The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [103]
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