The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [134]
She let the words hang on her lips an instant longer.
“He comes from the penal colony,” she finally said, lowering and deepening her awful voice.
All around her, cheeses were stinking. Huge blocks of butter were lined up on the two shelves at the back of the shop. Brittany butter was overflowing from its baskets. Normandy butters, wrapped in canvas, looked like models of stomachs onto which some sculptor had thrown wet cloths to keep them from drying out. Other blocks, already in use, cut with large knives into jagged rocks with valleys and crevices, looked like landslides on a mountain gilded by the pale evening light of autumn. Under the gray-veined red marble display counter were baskets of chalk white eggs, and in their crates on straw pallets were bondons, end to end, gourneys8 arranged on a platter like medals, in darker colors with greenish tints. But most of the cheeses were piled up on tables, and there, next to the one-pound packs of butter, was an enormous Cantal cheese on beet greens, looking as if it had been chopped with a hatchet, then a golden Chester and a Gruyère that looked like the fallen wheel of a primitive wagon. From Holland, there were balls like decapitated heads smeared with dried blood with the hard shell of an empty skull, which has given them the name “têtes-de-mort.”9
A Parmesan added an aromatic pungence to the heavy smell. Three Bries on round boards were sad as waning moons. Two very dry ones were full. The third, in its second quarter, was oozing, emitting a white cream that spread into a lake, flooding over the thin boards that had been put there to stem the flow. Port Saluts shaped like ancient discuses had the names of the producers inscribed around the perimeters. A Romantour, wrapped in silver paper, was reminiscent of a nougat bar, a sugary cheese that had strayed into the land of sour fermentation. The Roqueforts, under their glass bells, had a regal bearing, their fat, marbled faces veined in blue and yellow as though they were the victims of some disgraceful disease that strikes wealthy people who eat too many truffles. Alongside them were the goat cheeses, fat as a child's fist, hard and gray like the stones rams kick down a path when they lead the flock.
And then there were the smells: the pale yellow Mont d'Ors released a sweet fragrance, the Troyes, which were thick and bruised on the edges, were stronger-smelling than the others, adding a fetid edge like a damp cellar; the Camemberts, with their scent of decomposing game; the Neufchâtels, the Limbourgs, the Marolles, the Pont l'Evêques, each one playing its own shrill note in a composition that was almost sickening; the Livarots, dyed red, harsh and sulfurous in the throat; and the Olivets, wrapped in walnut leaves the way peasants cover rotting carcasses of animals lying by the side of the road in the heat of the sun with branches.
The warm afternoon had softened the cheeses, the mold on the rinds was melting and glazing in rich reds and greens of exposed copper, looking like badly healed wounds. The skin of an Olivet beneath an oak leaf lifted up and heaved like the chest of a sleeping man. A flood of life had made a hole in the Livarot, releasing a cluster of worms. And behind the scale in a narrow box was a Géromé seeded with anise that was so tainted that flies had dropped dead all around it on the veined red marble.
This Géromé was almost directly under the nose of Mademoiselle Saget. She recoiled and leaned her head against the large sheets of yellow and white paper that hung by a corner at the back of the shop.
“Yes,” repeated Mademoiselle Saget, grimacing with disgust, “He came from Cayenne … The Quenu-Gradelles don't have any reason to act so smug.”
But Madame Lecœur and La Sarriette were crying out in surprise, “That can't be true! What would he have been sent to prison for? Who would have thought