morning she would find the boy back under the old covers. So she sent him to sleep with a neighbor. This made the two children extremely unhappy. During the day, when Mère Chantemesse wasn't there, they lay down fully dressed in each other's arms on the floor as though it were a bed, and there they had fun.

Later on they started misbehaving, seeking out the dark corners of the bedroom or, more often, hidden in the back of the shop on rue au Lard behind the apple pile and the orange crates. They were free and without shame, like sparrows mating on a rooftop.

It was in the basement of the poultry pavilion that they were able to sleep together. It was their special tradition, and finding a way to sleep against each other, the old way they had lost, made them feel warm. There by the slaughtering table and the big baskets of feathers, they could stretch out. As soon as night fell, they slipped in and stayed there all evening, warming themselves, happy in the softness of their bed, with down up to their eyes. They dragged their basket away from the gaslight. They were alone with the strong smell of poultry, awakened by the sudden crowing of roosters in the darkness. And they laughed and kissed, filled with an affection that they were not sure how to express.

Marjolin was very stupid. Cadine beat him, overcome with anger toward him but not knowing why. But with her street-savvy instincts, she was awakening him. Slowly, there in the basket of feathers, they came to know everything. It was a game. The hens and roosters lying next to them did not have a sweeter innocence.

Even later, they filled Les Halles with their love like insouciant sparrows. They lived like happy young animals, ruled by their instincts, satisfying their appetites in the midst of mountains of food, where they had grown like plants made of flesh and blood. At sixteen Cadine was a girl set free, a dark gypsy of the streets, gluttonous and sensual. At eighteen Marjolin was already showing signs of the fat man he would become, devoid of intelligence and living by instinct. Often at night Cadine would leave her bed to join him in the poultry cellar. The next day she would laugh brazenly at Mère Chantemesse, who would chase her around the room, missing with her broom handle, while Cadine mocked her and claimed she had stayed out “to see if the moon grew horns.”

As for Marjolin, he lived like a vagabond. The nights that Cadine left him alone he spent in the pavilions with the night watchmen. He slept in sacks or in crates or in any quiet corner he came across. Neither of them ever left Les Halles for more than a few moments. It was their perch, their stable, the colossal manger where they slept, loved, and lived on a huge bed of meat, butter, and vegetables.

But they always had a special place in their hearts for the big baskets of feathers. They returned there for nights of love. The feathers were completely unsorted. There were long black turkey feathers and goose plumes, white and slick, which tickled their ears when they turned over. They sank into duck down as though it were cotton wool. There were light hen feathers, golden and speckled, which rose in a cloud with each breath they exhaled, looking like a jumble of flies in the sunlight. In the winter they also slept in the purple of pheasants, the ashen gray of larks, in the silky plumage of grouse, quail, and thrushes.

The feathers seemed to still be alive, warm with their scent, and they brushed the children's lips with the quiver of wings and the warmth of a nest. To them, the feathers felt like the great broad back of an enormous bird on which they rested, which swept them away as they swooned in each other's arms.

In the morning, Marjolin looked for Cadine, lost at the bottom of the basket, as though buried in new-fallen snow. Disheveled, she climbed up, shook herself, emerging from a cloud. A few feathers always stuck to her bun.

They found another place for their pleasures, in the wholesale market for butter, eggs, and cheese. Every morning a wall of empty baskets formed there. The two would find a way through this wall to carve out a hiding place. As soon as they had built their room inside, they pulled in a basket to close it off. Then they were at home. They had a house. They could kiss without fear. And their great joke at everyone's expense was that only a thin wall of wicker separated them from the crowds of Les Halles, whose loud voices they heard all around them.

Often they burst into laughter when they heard some unsuspecting person stop only two steps away from them. They would make peepholes to take a look. When cherries were in season, Cadine would throw the pits at the heads of women who came their way. The terrified women could not figure out where the hail of cherry pits came from.

They also crept in the shadows of the cellars, knowing all the darkest corners, able to squeeze through the most carefully sealed gates. A favorite game was to penetrate through to the tracks of the underground railroad that was supposed to connect the cellars of the different pavilions one day. Already connections had been built and were ready to hook up. Cadine and Marjolin had found a loose plank of wood by the railway that they could move to slip in and out.

Once inside, they were cut off from the world, though they could still hear the feet of Paris walking around on the streets overhead. The lines stretched into avenues of deserted galleries, spotted with daylight through the steel grates and lit by gas in the darker parts. They wandered around as though it were their own private castle, certain that no one would disturb them, content in the rumbling silence, dank light, and subterranean privacy, where their chatty childish love took on the suggestion of melodrama.

From the neighboring cellars, fenced off by timbers, came all kinds of smells—the dull scent of vegetables, the pungent smell of fish, the overpowering rankness of cheese, the warm breath of poultry.

Between kisses they were inhaling nourishment, in the dark alcove where they passed hours lying across the rails. At other times, when the night was beautiful, the dawn clear, they would climb over the rooftops by means of ladders in the turrets at the corner of each pavilion. At the top they had a view of sprawling meadows of zinc, with pathways and open spaces, a vast expanse of flowing countryside ruled by them. They toured the square roofs of the market, following the outstretched roofs of the covered streets, climbing up and down the slopes, losing themselves in endless journeys. Then, bored with the foothills, they climbed even higher, ascending the iron ladders where Cadine's skirts fluttered like flags.

Then they ran along the second tier of roofs beneath the open heavens with nothing above them but the stars. All kinds of sounds rose up from the market, clattering, rumbling, and the distant roar of a storm in the night. At that height the morning breeze swept away the foul smells, the fetid breath of the awakening market. They would kiss each other along the gutters like sparrows pecking. The first rays of the sun set them aglow. Cadine laughed to be so high in the air, and her neck reflected iridescent tints like a dove's while Marjolin bent down to look at the streets still murky and dark, his hands clasping the zinc edge like the feet of a pigeon. When they came back to earth again, exuberant from their trip in the open air, they pretended they were returning from a trip to the country.

They met Claude Lantier in the tripe market. They had been going there every day, drawn by the taste of blood, the cruelty of street urchins titillated by the sight of severed heads. A rust-colored stream ran through the pavilion. They dipped the tips of their shoes in it and made dams with leaves, creating little bloody puddles. They were fascinated by the arrival of cartloads of offal, which stank even after thorough washing. They watched the unloading of bundles of sheeps' feet, which were piled on the ground like dirty paving stones; huge stiff tongues still bleeding where they had been ripped from the throat; and beef hearts, like huge church bells, unmounted and silent. But what most made them shudder with pleasure was the big baskets dripping blood, filled with sheeps' heads, their greasy horns and black muzzles and strips of wooly skin left hanging from bleeding flesh. They looked at these bloody hampers and imagined guillotines lopping off countless heads and throwing them into baskets.

They followed the baskets to the bottom of the cellar, watching them glide along the rails laid over the steps and listening to the wheezing cry made by the castors as the wagons went down. Below was exquisite horror. They entered into the scent of death, walked among dark, cloudy puddles that sometimes appeared to be lit by glowing purple eyes. The floor felt sticky on the soles of their shoes as they splashed through, revolted yet entranced by this horrifying muck. The gas jets had low flames like the batting lid of a bloodshot eye. Near the faucets, in the pale light that came through the grates, they came to the chopping blocks. Mesmerized, they watched the butchers, their aprons stiffened with gore, smashing sheeps' heads with mallets. They lingered for hours until all the baskets were empty, held rapt by the crack of bones, until the last tongue was torn out, the last brain knocked loose by blows to the skull. Sometimes a worker walked behind them, hosing down the cellar floor, the water bursting out with the rush of an open floodgate. But although the flood was so powerful that it wore away at the floor, it did not have the power to remove either the stain or the stench of blood.

Toward evening, between four and five, Cadine and Marjolin knew that they would run into Claude at the wholesale beef lung auction. He was always right there, standing where the tripe vendors parked their carts, amid a mob of men in blue work overalls and white aprons, being shoved and jostled, his ears splitting from voices bellowing out bids. But he never felt the jabs of their elbows; he stood in a peaceful stupor in front of the gigantic lungs hanging from the auction hooks.

