The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [45]
To be as much in opposition as possible to any government in power was Gavard's religion. He committed the greatest outrages he could imagine against the political system, only to laugh about them later. To begin with, he always voted for the legislative candidate who would make the most trouble for the government at the Corps Législatif.14 Then, if he could steal public money, cause the police to stumble, or start some kind of trouble, Gavard would try to give the affair as much of an air of insurrection as possible. Also, he lied a lot to make himself appear tremendously dangerous and talked as though “the crowd up in the Tuileries”15 knew him well and trembled at the thought of him. He maintained that the next time things blew up, half of that bunch would have to be guillotined and the other half sent into exile. His violent political stance was fed by braggadocio, in far-fetched stories that demonstrated the same cynicism that leads a Parisian shopkeeper to take down his shutters on the day of a riot so he can count the corpses in the street. So when Florent got back from Cayenne, Gavard immediately sensed an opportunity and looked for some way, spiritually, to play some trick on the emperor, the ministers, the people in power, all the way down to the lowly sergents de ville.
Gavard took a hidden pleasure in Florent. He winked at him and spoke to him in a lowered voice when talking of the most banal things and clasped his hands with all sorts of Masonic secrecy. At last he had found his adventure. He knew someone who really was in danger, who could speak, without exaggeration, of the perils he had faced. He could feel the unstated fear of this young man who had come back from the penal colony, whose thinness testified to his long hardship, but this same delicious fear made Gavard think even more of himself, convinced that he was doing something truly shocking in treating this dangerous man as his friend. Florent became sacred. Gavard swore by him. Florent's name would be invoked if his argument needed support. He was attempting to crush the government once and for all.
Gavard had lost his wife on rue Saint-Jacques some months after the coup d'état. He had kept his rotisserie until 1856. At that time, it was rumored that he had made a considerable amount of money in association with a neighboring grocery store owner from a contract to furnish the Army of the East with dried vegetables. The truth was that after having sold the rotisserie, he had had enough capital to live on for a year. But he didn't like to speak of the source of this revenue. That was awkward for him and kept him from speaking candidly about the Crimean War, which he characterized as dangerous adventurism “undertaken merely to consolidate the throne and fill certain pockets with money.”
After a year, he was nearly dead from boredom in his bachelor quarters. Since he dropped by at the Quenu-Gradelles almost every day, he moved nearer to them on rue de la Cossonnerie. It was there that he fell in love with Les Halles, its roar of noise and constant exchange of gossip. He decided to rent a stall in the poultry market just to keep himself amused, to fill his days with idle market gossip. Now he could live a life of endless chitchat, stay on top of all the petty scandals of the neighborhood, fill his head until it was dizzy with gossip. He tasted a thousand rarified pleasures, at last in his element, diving into it with the sensual pleasure of a carp swimming through sunlight.
Florent would sometimes visit him in his stall. The afternoons were still warm, and women sat plucking fowl along the narrow alleyways. Rays of sunlight fell between the awnings, and in the warmth, feathers slipped