The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [175]
CHAPTER THREE
1. GURNARD: The French name for this spiny red fish commonly eaten in Europe but not in America is grondin. In English it is a red gurnet or gurnard, which few Americans have ever heard of even though it is related to the less edible sea robin, both in the genus Trigla.
2. TENCH: Tench, Cyprinidae tinca tinca, has edible carplike flesh, and an eellike exterior of tiny embedded scales covered with slime. Legend has it that the slime will heal any fish it rubs against, which is why tench is sometimes called doctor fish.
3. GUDGEON: Gudgeon is a small freshwater fish, common in Europe but not in the Americas, from the same cyprinid family as tench.
4. BARBEL: This fish, which Zola called a “gros barbillon,” seems from his description to be of the genus Barbus, probably a barbel, which is a fairly large, whitish-gray freshwater fish common in Europe and unknown in North America. Barbel is also the word for feelers around the mouth. Barbus fish have barbels, and barbu means “bearded.”
5. FAKE ASTRAKHAN: Astrakhan, in the delta of the Volga River, produces a fur from young lambs that is celebrated for its softness and was made fashionable by Russian military hats.
6. HE WAS AN HÉBERTISTE: Followers of Jacques Hébert, born in 1757, the son of a jeweler, who was one of the more bloodthirsty figures of the bloody French Revolution. As a leader of the radical faction sansculottes, he urged the ruling Jacobins to unleash the bloodbath known as the Reign of Terror and influenced the decision to execute Marie Antoinette. But in 1794, he himself was guillotined by the order of Maximilien Robespierre, who believed he had become too wildly radical. According to legend, at his execution he became hysterical at the sight of the guillotine. The sansculotte movement rose to prominence in the Revolution because it was a working-class movement, and as such it, including the hébertistes, remained active for much of the nineteenth century. The name, meaning “breechless,” referred to middle-class activists who refused to wear the knee-length breeches of the upper classes and sported workers' trousers.
7. PIQUET: Piquet is a card game dating back to at least the sixteenth century, when it was mentioned by Rabelais. It is played between two people with a thirty-two-card deck that does not use the numbers two through six. In Zola's time it was the most popular card game in France.
8. A TATTERED OLD COPY OF THE GUIDE TO DREAMS: La Clef des songes, a guide to the interpretation of dreams in encyclopedia form, was a popular book in nineteenth-century France.
9. TULLE: Tulle is a stiffened silk netting, today more often made of nylon, for veils, petticoats, and ballet tutus, among other uses. The fabric is named after the town of Tulle, the capital of the Department of Corrèze in the Limousin region of central France, where tulle was once produced.
10. “THAT'S SO MUCHE!”: This is another example of Les Halles slang. “C'est rien muche” is slang for “That's so cool.”
11. LANGOUSTINES: Nephrops norvegicus, the Norway lobster to some of the English-speaking world except in Ireland, where it is a Dublin Bay prawn, is more commonly known in the United States by its French name, which means small lobster. It has the appearance of a tiny pink-and-white lobster though the white flesh is not nearly as rich or flavorful. The reason Americans tend to know it by its French name is that it is not an American species and many Americans have been introduced to it in France.
12. THE SOCIAL CONTRACT: Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 1762 revolutionary tract was one of the intellectual underpinnings of the French Revolution with its famous line “Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.” Rousseau maintained that an individual's obligation was to his society, not his government, and that only the people could legitimize a government.
CHAPTER FOUR
1. POT-AU-FEU: A