He often told Cadine and Marjolin that this was the most beautiful sight in the world. The lungs were a gentle pink, gradually deepening in color down the length of the organs until the bottom was bordered in a brilliant crimson. Claude compared them to watered satin, unable to find any other way to describe the supple silkiness of the lengths of flesh, bunched in folds like the gathered skirts of dancers. He spoke of gauze and lace that revealed the thigh of a beautiful woman. When a ray of sunlight fell on the huge lungs and gave off a golden halo, Claude looked enraptured, as if he had seen a host of resplendently naked Grecian goddesses or perhaps fair ladies in their castles dressed in brocaded gowns.

The painter became a close friend of the two children. He was a great admirer of savage beauty and for a long time envisioned a large painting of Cadine and Marjolin as lovers wandering Les Halles amid the vegetables, the seafood, the meat. He would pose them seated on a bed of food, their arms embracing each other, exchanging an idyllic kiss. In this he saw an artistic manifesto, positivism in art,³ a modern art that was completely experimental and materialistic, but also as satire, as a punch in the mouth of the old school. But for almost two years he constantly redid his sketches, never able to strike the exact right note. He must have torn up at least fifteen canvases.

He judged himself harshly for this failure, but he continued to spend his time with his two models, held by a kind of unrequited love for his unrealized painting. Often when he ran into them, wandering about in the afternoon, he would join them, drifting through the Les Halles neighborhood, killing off time with his hands jammed deep into his pockets, fascinated by the street life around him.

The three ambled together, dragging their heels and scuffling along the pavement, forcing passersby into the street. They inhaled the odors of Paris, their noses in the air. They could have recognized every corner with their eyes shut, just by the scent of alcohol of the wine merchants, the warm breath of bakeries and pastry makers, or the vague impression of fruit. They took long walks. They loved to cross the round hall of the grain market, a huge, weighty stone cage, past the white piles of sacks of flour, listening to the echo of their footsteps in the silent vault.

They had their favorite sections of the neighborhood streets, silent now, sad and dark as the edge of a ghost town—rue Babille, rue Sauval, rue des Deux-Ecus, rue de Viarmes, pale with powder from the many flour mills in the neighborhood but full of life at four o'clock, when the grain exchange was open. Usually this would be their point of departure. Slowly they meandered along rue Vauvilliers, stopping to look into cheap restaurants, laughing loudly at the large yellow number on a house with drawn shades. Where the street narrowed to rue Prouvaires, Claude squinted to examine, in front of him at the end of the covered street, beneath the facade of a building as large as a train station, a side door of Saint Eustache with its glass rosette and its two levels of arched windows. He announced, as though making a challenge, that all of medieval and Renaissance architecture could be found in the Les Halles neighborhood. Then, as they walked along the broad new streets rue du Pont-Neuf and rue des Halles, he explained to the two youths about modern life, the excellent pavement, high buildings, and luxurious shops. He expressed a hopeful belief that a new art would be coming soon and bemoaned his fear that he would never master it.

But Cadine and Marjolin preferred the peaceful, simple life of rue des Bourdonnais, where they could shoot marbles in the street and not worry about getting run over. The young girl nevertheless primped as she passed the wholesale hat and glove stores. At each door, bored young assistant salesmen with pens tucked behind their ears followed her with their eyes. These young people preferred what little of the old Paris was still standing, such as rue de la Poterie and rue de la Lingerie, with their potbellied houses, their shops full of butter, eggs, and cheese, or rue de la Ferronerie and rue de l'Aiguillerie, beautiful old streets from before, with their narrow hidden shops, and especially rue Courtalon, a squalid black alley that ran from place Sainte-Opportune to rue Saint-Denis, peppered along the way with fetid little passageways where they had carried on when they were younger.

Rue Saint-Denis took them to the candy gourmand zone. They grinned at candied apples, licorice sticks, prunes, and rock candy sold at grocery stores and pharmacies. Their meanderings always ended up in thoughts of treats, with the craving to gobble up with their eyes all of the window displays. For them the neighborhood was like a huge table set out before them, perpetual dessert time, and they longed to dip their fingers in it. They barely wasted a moment visiting the clusters of dilapidated hovels on rue Pirouette, rue de Mondétour, rue de la Petite-Truanderie, and rue de la Grande-Truanderie, where their interest was held only briefly by the snail center, the herbalist, the shacks where they sold tripe or liquors.

But in the middle of this foul-smelling neighborhood, there was also a soap factory that gave off a sweet perfume. Marjolin always stopped there and waited for someone to go in or come out so that he could catch a whiff of the air coming out the door. Then they returned quickly to rue Pierre-Lescot or rue Rambuteau. Cadine adored salt-cured food and stood admiring bundles of pickled herring, barrels of anchovies and capers, tubs of cornichons and olives with wooden spoons in them. The smell of vinegar tickled her throat deliciously The pungency of rolled cod and smoked salmon, salt pork and ham, the tartness of a basket of lemons, drew the tip of her tongue, moist and hungry, to her lips. But she also enjoyed the sight of cans of sardines, rising like elaborate metal sculptures amid the sacks and boxes.

Rue Montorgueil and rue Montmartre had even more attractive restaurants and grocery stores with wonderful smells always coming from them, lively displays of poultry and game, preserved foods at the doorways where crates were overflowing with yellow sauerkraut, tangled as old lace. On rue Coquillière they lost themselves in the aroma of truffles. There was a big food store that gave off such a fragrance into the street that Cadine and Marjolin, by closing their eyes, could imagine devouring exquisite things. It would upset Claude, who said it made him feel empty. He would go back to the grain market by way of rue Oblin, examining the lettuces sold in doorways and the kitchen crockery spread out on the pavement, leaving “the two barbarians” on the scent of truffles, the strongest scent in the neighborhood.

This was how their long walks went. When Cadine was walking around by herself with her bouquets of violets, she filled out the itinerary, going back to certain shops she particularly liked, especially the Taboureau bakery, of which an entire window was devoted to displaying cakes. She worked up and down rue de Turbigo, retracing her steps ten times so that she could pass by almond cakes, Saint-Honoré cakes, savarins, flans, fruit tarts, platters of babas,⁴ éclairs, and cream puffs. She was especially taken with the pickling jars filled with cookies, macaroons, and madeleines. The bright bakery had large mirrors and marble and gilded ornaments, wrought-iron bread racks, and a second window where long glazed breads stood on one end on a crystal shelf, the other end leaning against a brass rod. When overcome by temptation, she would buy herself a brioche for a couple of sous.

There was another shop across from the square des Innocents that awakened the unrequited longings of her gluttonous searching. The shop specialized in meat turnovers. She would stop to reflect on the classic turnover but also pike turnovers and turnovers of foie gras and truffles. She would stand there motionless, dreaming of how someday she really must try one of them.

Cadine also had her vain moments and then she would imagine fantastic dresses that could be made for her from the window display at Fabriques de France, which adorned the pointe Saint-Eustache with great swaths of bright fabric, draped from the mezzanine to the street. Slightly hampered by her tray of violets among the women of Les Halles, who brushed their dirty aprons against her Sunday-bests of the future, she stroked the wools, the flannels, and the cottons, to make sure of the weave and suppleness of the material. She promised herself a flannel dress in vivid colors or a flowered cotton or a scarlet poplin. Sometimes she even chose from the windows displays. Among the draped fabrics set out by the window dresser, she would choose a soft pale silk in sky blue or apple green and imagine how she would look wearing it with pink ribbons.

In the evening she would stand in the glitter of the big jewelers on rue Montmartre. This harrowing street deafened her with its unending traffic and jostled her with its relentless wave of people. But nothing could make her move from her spot, and her eyes filled with the flaming splendor under the row of lamps in front of the shop. First there were the smooth bright white lights illuminating the silver: rows of watches and hanging chains, silverware displayed in crosses, cups and snuff boxes, napkin rings and combs, laid out on the shelves. She especially liked the silver thimbles, with their domes rising along the porcelain shelves, all covered by a glass dome. Then on the other side the amber glow of gold turned yellow in the mirrors. A panel of long chains hung like a curtain. Small ladies' watches draped over their boxes like fallen stars. Wedding rings were threaded on thin wire. Bracelets, brooches, and valuable jewels sparkled on the black velvet of their cases. Rings glowed with quick flames of blue, green, yellow, or mauve in their chubby square boxes, and all the shelves, in two or three rows, were arranged with earrings, crucifixes, medallions, decorating the glass cases with all the richness of an altar cloth. The reflection of such golden wealth shone out halfway across the street, as bright as sunshine.

