The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [111]
Some weeks Cadine owed as much as twenty sous, a crushing debt that required the sale of an indeterminable number of bouquets of violets because she could not count on Marjolin for anything. But she had to repay Léon's hospitality. As a matter of fact, she was a little ashamed that she never had any meat to offer him. As for Léon, he stole entire hams. Normally he stashed everything inside his shirt. At night when he went upstairs, he pulled out of his chest pieces of sausage, slices of pâté de foie gras, and bundles of pork cracklings. There was no bread, and they did not drink. One evening Marjolin caught Léon kissing Cadine between two bites of food. It made him laugh. He could have knocked the little boy out with one punch. But he did not get jealous over Cadine. He treated her like an old friend.
Claude did not take part in these parties. He caught Cadine stealing a beet from a little straw-trimmed basket, and he boxed her ear and called her a bum. “That's that,” he then said. He could not help feeling a kind of admiration for these sensual creatures, scroungers and gluttons who lived for the pleasures of the moment, picking up the crumbs that fell from the giant's table.
Marjolin was working for Gavard, content to have nothing to do but listen to an endless stream of stories from his boss. Cadine still sold her little bouquets and was resigned to the griping of Mère Chantemesse. Their childhood continued, shamelessly and indulgently, laced with their innocent vices. They had become a kind of vegetation growing up from the greasy pavement of Les Halles, where even in the best of weather the mud was always black and mucky. The girl at sixteen and the boy at eighteen still retained the great impudence of the young, who can openly urinate on fences.
But troubling dreams stirred in Cadine as she walked down the street twisting the stems of her violets. Marjolin also felt an uneasiness that he could not explain. Sometimes he slipped away from his little girl, skipped their meanderings, even missed some of the parties, to instead go and look at Madame Quenu through the charcuterie window. She was so beautiful, so full, so round that it made him feel good just to look. He experienced a sense of gratification whenever he saw her, as though he had just eaten something delicious or had a good drink. And when he left, he had a hunger and a thirst to see her again. This had gone on for several months.
At first he had shot her the kind of respectful glances he gave to the window displays of grocery stores and markets for salt-cured foods. But then, around the time they started raiding the market for food, when he looked at her he started to imagine taking her thick waist and ample arms into his arms, as though plunging his hands into an olive barrel or a cask of dried apples.
For some time, Marjolin had seen Beautiful Lisa every morning. She walked past Gavard's shop and paused to chat with the poultry seller. She told him that she did her own shopping to make sure she got good prices. But the truth was that she was trying to get Gavard to trust her. In her charcuterie he was very guarded, but in his own shop he held court and told anyone anything they wanted to know. Through him, she believed, she could find out what went on at Monsieur Lebigre's, for she had little confidence in her own secret police, Mademoiselle Saget. The information she got from this horrible old gossip troubled her deeply.
Two days after her scene with Quenu she returned from her shopping trip looking very pale. She motioned for her husband to follow her into the