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By Root 1438 0

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.