The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [110]
Cadine and Marjolin stopped following Claude if they saw Mère Chantemesse in the distance, shaking a fist at them, angered at the sight of them dawdling around together. Claude would meet them across the street, where he found a glorious subject for a painting: vendors under their large faded blue, red, and violet umbrellas on poles. They were little knolls of color dotting the market, catching the fire of the setting sun in their domes, a sun that was fading away on the carrots and turnips. One vendor, an old hag about a hundred years old, was sheltering three scrawny lettuce heads under a sad worn-out pink silk umbrella.
One day while Léon, the apprentice at the Quenu-Gradelle charcuterie, was delivering a meat pie in the district, Cadine and Marjolin ran into him. They saw him raise the lid of a baking crock in a dark corner of rue de Mondétour and delicately extract a meatball with his fingers. They grinned at each other, for it had given them a fine and mischievous idea. Cadine devised a plan to fulfill one of her greatest ambitions. When she next met the boy with his baking dish, she was very friendly and she got him to offer her a little meatball. She licked her fingers and laughed. She might have been a little disappointed, for she had imagined that it would taste better than it did. But nevertheless, the boy amused her, dressed all in white like a girl on her way to communion but with a cunning, hungry face.
She invited him to a gigantic lunch that she was giving within the baskets of the butter market. The three of them—Marjolin, Léon, and herself—sealed themselves off from the world in four walls of wicker. The table was set on a large flat basket. There were pears, walnuts, fromage blanc,5 shrimp, fried potatoes, and radishes. The fromage blanc came from the fruit stand on rue de la Cossonnerie. It was a gift. A fry shop on rue de la Grande-Truanderie had sold them two sous' worth of fried potatoes on credit. The rest—the pears, the walnuts, the shrimp, the radishes— were stolen from all over Les Halles. It was a grand banquet. Léon could not rest until he had returned the favor, so he invited them to dinner in his room at one in the morning. He served cold boudin, slices of dried sausage, a piece of petit salé, some cornichons, and goose fat. The Quenu-Gradelle charcuterie had supplied everything. And that was not all. Fine suppers followed delicate lunches, invitations upon invitations. Three times a week they had intimate little parties amid the baskets or in the attic. On sleepless nights Florent could hear the muffled sounds of chewing and laughter until nearly daybreak.
The love between Cadine and Marjolin was still growing. They were completely content. He played the gentleman and took her dining in a private room, where they crunched on apples or celery hearts in some shadowy corner of a basement. One day he stole a pickled herring, which they savored on the roof of the seafood pavilion, sitting on the edge of a gutter. There was hardly a shadowy recess of Les Halles where they had not enjoyed their tender banquets. The neighborhood, the rows of shops full of fruits and cakes and tidbits, was no longer the forbidden paradise where they displayed their hunger and desire. They passed the displays with a hand stretched out to pilfer a prune, a fistful of cherries, or a chunk of cod. They also got supplies from within Les Halles, keeping an eye out in the rows of the market, grabbing anything that fell, sometimes helping make things fall with a nudge of the shoulder to a basket of merchandise.
But despite