The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [25]
The luminous face of the clock on Saint Eustache turned pale, a night-light surprised by the dawn. One by one, the gaslights in the wine shops in the neighborhood were extinguished, like stars faded away by a bright sky. And Florent looked at the huge market emerging from the shadows, coming out of a dreamland in which they had been held, the palaces sprawling along the streets. They seemed to solidify into a greenish gray color with their columns holding up an endless expanse of roof. They rose in a geometrical mass, and once all the lights had been extinguished and the matching square buildings were bathed in dawn light, they seemed like some kind of oversize modern machine, a kind of steam engine with a cauldron designed to serve all mankind, a huge riveted and bolted metal belly built of wood, glass, and iron with the power and grace of a machine with glowing furnaces and dizzily spinning wheels.
Claude had enthusiastically leapt to his feet on the bench and forced his companion to admire daybreak on the vegetables. There was a sea of vegetables between the rows of pavilions from pointe Saint-Eustache to rue des Halles. At the two intersections at either end the seas grew higher, completely flooding the pavement. Dawn rose slowly in soft grays, coloring everything with a light wash of watercolors. The mounting piles, like a swelling sea, the river of greenery rushing through the streets like an autumnal torrent, took on delicate shadows and hues: tender violet, milk-blushed rose, a green steeped in yellows—all the soft, pale hues that change the sky into silk at sunrise. Step by step the fire of dawn rose higher, shooting up bursts of flame at the far end of rue Rambuteau as the vegetables brightened and grew more distinct from the bluish darkness that clung to the ground. Lettuce, escarole, and chicory, with rich earth still stuck to them, opened to expose swelling hearts. Bundles of spinach, bunches of sorrel, packets of artichokes, piles of peas and beans, mountains of romaine tied with straw, sang the full greenery repertoire from the shiny green lacquered pods to the deep green leaves—a continuous range of ascending and descending scales that faded away in the variegated heads of celery and bundles of leeks. But the most piercing note of all came from the flaming carrots and the snowy splotches of turnips, strewn in ample quantities all along the market and lighting it with their colors.
At the intersection of rue des Halles were mountains of cabbages. There were enormous white cabbages that were hard and compact like metal balls, curly savoys whose great leaves made them look like basins of greening bronze, and red cabbages that the dawn seemed to change into exquisite flowery masses the color of wine, crimson and deep purple. At the other end, where pointe Saint-Eustache intersects rue Rambuteau, the route was blocked by swollen-bellied orange pumpkins crawling across the ground in two lines. The varnished brown of onions shone here and there in baskets and the bloodred heaps of tomatoes, the muted yellow of cucumbers, and the deep purple of eggplants, while thick black radishes in funereal drapes still held memories of the night amid this vibrant, jubilant new day.
Claude clapped his hands at the sight. He found something extravagant, crazy, and sublime in all the jaunty vegetables. He insisted that they were absolutely not dead but, after being pulled from the earth the day before, were awaiting the next sunrise to make their farewells from the cobblestones of Les Halles. He saw them as alive, their leaves wide open, as though their roots were still embedded in warm, well-manured soil. He also claimed to hear in the market the death rattle of