The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [24]
“Listen,” he said, stopping. “Look over there in the corner. Isn't that a ready-made painting, infinitely more human than all their beloved pretentious paintings?”
Along the covered street women were selling coffee and hot soup. In a corner a crowd of customers had gathered around a man selling cabbage soup. The galvanized tin bucket full of broth was steaming on the little heater, whose holes emitted the pale glow of embers. The woman, armed with a ladle, took thin slices of bread out of a cloth-lined basket and dipped yellow cups into the soup. She was surrounded by tidy saleswomen, farmers in overalls, forts with coats stained by the foods they had carried and their backs bent by the weight of the loads, poor ragged drifters—the entire hungry early-morning crowd of Les Halles, eating, scalding themselves, sticking their chins forward so that the trickle from their spoons would not stain their clothes.
And the passionate painter blinked his eyes, thrilled by the scene, looking for the best vantage point, working out the painting's best composition. But the goddamn cabbage soup smelled impressive.
Florent turned his head, unable to watch the customers emptying their soup cups in silence like a cluster of distrustful animals feeding. Claude himself was overwhelmed by pungent steam rising from someone's spoon that struck him in the face.
He tightened his belt, smiling as though he was annoyed. Then, as they continued their stroll, he alluded to the punch Alexandre had bought them, saying in a low voice: “It's a funny thing, but have you ever noticed that you can always find someone to buy you a drink but there is never anyone who will pay for something to eat?”
It was daybreak. The houses at the end of rue de la Cossonnerie along boulevard Sébastopol were still black, but above the clean line of their slate roofs, a patch of blue sky framed in the arches of the covered street shone like a half-moon. Claude, who had been bending down to look through some ground-level gratings, peering down into the glimmering gaslight of deep cellars, glanced up at the opening between the pillars, as though studying the dark roofs on the edge of the clear sky. Then he stopped again, this time to inspect an iron ladder, one of those that connected the two levels of roofing. Florent asked him what he was looking at up there.
“It's that bastard Marjolin,” said the painter, not in answer to Florent's question. “You can bet he's lying in some gutter, unless he spent the night with the animals in the poultry cellar. I need him to do a study.”
And he told the story of how his friend Marjolin had been found by the market women one morning on a pile of cabbages and how he had grown up wild on the neighborhood streets. When they wanted to send him to school, he would suddenly become ill and they had to take him back to the markets. He knew the most hidden nooks and loved them as if they were his family moving with squirrellike agility through his ironwork forest. What a pretty couple they made—he and the slutty Cadine, whom Mère Chantemesse had picked up one night at the old Marché des Innocents. He was beautiful, this big oaf, golden as a Rubens with a reddish down that caught the light; she was a little thing, lithe and slender, with an odd face beneath a tangle of frizzy black hair.
Claude, engrossed in his talk, walked quickly, bringing his companion to the pointe Saint-Eustache. But Florent, whose legs were starting to buckle again, finally collapsed on a bench near the horse trolley station. There was a cool breeze. At the bottom of the rue Rambuteau, a bright pink light was streaking the milky sky, which higher up was cut by broad gray patches. With the dawn came such a sweet balsamic scent that for a minute Florent thought he was sitting on a hillside in the country. But Claude pointed out to him that on the