The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [19]
They could spend a quarter of an hour fighting over one sou. Florent was surprised at the calm of the marketers with their plaid clothing and tanned faces in the middle of the long-winded haggling of the market.
Behind him on the sidewalk of the rue Rambuteau, fruit was being sold. Hampers and smaller baskets were lined up, covered with canvas or straw giving off a strong odor of overripe mirabelle plums. After listening for some time to a soft, slow voice, Florent had to turn his head and look. He saw a charming woman, small and dark, sitting on the ground and bargaining.
“Oh, come on, Marcel,” she said. “You can take a hundred sous, won't you?” She was speaking to a man who kept his coat closely wrapped around him and did not answer. After about five very long minutes the woman went back on the attack. “Come on, Marcel, one hundred sous for that basket there and four francs for the other one. That'll make nine francs I owe you.”
More silence.
“All right, what's your price?”
“Ten francs, as you well know because I already told you. And what have you done with your Jules this morning, La Sarriette?” The young woman started laughing as she grabbed a fistful of small change from her pocket.
“Oh,” she said, “Jules is having his beauty rest this morning. He claims that men are not made for work.”
She paid for the two baskets and carried them into the newly opened fruit pavilion. Les Halles was still wrapped in artfully lit dankness, with thousands of stripes from jalousies beneath the awnings of the long covered street already heavily trafficked with pedestrians, while the distant pavilions were still deserted. At the pointe Saint-Eustache the bakers and wine merchants were busy taking down their shutters; their red shops, gaslights aglow, were brilliant against the grayness that still covered the other buildings. Florent looked at a boulangerie4 on the left-hand side of rue Montorgueil, all full and golden with a fresh batch of bread, and he thought he could smell the fragrance of warm bread. It was 4:30 in the morning.
Meanwhile, Madame François had sold all her produce. When Lacaille reappeared with his bag, only a few carrot bunches were left.
“How about a sou for that?” he asked.
“I knew I'd be seeing you again,” she answered quietly. “Go ahead. Take the rest. There are seventeen bunches.”
“So that makes seventeen sous.”
“No. Thirty-four.”
They settled on twenty-five. Madame François was in a hurry to leave. Once Lacaille had wandered off with the carrots in his bag she said to Florent, “See that, he was watching me. The old bastard drifts around the market. Sometimes he waits till the last second to buy four sous' worth of goods. Oh these Parisians! They'll bicker over a few sous and then empty their pockets drinking at the wine shop.”
When Madame François spoke of Paris, her voice was full of irony and disdain. She talked about it as though it were a distant city so ridiculous and contemptible that she condescended to set foot there only in the dark of night.
“Now I can get out of here,” she said, sitting down next to Florent on a neighbor's vegetable pile.
Florent bowed his head. He had just stolen something. Just as Lacaille had left, Florent had spied a piece of carrot lying on the ground, picked it up, and was grasping it tightly in his right hand. Behind him, celery stalks and parsley bunches gave off a smell that was nauseating him.
“I'm going to get out of here,” Madame François repeated. This stranger touched her, and her senses told her that he was suffering, sitting there on the sidewalk motionless. She offered again to help him, but he again refused with an even more biting pride. He even stood up and remained on his feet to prove that he had regained his strength. Then, as Madame François turned away, he stuffed the carrot into his mouth. But despite his terrible longing to sink his teeth into it, he was forced to take it out