To Cadine, there was something holy about this place displaying the emperor's treasures. She spent a long time staring at the kind of jewelry the fish vendors bought, carefully studying the price tag attached to each piece, written in large numbers. She decided on pear-shaped earrings made of artificial coral, dangling from golden roses.

One morning Claude happened upon her, mesmerized in front of a hairdresser's on rue Saint-Honoré. She was fraught with envy as she stared at the hair. High in the window hung manes and tails, unfastened plaits, cascading waves in three tiers, a flood of curls and silks with glowing red locks, thick blacks, and pale blonds, all the way to white hair for sexagenarian lovers. Lower in the window, discreet curls, tight ringlets, combed and scented locks and waves slept in cardboard boxes. In the middle of this picture, as if deep inside a chapel, under the fringe of springing curls, the bust of a woman was revolving. The woman wore a cherry red satin scarf fastened between her breasts with a copper brooch and a high bridal headdress adorned with orange blossom branches. She smiled with her doll mouth. Artificially long lashes stuck out stiffly from her light eyes. Her waxy cheeks and shoulders looked as though they had been smoked over gas. Cadine waited for her to come around again with that smile of hers, and her pleasure grew as the profile sharpened and the beautiful woman slowly turned from left to right.

Claude was indignant. He shook Cadine and demanded to know what she was doing in front of this trash, “this dead woman taken from a morgue.” He ranted against the nudity of the cadaver, the ugliness of this beauty, saying that women did not even wear their hair like that anymore.

But the little girl remained unconvinced and insisted that the woman was beautiful. Then, yanking herself away from the painter, who held her by one arm, and scratching her thicket of black hair with annoyance, she pointed out to him an enormous tail of red hair that had been torn from some sturdy, handsome horse and insisted that that was the kind of hair she wished for.

When all three of them—Claude, Cadine, Marjolin—went on their wanderings around Les Halles, they caught a glimpse of a steel giant at the end of every street. There were sudden glimpses at unexpected angles defining the horizon. Claude would turn around, especially on rue Montmartre after they had passed the church. Seen from a distance at the right angle, Les Halles filled him with enthusiasm. The broad arcade and a tall gaping doorway would appear and the pavilions crowded one on top of another with their two lines of roofs, their row of jalousies. It seemed that the profiles of houses and palaces had been superimposed to create an immense oriental metal structure, as delicate as the hanging gardens of Babylon, crisscrossed by descending terraces of roofs, passageways, and flying bridges.

They always went back to this, the city where they loved to roam, never straying more than a hundred yards from its center. They meandered back to the warm afternoon of Les Halles. Above, the shutters were closed, the blinds lowered. In the covered galleries, the air slept—an ash gray air with yellow stripes of sunlight cutting across it from the high windows. Soft sounds drifted through the market, the footsteps of busy pedestrians rang out from time to time from the pavement, while the porters, wearing their badges, sat in a row on the stone borders in the corners of the pavilions, taking off their heavy boots and tending their aching feet.

This was the peace of a colossus at rest, broken by the occasional cock's crow from out of the darkness of the poultry cellars. They would often go to see the wagons that came in the afternoon to collect the empty baskets and carry them back to the suppliers. The baskets, labeled with black letters and numbers, were piled into mountains in front of the pawnshops on rue Berger. The men built the piles systematically, and when a tower of baskets on a wagon was a story tall, the man on the ground balancing the baskets had to take a wide swing to toss them up to his coworker, who was perched on the top with his arms outstretched to catch them. Claude, who enjoyed displays of strength and dexterity, would spend hours watching the flight of wicker, laughing when an over-ambitious throw sent a basket soaring over the top and landing on the other side.

He also enjoyed the fruit market at the corner of rue Rambuteau and rue du Pont-Neuf, where a few of the vegetable merchants were based. Vegetables in the open air, spread out on tables covered with damp black cloth, delighted him. At four o'clock sunlight streamed across these patches of green, and he walked down the rows, pleased to take note of the different-colored faces of the vendors—the young women with their hair pulled back into nets, already sunburned from their hard lives, and the old ones, broken and shrunken and red-faced under their yellow head scarves.

Cadine and Marjolin stopped following Claude if they saw Mère Chantemesse in the distance, shaking a fist at them, angered at the sight of them dawdling around together. Claude would meet them across the street, where he found a glorious subject for a painting: vendors under their large faded blue, red, and violet umbrellas on poles. They were little knolls of color dotting the market, catching the fire of the setting sun in their domes, a sun that was fading away on the carrots and turnips. One vendor, an old hag about a hundred years old, was sheltering three scrawny lettuce heads under a sad worn-out pink silk umbrella.

One day while Léon, the apprentice at the Quenu-Gradelle charcuterie, was delivering a meat pie in the district, Cadine and Marjolin ran into him. They saw him raise the lid of a baking crock in a dark corner of rue de Mondétour and delicately extract a meatball with his fingers. They grinned at each other, for it had given them a fine and mischievous idea. Cadine devised a plan to fulfill one of her greatest ambitions. When she next met the boy with his baking dish, she was very friendly and she got him to offer her a little meatball. She licked her fingers and laughed. She might have been a little disappointed, for she had imagined that it would taste better than it did. But nevertheless, the boy amused her, dressed all in white like a girl on her way to communion but with a cunning, hungry face.

She invited him to a gigantic lunch that she was giving within the baskets of the butter market. The three of them—Marjolin, Léon, and herself—sealed themselves off from the world in four walls of wicker. The table was set on a large flat basket. There were pears, walnuts, fromage blanc,⁵ shrimp, fried potatoes, and radishes. The fromage blanc came from the fruit stand on rue de la Cossonnerie. It was a gift. A fry shop on rue de la Grande-Truanderie had sold them two sous' worth of fried potatoes on credit. The rest—the pears, the walnuts, the shrimp, the radishes— were stolen from all over Les Halles. It was a grand banquet. Léon could not rest until he had returned the favor, so he invited them to dinner in his room at one in the morning. He served cold boudin, slices of dried sausage, a piece of petit salé, some cornichons, and goose fat. The Quenu-Gradelle charcuterie had supplied everything. And that was not all. Fine suppers followed delicate lunches, invitations upon invitations. Three times a week they had intimate little parties amid the baskets or in the attic. On sleepless nights Florent could hear the muffled sounds of chewing and laughter until nearly daybreak.

The love between Cadine and Marjolin was still growing. They were completely content. He played the gentleman and took her dining in a private room, where they crunched on apples or celery hearts in some shadowy corner of a basement. One day he stole a pickled herring, which they savored on the roof of the seafood pavilion, sitting on the edge of a gutter. There was hardly a shadowy recess of Les Halles where they had not enjoyed their tender banquets. The neighborhood, the rows of shops full of fruits and cakes and tidbits, was no longer the forbidden paradise where they displayed their hunger and desire. They passed the displays with a hand stretched out to pilfer a prune, a fistful of cherries, or a chunk of cod. They also got supplies from within Les Halles, keeping an eye out in the rows of the market, grabbing anything that fell, sometimes helping make things fall with a nudge of the shoulder to a basket of merchandise.

But despite these raids, a serious debt was accruing at the fry shop on rue de la Grande-Truanderie. The fry man, whose shop was propped up by a rickety house supported by planks that were green with moss, kept cooked mussels swimming in clear water at the bottom of a large earthen casserole, dishes of little dabs, yellow and stiff with too thick a breading, cubes of gras-double⁶ simmering at the bottom of the skillet, and grilled herring, blackened and so hard that it made a sound like a piece of wood.

Some weeks Cadine owed as much as twenty sous, a crushing debt that required the sale of an indeterminable number of bouquets of violets because she could not count on Marjolin for anything. But she had to repay Léon's hospitality. As a matter of fact, she was a little ashamed that she never had any meat to offer him. As for Léon, he stole entire hams. Normally he stashed everything inside his shirt. At night when he went upstairs, he pulled out of his chest pieces of sausage, slices of pâté de foie gras, and bundles of pork cracklings. There was no bread, and they did not drink. One evening Marjolin caught Léon kissing Cadine between two bites of food. It made him laugh. He could have knocked the little boy out with one punch. But he did not get jealous over Cadine. He treated her like an old friend.

