The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [159]
Marjolin was carrying about fifty pigeons in a box. Claude and Florent followed him. He settled himself on the floor by one of the faucets, putting the box next to him and placing a fine screen on a wooden frame in a deep zinc tray. Then he began. He moved the knife quickly in his fingers, grabbing pigeons by the wings, knocking them out with a blow on the head from the knife handle, then sticking the blade into the throat. The pigeons shuddered for an instant, and their feathers rumpled as he laid them out in rows, their heads stuck out on the screen over the zinc tray into which, drop by drop, their blood fell. All of this was done in an even rhythm— the whack of the handle on the smashed little skull in measured time with the hand that took the live birds on one side and the hand that placed the dead ones on the other side.
Marjolin was going ever faster, enjoying the slaughter, crouching with gleaming eyes like a huge salivating mastiff. Finally he started laughing and sang, “Tic-tac, tic-tac, tic-tac,” accompanying the rhythm of his knife with the clicking of his tongue, making the sound of a head-grinding mill. The pigeons hung like swatches of silk.
“So you think that's funny, you big dummy,” said Cadine, laughing too. “They look so funny, those pigeons, when they pull in their head between their shoulders and the neck is gone. They're mean little things anyway. They'd bite you if they could.”
Marjolin laughed even louder at an ever more feverish pace. She added, “No matter how hard I try, I can't do it as fast as he does. One day he bled a hundred in ten minutes.”
The wooden frame was filling up, and they could hear the blood dropping into the zinc tray below. Then Claude by chance looked at Florent and saw how pale he had turned. He hurried him out and made him sit on the top step by the street.
“Look at you,” Claude said, clapping his hands. “There you go, fainting like a woman.”
“It's the smell of the cellar,” said Florent, feeling a little ashamed.
The pigeons, force fed seeds and then saltwater and then slashed in the throat, reminded him of the pigeons of the Tuileries strutting in their satin gowns over the grass, yellow with sunlight. He pictured them cooing on the marble arm of the ancient wrestler amid the great silence of the garden, while under the dark shadows of chestnut trees a little girl played with a hoop. It was then that his bones iced over, when he saw that huge blond animal conducting his massacre, stunning with the handle and stabbing with the blade in the depths of the fetid cellar. Then he felt himself falling, his legs buckling and his eyelids fluttering.
“What the hell!” Claude said when Florent came to. “You wouldn't make much of a soldier. I have to say, whoever sent you to Guiana must have been some character to imagine you were dangerous. If you ever got involved in an uprising, my old friend, you wouldn't dare to fire your pistol, you'd be too afraid you might kill someone.”
Florent got up without answering. He had become very somber, and there were worry lines across his face. He walked away, leaving Claude to go back down into the cellar. On his way back to the fish market he once more went over his plan of attack and the armed groups that would invade the Palais Bourbon. In the Champs-Elysées the cannon would roar, the gates would be smashed down; there would be blood on the steps and skulls smashed against the columns. A fleeting image of the battle passed through his mind. He saw himself in the thick of it, pale, unable to look, his face hidden in his hands.
Crossing rue du Pont-Neuf, he thought he saw the pale face of Auguste at the corner of the fruit market, walking along, his neck outstretched. He seemed to be looking for someone, his eyes round with some extraordinary imbecilic emotion. Suddenly,