The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [100]
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