Claude did not take part in these parties. He caught Cadine stealing a beet from a little straw-trimmed basket, and he boxed her ear and called her a bum. “That's that,” he then said. He could not help feeling a kind of admiration for these sensual creatures, scroungers and gluttons who lived for the pleasures of the moment, picking up the crumbs that fell from the giant's table.

Marjolin was working for Gavard, content to have nothing to do but listen to an endless stream of stories from his boss. Cadine still sold her little bouquets and was resigned to the griping of Mère Chantemesse. Their childhood continued, shamelessly and indulgently, laced with their innocent vices. They had become a kind of vegetation growing up from the greasy pavement of Les Halles, where even in the best of weather the mud was always black and mucky. The girl at sixteen and the boy at eighteen still retained the great impudence of the young, who can openly urinate on fences.

But troubling dreams stirred in Cadine as she walked down the street twisting the stems of her violets. Marjolin also felt an uneasiness that he could not explain. Sometimes he slipped away from his little girl, skipped their meanderings, even missed some of the parties, to instead go and look at Madame Quenu through the charcuterie window. She was so beautiful, so full, so round that it made him feel good just to look. He experienced a sense of gratification whenever he saw her, as though he had just eaten something delicious or had a good drink. And when he left, he had a hunger and a thirst to see her again. This had gone on for several months.

At first he had shot her the kind of respectful glances he gave to the window displays of grocery stores and markets for salt-cured foods. But then, around the time they started raiding the market for food, when he looked at her he started to imagine taking her thick waist and ample arms into his arms, as though plunging his hands into an olive barrel or a cask of dried apples.

For some time, Marjolin had seen Beautiful Lisa every morning. She walked past Gavard's shop and paused to chat with the poultry seller. She told him that she did her own shopping to make sure she got good prices. But the truth was that she was trying to get Gavard to trust her. In her charcuterie he was very guarded, but in his own shop he held court and told anyone anything they wanted to know. Through him, she believed, she could find out what went on at Monsieur Lebigre's, for she had little confidence in her own secret police, Mademoiselle Saget. The information she got from this horrible old gossip troubled her deeply.

Two days after her scene with Quenu she returned from her shopping trip looking very pale. She motioned for her husband to follow her into the dining room. After shutting the door she asked, “Is your brother trying to send us to the gallows? Why did you hide information from me?”

Quenu swore that he knew nothing. He made a solemn declaration that he no longer went to Monsieur Lebigre's and was never going back there.

But she shrugged and said, “That's a good thing unless you want to lose your head. Florent is mixed up in something bad. I can feel it. I've learned just enough to figure out where he's headed. He'll go back to the penal colony, you know.”⁷

After a silence she continued in a calmer voice, “What a fool. Here he was sitting pretty. He could have become an upstanding citizen again. He was surrounded by good role models. But no, there's something in his blood. He's going to break his neck with his politics. I want all this to stop. Do you understand, Quenu? I've warned you.”

She said the last words with particular emphasis. Quenu lowered his head, awaiting sentencing.

“First of all, tell him that he can no longer eat here. It's enough he gets a place to sleep. But he earns money, and he can feed himself.”

He started to protest, but she cut him off with “Fine, choose between him or us. I swear to you, I will leave and take my daughter with me if he stays. Do you want me to finally say it? He's a man who is capable of anything, and he has come here to wreck our home. But I'll fix that, I promise you. You've heard me. It's him or me.”

She left her husband silenced and went back into the charcuterie, where she served up a pound of foie gras with the friendly smile of the neighborhood charcuterie woman.

Gavard, in the course of a political discussion that she had slyly drawn out, had gotten worked up enough to tell her that she would soon see everything razed to the ground, that it would take only two men of real determination such as her brother-in-law and himself, to burn her shop down. This was the bad thing that she had told Quenu that Florent was mixed up in. There was some conspiracy to which the poultry man was constantly alluding with a furtive look and a sly grin, from which he hoped a great deal would be inferred. She could picture a detachment of sergents de ville forcing their way into the charcuterie, seizing the three of them— herself, Quenu, and Pauline—and throwing them into a dungeon.

That night at dinner she was an iceberg. She didn't even serve Florent, and several times she commented, “Isn't it funny how much bread we seem to be going through lately?”

Eventually Florent understood, feeling like a poor relative being shown the door. For the past few months Lisa had been dressing him in Quenu's old pants and coats, and since he was as skinny as his brother was fat, the clothes looked very odd on him. She had also been giving him Quenu's old linens, handkerchiefs mended in dozens of spots, ripped towels, sheets good only to be torn into dishrags, threadbare shirts stretched out by his brother's potbelly and so short that they would have worked better as jackets. Nor did he sense the warmth of earlier times. The entire household shrugged their shoulders at him, exactly the way they had seen Lisa do. Auguste and Augustine would turn their backs on him, and little Pauline, with the viciousness of a child, ridiculed him for the spots on his clothes and the holes in his linen. For the last few days mealtime had been particularly painful. He would see both mother and daughter glaring at him so hard while he cut a piece of bread that he didn't dare to eat it. Quenu gazed at his plate and avoided looking up so that he would not have to participate.

What was tormenting Florent was that he did not know how to leave. For nearly a week he had been working on a sentence in his mind, something that would say that he would take his meals elsewhere. But this gentle soul lived so far from reality that he feared that his brother and sister-in-law would be hurt if he no longer ate with them. It had taken him more than two months to notice Lisa's raw hostility, and he still worried that he was misreading her. He still thought that she was very kind to him. So unconcerned for his own well-being was he that it could no longer be counted as a virtue. It was more a matter of supreme indifference, a lack of personality. Never, even when he saw himself being pushed out little by little, did he think for an instant about the money left behind by old Gradelle or the arrangement Lisa had made for his money.

He had his budget all mapped out. With the money that Madame Verlaque left him from his salary and the thirty francs for lessons from the Beautiful Norman, he calculated that he could spend eighteen sous on his lunch and twenty-six sous on his dinner. That was sufficent. Finally, one morning, he dared to make his move. He used the excuse of the new classes he was teaching, saying they made it impossible to be at the charcuterie at mealtimes. He blushed while telling the clumsy lie. Then he began making excuses.

“It's not what I want, but the child is only available at those times. Oh, it's not a problem. I'll grab a bite somewhere. I'll come back later to say good night.”

Beautiful Lisa remained ice cold. That made Florent even more uneasy. She had not wanted to send him away, preferring to wait until he gave up, so that she would not feel as though she had done anything wrong. Now he was leaving and it was good riddance, so she didn't want to do anything that might make him change his mind. But Quenu, a little upset, blurted out, “Don't worry, eat outside if you want. You know we wouldn't send you away, for God's sake. We can dine together on Sundays sometimes.”

Florent left quickly and with a heavy heart. After he was gone Beautiful Lisa did not dare to reproach her husband for the Sunday invitation. The victory was still hers, and, breathing more easily in the light oak dining room, she was suddenly overcome with a desire to burn sugar in the room to drive off the odor she thought she could smell of perverse skinniness.

But she remained on the defensive. By the end of the week her thoughts were even more disturbing. Never seeing Florent except occasionally in the evening, she imagined terrible goings-on. Was there a sinister machine of some kind being built upstairs in Augustine's bedroom or maybe some kind of signals being sent from the balcony to a network of roadblocks throughout the neighborhood? Gavard had become broody and would respond only with nods of his head, and he left Marjolin to run his shop for days at a time.

Beautiful Lisa resolved to find out what was going on. She knew that Florent had a day off and planned to spend it with Claude Lantier going to Nanterre to see Madame François. Since he would be leaving in the morning and not returning until the evening it occurred to Lisa that it was an opportunity to invite Gavard to dinner, where he would babble freely with food in front of his belly. But she did not run into the poultry man anywhere all morning. She went back to the market in the afternoon.

