The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [16]
“No,” Florent answered, “I've been abroad. And this main street here, what's it called?”
“It's a new street called rue du Pont-Neuf. It starts at the Seine and goes all the way to rue Montmartre and rue Montorgueil. You could have figured it out in daylight.” She got up, seeing a woman eyeing her turnips. “Is that you, Mère Chantemesse?” she said pleasantly.
Florent looked down to the foot of rue Montorgueil. It was there that a group of sergents de ville had grabbed him on the night of December 4. He had been strolling boulevard Montmartre at about two in the afternoon, slowly ambling with the crowd, smiling at all the soldiers the government had posted in the streets so that it would be taken seriously, when suddenly the military had started making a sweep of the boulevard. It had gone on for a good quarter of an hour. Then someone had pushed him and he had been thrown to the ground at the corner of rue Vivienne. He wasn't sure what had happened after that because gunshots had rung out and the crowd had panicked and trampled him.
When he heard no more noise, he tried to get up but realized that a young woman in a pink bonnet was lying on top of him. Her shawl had slipped off her shoulders, and he could see her undergarment, a bodice tucked in little pleats. Just above her breasts were two holes where bullets had entered, and when he tried to move her gently to free his legs, two dribbles of blood had leaked out of the holes and over his hands. He had leapt to his feet and bolted, without a hat, blood moist on his hands. He had wandered around, delirious, until evening fell, constantly seeing the woman who had lain across his legs, her face so pale, her eyes so blue and large, her lips grimacing at the shock of being there, dead so soon.
At the age of thirty, he was a bashful young man who could barely bring himself to look a woman in the face, and now he would be seeing her face, carrying it in his heart and memory, for the rest of his life. It was as though she had been his beloved wife.
In the evening, his mind still blurred by the afternoon's horror, he had somehow, not really knowing how, found himself in a wine shop on the rue Montorgueil, where men were drinking and threatening to throw up barricades. He had gone with them, helping them pull up a few paving stones. He had sat on the barricade, worn out from wandering the streets, and he had vowed to himself that when the soldiers came he would fight. He wasn't even carrying a knife, and his head was still hatless. Around eleven o'clock, he nodded off, and in his sleep he saw the two holes in the white bodice staring at him like two bloodshot, tearstained eyes. When he woke up, he was being taken by four sergents de ville, who were beating him with their fists. The men at the barricade had all fled. The sergents had become enraged and almost strangled him when they found that he had blood on his hands. It was the young woman's blood.
Florent, lost in all these memories, looked up at Saint Eustache without noticing the hands of the clock. It was almost four o'clock. Les Halles was still asleep. Madame François was standing and arguing with Mère Chantemesse about the price of a bunch of turnips. Florent was remembering how he had almost been executed right there, against a wall of Saint Eustache. There a police detachment had just blown the heads off five unlucky souls, taken at a barricade on rue Grenéta. Five bodies had been piled on the sidewalk at