The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [101]
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