Marjolin was by himself in the shop. He snoozed for hours, recuperating from his long walks. His usual position was at the back of the shop with his legs up on another chair and his head leaning against a buffet. In the wintertime he was dazzled by the displays of game. Deer with their heads hanging down, their front legs broken and twisted around their necks, larks strung in garlands around the shop like necklaces worn by savages, large rust-colored partridges, bronze-gray waterfowl, grouse that arrived from Russia packed in straw and charcoal, and pheasants magnificent in their scarlet hoods, their throats of green satin and enameled gold mantles with their flaming tails flaring out like evening gowns. All these feathers made him think of Cadine and nights spent together in the soft depths of baskets.

On this particular day Beautiful Lisa found Marjolin sitting amid the poultry. It was a damp afternoon, but little puffs of air passed down the narrow lanes of the market. She had to bend down to catch sight of him because he was spread out in the back of the shop in a display of raw meat. Fat geese hung from spiked bars above him. The hooks plunged into bleeding wounds in their long stiff necks, and their enormous red bellies under fine down ballooned out like obscene nudes as white as linen from tail to wings.

Gray-backed rabbits also hung from the bar, their legs spread as though about to take some impressive leap and their ears lying flat with tufts of white fur at the tail. Their heads showed sharp teeth and terrified eyes vivid with the laughing grimace of dead animals. Plucked chickens showed fleshy breasts on the display table, where they were stretched tight on skewers, while pigeons, pressed together on a wicker frame, exposed the tender naked skin of newborn babies. Tough-skinned ducks splayed their webbed feet. Three turkeys with blue shadows like a shaved face and their throats sewn up with needle and thread slept on their backs on the fans of their wide black tails. Giblets were placed in plates next to them—livers, gizzards, necks, feet, and wings—and in a nearby oval bowl sat a skinned and gutted rabbit with a blood-spattered head, its four limbs stretched wide apart, and the cavity was spread to reveal the two kidneys inside. A trickle of blood ran down to the tail and fell drop by drop, staining the pale ceramic tiles.

Marjolin had not even troubled himself to wipe the carving board, near which a few severed rabbits' paws were left. His eyes were half closed, and he was surrounded on the shop's three shelves with more dead birds piled up, birds dressed up with paper collars and such a repetitive pattern of folded thighs and plump breasts that it confounded the eye. Against the background of all this food, with his well-built, fair body, his cheeks and hands, his powerful neck, and his head of red hair, Marjolin resembled the glorious turkeys and round bellies of the fat geese.

The moment he saw Beautiful Lisa he jumped out of the chair, blushing at having been caught loafing. He was very shy and awkward in her presence, and when she asked if Monsieur Gavard was there he stammered, “No. I don't know. He was here a minute ago. Now he's gone.”

Lisa smiled. She liked him. Her hand, which was hanging at her side, lightly brushed something warm and she emitted a little cry. Under the display table, rabbits in boxes were stretched out, sniffing her skirts. “Oh,” she said, laughing, “your rabbits are tickling me.”

She bent down to pet a white rabbit, which immediately hid in the corner of the box. Then she straightened up and asked, “Will Monsieur Gavard be back soon?”

Marjolin again said that he didn't know. His hands were shaking slightly. He continued in an uncertain voice, “He might be in the storeroom. I think he told me he was going down there.”

“Then I should wait for him. Maybe you could let him know that I'm here. Or should I go down myself? Yes, that's a good idea. I've been wanting to see the storeroom for five years now. Would you take me down and show me everything?”

His face was turning bright red. He hurried out of the shop, walking very fast in front of her, leaving the store unattended and repeating, “Certainly, whatever you'd like, Madame Lisa.”

But, once down below, the beautiful charcuterie woman could not breathe in the black air. She remained on the bottom step and looked up at the vaulted ceiling in stripes of red and white brick slightly arched between iron ribs supported by short columns. What stopped her there was a warm, penetrating smell, the breath of live animals prickling her nose and throat.

“It smells awful down here,” she muttered. “It can't be healthy to live here.”

“I feel fine,” said Marjolin, a bit surprised. “The smell isn't so bad once you get used to it. And it keeps you warm in the winter. You can be very comfortable here.”

She followed him, saying that the violent smell of poultry made her so sick that she would not be able to eat chicken for two months.

The storage spaces, the narrow stalls in which the merchants kept their livestock, ran back in straight, even rows, separated from one another at right angles. The gaslights were few, and the rows slept, silent as a village when everyone is in bed. Marjolin had Lisa touch the mesh covering the iron ribs. As they passed through a row, she read the names of the owners on blue plaques.

“Monsieur Gavard is just at the end,” said Marjolin. They turned to the left and came to a dead end at a dank cave into which no light penetrated. Gavard was not there. “No matter,” said Marjolin. “I can still show you all our animals. I have the keys.”

Beautiful Lisa followed him into the heavy darkness. Then suddenly she found him wrapped in her skirts. She thought she must have walked too fast and run into him, so she backed up and asked, “Do you think I'm going to be able to see your animals in this dark box?”

At first he didn't answer, and then he stammered that there was always a bit of candle in the storage place. But he was taking forever to open it. He couldn't find the keyhole. As she helped him with it, she could feel hot breath on her neck. Finally when he got the door open and lit the candle, she could see that he was shaking so much that she said, “You silly thing, why are you getting so worked up just because the door won't open? You're just a little girl with large fists.”

She walked into the stall. Gavard rented two compartments, which he had made into a little chicken range by removing the partition. The larger birds—geese, turkeys, and ducks—were waddling around in bird droppings. The three shelves above had flat open boxes full of hens and rabbits. The chicken wire was thick with dust and festooned with cobwebs, so that the stall appeared to be furnished with gray blinds. Rabbit urine had corroded the lower panels, and white splashes of bird droppings spotted the board.

But Lisa did not want to hurt Marjolin by showing any more disgust. She stuck her fingers into the little cages and expressed sympathy for the wretched hens cooped up in a space too small for them even to stand up in. She petted a duck that was cowering in a corner with a broken leg. Marjolin told her that they were planning to kill it tonight in case it died during the night.

“But what,” she asked, “do they do for food?”

He explained that poultry won't eat in the dark. The merchants have to light a candle and wait there until they are finished.

“It's fun,” he continued. “I stand there holding a light for hours. You should see the way they peck at each other. Then, when I cover the candle with my hand, they're all left with their necks sticking out, as though the sun had set. But you can't simply leave them a light and go away. One woman, Mère Palette—you know her— nearly burned the whole place down the other day. A hen must have knocked a candle onto some straw.”

“Oh well,” said Lisa, “that's not too bad, if they have to have their chandeliers lit for each meal.”

That made him laugh. She had stepped out of the stall, wiping her feet and lifting her skirt slightly to keep it out of the filth. Marjolin blew out the candle and shut the door. She was afraid to walk in the dark with this large boy at her side and went ahead of him so that she wouldn't end up with him in her skirts again. When he caught up to her, she said, “I'm glad I saw it. You'd never guess some of the things that are under Les Halles. Thank you for showing me. I have to go now—quickly. They'll wonder what happened to me at the shop. If you see Monsieur Gavard, tell him that I'd like to talk to him as soon as possible.”

“But he's probably at the slaughterhouse,” he said. “We could go see, if you want.”

She did not answer, overcome by the warm air that hit her face. It was turning her pink, and her stretched bodice, usually lifeless, was starting to heave. It worried her for some reason, made her feel anxious, to hear Marjolin's quickening footsteps behind her. He was panting. She stood aside to let him pass her. The village with its darkened rows was still asleep. Lisa noticed that her companion was taking the long way around. When they came out, opposite the railway line, he said that he wanted to show her the tracks, and they stood there a moment looking at the wide planks of fencing. He offered to lead her along the track, but she declined, saying that it was not worth the trouble. And she had a good idea of what it looked like from where they were.

