The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [23]
Still traveling down the main route, they walked in a heady fragrance that surrounded them and seemed to follow them. They were in the midst of the cut flower market. On the ground, to the right and left, women sat with square baskets in front of them filled with bunches of roses, violets, dahlias, and daisies. Some bunches were darker, like bloodstains; others brightened into delicate, silvery grays. A lighted candle near one of the baskets gave the surrounding blackness a sudden burst of color, the bright plumage of the daisies, the bloodred of the dahlias, the rich blueness of violets, the brilliant tints of roses. And nothing was more like spring than the tenderness of this perfume on the pavement after the biting breath of seafood and the pungent scent of butter and cheese.
The two men went on their way meandering among the flowers. Out of curiosity they stopped in front of the women selling bunches of ferns and vine leaves, neatly tied-up bundles with twenty-five pieces in each. Then they went down a nearly deserted alley, where their footsteps echoed as though they were in a church. There they found a small cart the size of a wheelbarrow with an undersized donkey hitched to it, which was probably bored because when he saw them, he began braying so loudly that his groans echoed in the great vaulted roofs of Les Halles, which seemed to shake from the sound. The horses answered with neighing, then a stamping and scraping of hooves, a distant fracas that swelled, rolled, and then faded.
In front of Claude and Florent on rue Berger they saw, in the glow of gaslight, bare retail shops, open on one side, with baskets and fruit surrounded by three grimy walls covered with arithmetical calculations scribbled in pencil. As they stood there they saw a well-dressed woman curled up with an air of weary contentment in the corner of a cab that looked misplaced in the procession of carts as it made its way along.
“There's Cinderella heading home without her slippers,” said Claude with a smile.
They chatted now as they went back to the market. Claude, his hands in his pockets, whistled and expounded on his love for this great mountain of food that rose up every morning in the heart of Paris. He roamed the streets every night dreaming of colossal still lifes, extraordinary works. He had even begun one. He had made his friend Marjolin and that slut Cadine pose, but it was hard. Those damn vegetables and the fruit and fish and meat—it was all too beautiful!
Florent listened to the artist's exuberance with his own belly aching from hunger. It was obvious that it had not occurred to Claude at that moment that all those beautiful objects were there for people to eat. He loved them for their colors. But suddenly he stopped talking and tightened the long red belt that he wore under his greenish coat, an old habit. Then he continued with a sly look.
“And here, this is where I have my breakfast, at least with my eyes, which is better than nothing at all. Sometimes when I forget dinner the night before, I work myself into indigestion the next morning by watching the carts come in here, filled with all sorts of good things. On such a morning I love my vegetables more than ever. Oh, the thing that exasperates me, the real injustice of it, is that those good-for-nothing bourgeois actually eat all this.”
He remembered a dinner that a friend had bought him at Baratte's8 one glorious day. They had had oysters, fish, and game. But Baratte's had gone under and all the carnival life of the old Marché des Innocents was now buried, and everything had been replaced by the huge central market, a steel giant of a new town. “Fools can say what they like, but this was the quintessence of the era.”
At first Florent could not decide if he was criticizing the picturesqueness of Baratte's or its cheerful atmosphere. But Claude was on a rant against romanticism. He