The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [102]
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.