On the way back they ran into Mère Palette in front of her storage. A frenzy of wings and paws could be heard inside. After she untied the last knot the long necks of the geese acted like springs and flipped open the cover. The frightened geese made their escape, their heads plunged forward with a whistling and a quacking that filled the darkness of the cellar with cacophonous music. Lisa could not help laughing, despite the exclamations of the old poultry seller, who in her despair was cursing like a wagoneer while dragging by the neck two geese she had managed to recapture. Marjolin had run off to catch a third goose. He could be heard scrambling through the rows, outwitted by the bird but enjoying the chase. Then there was the sound of a scuffle at the far end, and he returned carrying the goose. Mère Palette, an old, yellowing woman, clutched the bird in her arms and held it against her stomach in the classical pose of Leda.⁸

“I'll tell you,” she said, “you should have been there … the other day I got into it with one of them. I had my knife on me, and I slit its throat.”

Marjolin was winded. When they got to the stone blocks where the slaughtering was done, the light was better and Lisa noticed that he was soaking with sweat and his eyes had a glow she had never seen before. Usually he lowered his eyes in her presence like a girl. She found him particularly handsome the way he was, with his broad shoulders and large pink face framed by his mop of light-colored curls. She looked at him pleasantly, with that look of appreciation that can be offered risk-free to boys who are too young. He was starting to feel shy again.

“As you can see, Monsieur Gavard is not here and you are wasting my time,” she said.

He explained to her, in rapid words, the process of slaughter, the five enormous stone slabs, that went down the side of rue Rambuteau under the yellow lights of the gas burners. At one end a woman was bleeding chickens, which led Marjolin to comment that she was plucking the poultry while it still had some life in it, which made it easier to pluck. Then he wanted her to take handfuls of feathers from the stone slabs. There were piles of feathers everywhere. He explained that they were sorted and sold for as much as nine sous a pound depending on the quality. He also told her to sink her arms into the large baskets of down. Then he turned on the water faucets installed in every pillar.

His deluge of facts was relentless. The blood ran along the benches and made puddles on the flagstones. Every two hours cleaners came and scrubbed away the blood stains with thick brushes. When Lisa leaned over the opening of the drain, there was another lengthy explanation, this time of how the water flooded the cellar through this hole on rainy days. One time it had actually risen a foot and they'd had to move all the poultry to the other end of the cellar, where it sloped upward. Recalling the outcry of the panicking animals made him laugh all over again.

But after that he ran dry unable to think of another point of interest. Then he remembered the ventilator. He led her down to the end, and when she looked up, as instructed, she saw inside one of the corner turrets a ventilation pipe by which the foul air escaped. Then Marjolin fell speechless in this pestilent stinking corner with the alkaline crudeness of guano. But he seemed alert, even invigorated. His nostrils quivered and his breathing grew heavy, as though he were regaining his nerve. For the past quarter hour he had been in the basement with Beautiful Lisa, intoxicated by the warmth and scent of live animals. He was no longer the shy young thing; the scent of chickens had put him in heat under the vaulting of the black, shadowy ceiling.

“You know,” she said, “you're a nice boy to have shown me all this. When you come to the charcuterie, I'll give you something.”

She held his chin in her hand, the way she often did, and did not notice that he was no longer a little boy. Actually, she was a little affected, stirred by this stroll through the basement, and she was savoring a gentle emotion—nothing inappropriate and of no real significance. Maybe she inadvertently left her hand just a little longer than usual under his young chin that was so supple to the touch.

For whatever reason, responding to this caress, his instincts took over, and, shooting a glance out of the corners of his eyes to make sure that no one was watching, he summoned his strength and threw himself on Beautiful Lisa with the force of a bull. He grabbed her by the shoulders, and he pushed her backward into a basket of feathers, where she tumbled in a heap, her skirts up to her knees.

He was going to take her, the same way he had taken Cadine, with the brutality of an animal sating himself, when without making a sound but pale from the suddenness of the assault, Beautiful Lisa sprang out of the basket in a single bound. Raising her arm the way she had seen them do in the slaughterhouse, with her fine female fist she knocked Marjolin unconscious with one blow between the eyes. He fell over backward and cracked his head against the corner of a stone slab. At that very moment a rooster let fly in the darkness a long raucous crow.

Beautiful Lisa remained cool and collected. Her lips were pursed, and her bosom was back to the mute round shape of a belly. The heavy sounds of Les Halles were rumbling overhead. The sounds of the street came through the grates on rue Rambuteau and cut through the thick basement silence.

She reflected on how it was only the sheer power of her arms that had saved her. She shook off a few feathers that were still stuck to her skirt. Then, afraid to be found there, she left without looking at Marjolin. She was relieved to be lit by sunlight from the grates as she climbed the stairs.

Perfectly calm and a little pale, she went back to the charcuterie.

“You were gone a long time,” Quenu said.

“I couldn't find Gavard. I looked everywhere,” she said calmly. “We'll have to have the leg of lamb without him.”

She refilled the crock of saindoux and cut off some chops for her friend Madame Taboureau, who had sent her maid to pick them up. The blows of the cleaver reminded her of Marjolin down in the basement. But she felt no guilt. She had behaved as a decent woman should. She wasn't going to upset herself for a ragamuffin like that. She had her husband and daughter to think of.

But when she looked at Quenu, she did notice the coarseness of the reddish skin on the back of his neck and his clean-shaven chin as rough and wrinkly as knotty wood. The neck and chin of the other one had seemed like pink velvet.

It was better not to think about such things. She was never going to touch him again. He imagined things that were not possible. It had been a little treat that she had allowed herself and now regretted—children grew up much too fast these days.

As the color came back to her cheeks, Quenu thought she was looking “pretty damn good.” He sat down next to her at the counter and said, “You ought to go out more often. It agrees with you. Maybe we should go to the theater some evening to the Gaîté,⁹ where Madame Taboureau saw that play she liked.”

Lisa smiled and said, “We'll see.” Then she disappeared again.

Quenu thought about how nice it had been of her to run after that fellow Gavard. He did not notice her go upstairs. She went to Florent's room with the key that hung on a nail in the kitchen. She couldn't count on the poultry man now, so she hoped to find some clue in Florent's room. She paced slowly, looking at the bed, the mantel, peering into every corner. The window that led to the narrow balcony was open, and the budding pomegranate plant was bathed in the golden dust of sunset. It occurred to her that it was as though the shopgirl had never left the room and had slept there the night before. There was no male scent to the room. This surprised her. She had expected to find some suspicious locked boxes or trunks. She fingered Augustine's summer dress, still hanging on the wall.

Finally she sat at the table and started reading a piece of paper half filled with writing. The word “revolution” turned up twice. Frightened, she opened the drawer. It was full of paper. But, faced with this not-very-well-concealed secret in this sad light-wood table, her honesty got the better of her. She lingered for a moment over the papers, trying to read them without actually touching them. And then a finch, the sunlight suddenly striking its cage, let out a shriek, and Beautiful Lisa shuddered. She closed the drawer. It was very bad, what she was doing.

Standing by the window, she was wondering if she should ask the advice of that wise man, the Abbé Roustan, when she noticed a group of people on the street below gathered around a stretcher. Though it was nearly nightfall, she could clearly make out Cadine in the center of the crowd, in tears, while Florent and Claude, their feet covered in white dust, were on the sidewalk discussing something in great agitation. Surprised that they were back already, she hurried down the stairs.

She had barely made it to the counter when Mademoiselle Saget came in and said, “It's that poor Marjolin. They just found him in the cellar with his head split open … Don't you want to come look, Madame Quenu?”

She crossed the street to see Marjolin. The young man lay stretched out and pale with his eyes closed, one lock of his hair caked with blood. The crowd agreed that it wasn't a big thing, that the fault was his, the ne'er-do-well, the way he was always carrying on in the cellars. They guessed that he must have tried to jump over one of the slaughtering blocks, one of his favorite games, and he'd fallen and smacked his head on the stone. Pointing at the crying Cadine, Mademoiselle Saget murmured, “She probably shoved him. They're always together in some corner.”

Revived by the fresh air, Marjolin opened his startled eyes wide. He looked up at everyone, and then, running across Lisa's face bent over him, he smiled sweetly with a humble, submissive look. It was as though he did not remember what had happened. Lisa was relieved and said that he should be taken to the hospital immediately. She would visit him there with cookies and oranges. Marjolin's head fell back, and the stretcher was carried away. Cadine followed it with her tray still hanging from her neck, the little bouquets of violets on the carpet of green moss catching her warm teardrops. But, burning with grief, she gave no thought to her flowers.

