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By Root 1410 0

of a hairdresser's on rue Saint-Honoré. She was fraught with envy as she stared at the hair. High in the window hung manes and tails, unfastened plaits, cascading waves in three tiers, a flood of curls and silks with glowing red locks, thick blacks, and pale blonds, all the way to white hair for sexagenarian lovers. Lower in the window, discreet curls, tight ringlets, combed and scented locks and waves slept in cardboard boxes. In the middle of this picture, as if deep inside a chapel, under the fringe of springing curls, the bust of a woman was revolving. The woman wore a cherry red satin scarf fastened between her breasts with a copper brooch and a high bridal headdress adorned with orange blossom branches. She smiled with her doll mouth. Artificially long lashes stuck out stiffly from her light eyes. Her waxy cheeks and shoulders looked as though they had been smoked over gas. Cadine waited for her to come around again with that smile of hers, and her pleasure grew as the profile sharpened and the beautiful woman slowly turned from left to right.

Claude was indignant. He shook Cadine and demanded to know what she was doing in front of this trash, “this dead woman taken from a morgue.” He ranted against the nudity of the cadaver, the ugliness of this beauty, saying that women did not even wear their hair like that anymore.

But the little girl remained unconvinced and insisted that the woman was beautiful. Then, yanking herself away from the painter, who held her by one arm, and scratching her thicket of black hair with annoyance, she pointed out to him an enormous tail of red hair that had been torn from some sturdy, handsome horse and insisted that that was the kind of hair she wished for.

When all three of them—Claude, Cadine, Marjolin—went on their wanderings around Les Halles, they caught a glimpse of a steel giant at the end of every street. There were sudden glimpses at unexpected angles defining the horizon. Claude would turn around, especially on rue Montmartre after they had passed the church. Seen from a distance at the right angle, Les Halles filled him with enthusiasm. The broad arcade and a tall gaping doorway would appear and the pavilions crowded one on top of another with their two lines of roofs, their row of jalousies. It seemed that the profiles of houses and palaces had been superimposed to create an immense oriental metal structure, as delicate as the hanging gardens of Babylon, crisscrossed by descending terraces of roofs, passageways, and flying bridges.

They always went back to this, the city where they loved to roam, never straying more than a hundred yards from its center. They meandered back to the warm afternoon of Les Halles. Above, the shutters were closed, the blinds lowered. In the covered galleries, the air slept—an ash gray air with yellow stripes of sunlight cutting across it from the high windows. Soft sounds drifted through the market, the footsteps of busy pedestrians rang out from time to time from the pavement, while the porters, wearing their badges, sat in a row on the stone borders in the corners of the pavilions, taking off their heavy boots and tending their aching feet.

This was the peace of a colossus at rest, broken by the occasional cock's crow from out of the darkness of the poultry cellars. They would often go to see the wagons that came in the afternoon to collect the empty baskets and carry them back to the suppliers. The baskets, labeled with black letters and numbers, were piled into mountains in front of the pawnshops on rue Berger. The men built the piles systematically, and when a tower of baskets on a wagon was a story tall, the man on the ground balancing the baskets had to take a wide swing to toss them up to his coworker, who was perched on the top with his arms outstretched to catch them. Claude, who enjoyed displays of strength and dexterity, would spend hours watching the flight of wicker, laughing when an over-ambitious throw sent a basket soaring over the top and landing on the other side.

He also enjoyed the fruit market at the corner of rue Rambuteau