The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [121]
Farther away were lettuce, onion, leeks, and celery in rows as tidy as soldiers on parade. The peas and beans were beginning to unfurl their thin stems, creeping up the forest of sticks that by June would become stalks thick with leaves. There was not one weed in sight. The garden looked like two parallel carpets, green patterns on a reddish background, carefully brushed each morning. Borders of thyme made gray fringes on the two sides of the path.
Florent paced back and forth in the perfume of sun-warmed thyme. He was deeply contented in the wholesome and peaceful earth. For about a year now the only vegetables he had seen were bruised from bouncing in wagons, yanked from the earth the night before and still bleeding. Now he delighted in finding them where they belonged, living peacefully in the earth, their every limb thriving. The cabbages looked stout and prosperous, the carrots were merry, and the lettuces were lined up in lazy nonchalance. The Les Halles that he had left that morning seemed to him to be a sprawling mortuary, a place for the dead scattered with the corpses of the once living, a charnel house with the stench of decomposition.
His steps began to slow down, and he rested a while in Madame François's garden, as though resting from a long march through deafening noise and foul smells. The ruckus and the sickening humidity of the fish pavilion began to leave him. He was reborn in the fresh air. Claude was right: everything in Les Halles was in the throes of death. The earth was life, the eternal cradle, the health of the world.
“The omelette's ready!” Madame François shouted.
With all three seated in the kitchen, the door open to the sun, they ate so merrily that Madame looked at Florent with wonder, saying with every mouthful, “How you've changed. You look ten years younger. It's that vile Paris that makes you so somber. But now I see some sunlight in your eyes. You see, it's no good to live in big cities. You ought to come live here.”
Claude laughed, insisting that Paris was wonderful. He stood by his city down to its very bricks, but he also had a fondness for the countryside. In the afternoon Florent and Madame François were alone in the garden. They were seated on the ground in a corner that was planted with fruit trees, and had a serious chat. She gave him advice with a sense of friendship that seemed tender and maternal. She asked him a thousand questions about his life and his plans for the future. She told him that she was always available if he needed her. He was very moved by this. No woman had ever spoken to him in this way. To him she was like a robust healthy plant that had grown the same way as her vegetables in the garden. He thought of the fair women of Les Halles, of the Lisas and the Normans, like dubious meat that had been dressed for the window. Here he inhaled into his lungs a few hours of complete well-being, free of the food smells that had driven him mad. He was resuscitated in the countryside like the cabbage that Claude said kept sprouting back from the ground.
At about five o'clock they said their good-byes to Madame François. They wanted to walk back. She went with