As Lisa was going back to the charcuterie, she overheard Claude exchange a handshake with Florent and bid him good-bye, saying, “The damn brat, he ruined my day. Still, we had a hell of a good time, didn't we?”

Claude and Florent had returned weary but happy. They carried with them the pleasant scent of open air. By daybreak that morning Madame François had already sold all her vegetables. The three of them went to get her wagon at the Compas d'Or on rue Montorgueil. Even in the center of Paris this was a foretaste of the countryside. Behind Restaurant Philippe,¹⁰ whose ground floor was done in gilded wood, was a farmyard, bustling and dirty, redolent with the smell of hot dung and fresh straw. Clusters of chickens were pecking at the soft ground. Stairways, balconies, and broken roofing were green with mold and leaned against the house next door. At the back, under a crudely made shelter, Balthazar was waiting, already harnessed and eating oats from a bag tied to his halter. He trotted slowly down rue Montorgueil, pleased to be returning to Nanterre so soon. But he wasn't hauling an empty cart. Madame François had made an arrangement with the company that cleaned Les Halles. Twice a week she carted off a load of leaves pitchforked from the trash heaps scattered around the streets of the market. It made excellent compost.

In very little time the cart was loaded to overflowing. Claude and Florent stretched out leisurely on the thick bed of greens. Madame François took the reins and Balthazar shuffled off at his slow pace, his head slightly bowed with the effort of pulling so many people.

The outing had been planned for a long time. The woman liked the two men and laughed easily and promised them an omelette au lard¹¹ the likes of which could not be found in that “pigsty called Paris.” They savored this lazy day, not yet lit by the sun. Far away, Nanterre was a paradise that they were about to enter.

“I hope you're comfortable,” said Madame François as she turned into rue du Pont-Neuf.

Claude swore that it was “as soft as a bridal bed.” The two of them lay there on their backs, arms folded behind their heads and gazing up at the sky, where the stars were beginning to lose their glow. They kept silent as they rolled along rue de Rivoli, waiting until there were no more buildings in sight. They just listened to the kind woman in the front talking in a soft voice to Balthazar. “Don't strain yourself, my old friend. We're not in any hurry. We'll get there eventually.”

Along the Champs-Elysées, where the painter saw only the tops of trees on both sides and a broad green swath of the Tuileries Garden at the end, he woke up and began talking to himself. As they passed rue de Roule, he looked down the street and could see one of the side doors to Saint Eustache, which could be seen from a long distance under the giant curve of one of the covered alleyways. He kept returning to the subject of the church as he spoke, seeing it as a point of great symbolic value.

“It's an odd juxtaposition,” he said. “That section of the church framed in the avenue of cast iron. One kills the other. Iron will kill off stone, and the time is near … Florent, do you believe in coincidences? I don't think it was merely a desire for symmetry that brought one of Saint Eustache's rosette windows into alignment with Les Halles like this. Don't you see the message? It's modern art, realism or naturalism—whatever you want to call it—springing up in the face of the old art. Don't you think so?”

Since Florent didn't answer, he went on, “This church is an architectural bastard. It houses the death throes of the Middle Ages together with the baby gurgles of the Renaissance. Have you noticed the kind of churches they build nowadays? They could be anything—a library, an observatory, a pigeon coop, barracks, but certainly no one could be persuaded that God dwells in them. The masons of the Lord are dead, and the wise would stop building these ugly stone carcasses in which no one can live … Since the beginning of the century only one original building has been erected, only one that is not a copy from somewhere else but has sprung naturally out of the soil of our times, and that is Les Halles. Do you see it, Florent? A brilliant work that is a shy foretaste of the twentieth century. That is why it frames Saint Eustache. There stands the church with its rosette window, empty of the faithful, while Les Halles spreads out around it, buzzing with life. That's what I think anyway, my good friend.”

Madame François laughed. “You know, Monsieur Claude, whoever made your tongue certainly earned their money. Balthazar is turning his ears to listen to you. Giddyap, Balthazar!”

The wagon slowly made its way along. The avenue was deserted at this hour of the morning, with its empty steel chairs lining both sides and its lawns broken up by bushes in the bluish shadows of the trees. At the traffic circle a man and a woman on horseback passed them at an easy trot. Florent, who was using a bundle of cabbage leaves for a pillow, was still staring up at the sky, where the rosy light of morning was spreading. From time to time he closed his eyes to let the morning freshness cool his face. He was so happy to be leaving Les Halles and moving into clean air that he could barely listen to what was being said.

“It's fine for those who want to encase art in a toy box,” Claude continued after a brief silence. “It's a big thing now to say that art cannot live with science. The products of industry kill poetry. Then all those fools start crying into their flowers as though anyone were trying to harm them. It nauseates me. I would love to answer those idiots with art that was truly outrageous. It would feel good to upset them. You know what my best work has been so far, the one that gives me the greatest satisfaction when I look back? This is a great story … Last year on Christmas Eve, I was staying with my aunt Lisa, and that moronic apprentice—you know him— Auguste, was busy arranging the window display. He was driving me absolutely crazy with the way he was doing the window. I insisted that he step back and let me try to do it, like it was a painting. It had all the powerful colors—the red of stuffed tongues, the yellow of jambonneaux, blue paper shreds, pink where things had been cut into, green from sprigs of heather, and most especially the black of boudin, a spectacular black that I have never been able to capture again. And then the caul fat, the sausages, the andouille, the breaded pigs' feet, gave me a subtle range of grays.

“So I made a virtual work of art. I took the platters and the dishes, canning jars and crocks. I carefully placed the colors in an astonishing still life bursting with color, ingeniously running up and down the color scale. Hungry flames shot out of the red tongues, and the boudin mingled with the clear tones of sausage, hinting at a colossal bellyache. You see, I had painted the gluttony of Christmas Eve dinner,¹² the midnight hour for overeating, the gorging of stomachs inspired by the singing of carols.

“Above, a giant turkey was showing its white breast, marbled under the skin by the dark splotches of truffles. It was both barbaric and very fine, like a vision of a belly but with a touch of cruelty, such an outburst of parody that a crowd gathered around the window, troubled by this brightly burning display of colors. When my aunt Lisa came out of the kitchen, she panicked, thinking for an instant that I had somehow set all the fat in the shop on fire. The turkey struck her as particularly obscene. She threw me out and had Auguste go back to arranging the window and displaying his stupidity. Those backward creatures will never grasp the power of a touch of red next to a touch of gray … Oh, well, that was my masterpiece. I've never done better.”

He fell silent, smiling and withdrawing into his reminisces. The wagon reached the Arc de Triomphe. Gusts of wind raced through the open expanse, blowing through all the streets that emptied into the enormous plaza. Florent sat up and inhaled the first scents of country grass. He turned his back on Paris and strained for a glimpse of country meadows. When they came up to rue de Longchamp, Madame François pointed out the spot where she had picked him up. That turned him introspective. He studied her pensively. She seemed so healthy and calm with her slightly outstretched arms working the reins. She was more beautiful than Beautiful Lisa, with a kerchief over her head, her ruddy complexion, and her look of plain, outspoken kindness. When she clicked her tongue softly, Balthazar perked up his ears and picked up his step.

When they got to Nanterre, the cart turned left down a narrow lane running between walls and stopped at a dead end. It was what she called the end of the world. First the cabbage leaves had to be unloaded. Claude and Florent did not want to bother the garden boy who was busy planting lettuce. They each took a pitchfork and started hurling the load onto the compost heap. It was fun. Claude particularly liked the compost. Vegetable peelings, Les Halles mud, the trash from that giant table, still alive and being returned to the place where new vegetables would grow to warm a new generation of turnips and cabbage. They grew into beautiful produce that was laid out on Paris pavements. Paris rotted everything and sent it back to the earth, which tirelessly revived life from the dead.

“Look,” said Claude, thrusting in his pitchfork one last time, “there's a stump of cabbage I recognize. This is at least the tenth time it's sprouted back in that corner by the apricot tree.”

That made Florent laugh, but he became serious again very soon, walking slowly around the garden while Claude sketched the stable and Madame François prepared lunch. The garden was a long strip of land divided down the middle by a path. It rose gradually and at the top, if you looked up, you could see the stumpy barracks of Mont-Valérien. Lush hedges separated the garden from other plots of land. Thick tall walls of hawthorn drew a green curtain around the garden so impenetrable that of all the neighboring land, only Mont-Valérien gave a curious glance into Madame François's domain. This unseen countryside offered peace. Between the four hedges the May sunlight struck the entire length of the garden, warming it in a silence that buzzed with insects. Certain cracking noises and gentle sighs made it seem that you could hear the vegetables growing. The beds of spinach and sorrel, the rows of radishes, turnips, and carrots, the tall potato plants and cabbages, formed regular lines along the black earth, shaded green by tree branches.

Farther away were lettuce, onion, leeks, and celery in rows as tidy as soldiers on parade. The peas and beans were beginning to unfurl their thin stems, creeping up the forest of sticks that by June would become stalks thick with leaves. There was not one weed in sight. The garden looked like two parallel carpets, green patterns on a reddish background, carefully brushed each morning. Borders of thyme made gray fringes on the two sides of the path.

Florent paced back and forth in the perfume of sun-warmed thyme. He was deeply contented in the wholesome and peaceful earth. For about a year now the only vegetables he had seen were bruised from bouncing in wagons, yanked from the earth the night before and still bleeding. Now he delighted in finding them where they belonged, living peacefully in the earth, their every limb thriving. The cabbages looked stout and prosperous, the carrots were merry, and the lettuces were lined up in lazy nonchalance. The Les Halles that he had left that morning seemed to him to be a sprawling mortuary, a place for the dead scattered with the corpses of the once living, a charnel house with the stench of decomposition.

His steps began to slow down, and he rested a while in Madame François's garden, as though resting from a long march through deafening noise and foul smells. The ruckus and the sickening humidity of the fish pavilion began to leave him. He was reborn in the fresh air. Claude was right: everything in Les Halles was in the throes of death. The earth was life, the eternal cradle, the health of the world.

“The omelette's ready!” Madame François shouted.

With all three seated in the kitchen, the door open to the sun, they ate so merrily that Madame looked at Florent with wonder, saying with every mouthful, “How you've changed. You look ten years younger. It's that vile Paris that makes you so somber. But now I see some sunlight in your eyes. You see, it's no good to live in big cities. You ought to come live here.”

Claude laughed, insisting that Paris was wonderful. He stood by his city down to its very bricks, but he also had a fondness for the countryside. In the afternoon Florent and Madame François were alone in the garden. They were seated on the ground in a corner that was planted with fruit trees, and had a serious chat. She gave him advice with a sense of friendship that seemed tender and maternal. She asked him a thousand questions about his life and his plans for the future. She told him that she was always available if he needed her. He was very moved by this. No woman had ever spoken to him in this way. To him she was like a robust healthy plant that had grown the same way as her vegetables in the garden. He thought of the fair women of Les Halles, of the Lisas and the Normans, like dubious meat that had been dressed for the window. Here he inhaled into his lungs a few hours of complete well-being, free of the food smells that had driven him mad. He was resuscitated in the countryside like the cabbage that Claude said kept sprouting back from the ground.

At about five o'clock they said their good-byes to Madame François. They wanted to walk back. She went with them to the end of the lane and for a moment held Florent's hand in hers. “If you ever get sad, come and see me,” she said softly.

For a quarter of an hour Florent walked in silence, already growing sad, telling himself that he was leaving his health behind him. The route to Courbevoie was whitened by dust. They both enjoyed hiking the long distance, their thick shoes ringing on the hard earth. With every step little clouds of dust rose behind them. The rays came at an angle across the avenue, stretching out their two shadows, distorting them so that their heads stretched to the other side and hopped along the opposite sidewalk.

Claude, swinging his arms loosely, took long, regular strides and enjoyed watching their shadows, happily lost in their sway, which he further exaggerated by putting his shoulders into the rhythm.

Then, as though suddenly waking from a dream, he asked, “Do you know ‘The Battle of the Fat and the Thin’?”

Florent, caught by surprise, answered no. Claude excitedly praised this series of prints, pointing out favorite parts: the Fat, bursting from their enormity, prepare the evening glut, while the Thin, doubled over from hunger, look in from the street, stick figures filled with envy; then the Fat, seated at the table, cheeks overflowing, drive away a Thin who had the audacity to approach humbly, looking like a bowling pin among bowling balls.

Claude saw in these drawings the entire drama of mankind, and he took to classifying all people into the Thin and the Fat, two opposing groups, one devouring the other to grow plump and jolly. “You can bet,” he said, “that Cain was a Fat and Abel a Thin. And since that first killing, there have always been hungry Fats sucking the blood out of scanty eaters. It is a constant preying of the stronger on the weaker, each swallowing his neighbor and then finding himself swallowed in turn … So you see, my friend, watch out for the Fat.”

He fell silent for a moment, gazing at their two shadows as the setting sun stretched them ever longer. Then he murmured, “You and I, we belong to the Thin, you see. Tell me if people with flat stomachs like ours take up much sunlight.”

Florent looked at the two shadows and smiled. But Claude became angry. “If you think it's funny, you're wrong. I suffer a lot because I'm a Thin. If I were a Fat, I could paint when I felt like it, I would have a beautiful studio, I could sell my paintings for their weight in gold. Instead, I'm a Thin. I pour my soul out to produce things that only make the Fats shrug their shoulders. I'm sure I'll end up dying of it, my skin sticking to my bones and so flat that they could bury me between the covers of a book. And you! You're a Thin, a perfect example, the King of Thins. Remember your argument with the fish sellers? It was spectacular, all those giant bosoms flying at your spindly chest. They were acting out of instinct, hunting the Thin the way a cat chases a mouse. You see, Fats have such a distaste for Thins, they have to drive them out of their sight by either biting or kicking. That's why, if I were you, I'd be careful. The Quenus are Fats, and the Méhudins too. The fact is you are completely surrounded by Fats. That would worry me.”

“And what about Gavard and Mademoiselle Saget and your friend Marjolin?” Florent asked, still smiling.

“If you want, I can classify everyone we know for you,” answered Claude. “I've been keeping a file on them in my studio for a long time with notations on who belongs to which group. It's a whole chapter of natural history. Gavard is the kind of Fat who pretends to be a Thin. Not at all a rare species. Mademoiselle Saget and Madame Lecœur are a variety of Thin that should be feared— desperate, capable of doing anything to fatten themselves. My friends Marjolin, little Cadine, and La Sarriette are three Fats, still innocent with nothing more than the lovable hunger of youth. I've noticed that the Fat, if they're still young enough, can be charming creatures. Monsieur Lebigre, he's a Fat, isn't he? Then there are your political friends, who are mostly Thins—Charvet, Clémence, Logre, Lacaille. But I make an exception for that fat slob Alexandre and for the enormous Robine, who has caused me a lot of trouble.”

The painter continued in this vein from the pont de Neuilly to the Arc de Triomphe. He went back to some people to complete their portraits with a few characteristic brushstrokes. Logre was a Thin who carried his belly between his shoulders. Beautiful Lisa was all stomach and the Beautiful Norman, all bosom. Mademoiselle Saget had surely missed an opportunity sometime in her life to become fat, for she loathed the Fats, while still disdaining the Thins. As for Gavard, he was compromising his role as a Fat and would end up skinny as a bug.

“And Madame François?” asked Florent.

Claude was embarrassed by the question. He struggled for an answer and finally stuttered, “Madame François. Madame François. I don't know. I never had the urge to classify her. She's a fine woman, that's all. She's not a Fat, and she's not a Thin.”

They both laughed. They were now in front of the Arc de Triomphe. The sun, on the crest of the hills of Suresnes, was so low on the horizon that their shadows darkened the whiteness high up on the monument, even higher than the group of statues, like two black marks sketched in charcoal. This made Claude even more amused, and he waved his arms and bent his body. Then, as he started to walk again, he asked, “Did you notice? Just as the sun set, our two heads flew up to the sky.”

But Florent stopped laughing. Paris started to overtake him again, Paris that had cost him so many tears in Guiana and still frightened him. He lowered his head as he returned to that nightmare of mountains of food, but he carried within him the sweet and sad memories of the day in thyme-scented fresh air.