The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [46]
Florent managed to slip past, both embarrassed and deafened. The women continued plucking as they vied for his attention, and he was nearly suffocated by a cloud of down, thick as a puff of smoke with the stench of poultry.
At last, in mid-alleyway by the water faucets, he found Gavard babbling away in shirtsleeves, his arms crossed over a blue apron. There Gavard ruled over a group of ten or twelve women like a benevolent prince. He was the only man in that section of the market. He had already been through five or six women to run the stall, all of whom had become angered by his long wagging tongue, so that he had decided he would run it himself, naively insisting that the problem was that the silly creatures wanted to pass the whole day gossiping and he could not control them. But since he did need to have someone to keep his place when he wasn't there, he had brought in Marjolin, who was drifting through the market trying out all the lesser positions Les Halles had to offer.
Florent sometimes spent as much as an hour with Gavard, marveling at his endless babble and how confident he was surrounded by petticoats. Interrupting one woman, then picking an argument with another ten stalls away, and grabbing a customer from a third, he made more noise by himself than the hundred or so talkative neighbors who raised such a clamor that the steel girders thumped like tom-toms.
The poultry seller's only relatives were a sister-in-law and a niece. When his wife had died, her older sister, Madame Lecœur, who had been widowed for a year, had mourned her in an exaggerated fashion, going every evening to console the bereaved husband. At the time she was entertaining the idea that she might somehow take the still-warm place of her dead sister. But Gavard could not bear thin women: he said it pained him to feel their bones under the skin. He didn't even pet cats and dogs unless they were very fat. He derived a personal satisfaction from the feel of round, well-fed backs.
Madame Lecœur, her pride wounded, but worse, furious to watch all those hundred-sou coins the rotisserie brought in slipping from her grasp, nurtured a deep grudge. Her brother-in-law became her enemy, and this animosity preoccupied her days. When she saw him set himself up in the market only two steps from where she sold her butter, cheese, and eggs, she accused him of having done it just to annoy her and bring her bad luck. From then on she was always complaining and turned so yellow and melancholy that she really did start losing customers and her business turned sour.
For a long time she had been raising the daughter of one of her sisters; a peasant woman had sent her the child and never given her another thought. The child grew up in Les Halles. Since she was named Sarriet, which was her family name, she soon became known as La Sarriette. At the age of sixteen, La Sarriette was such an alluring young street wench that men would come and buy cheese just to see her. With her pastel face, dark brown hair, and eyes that burned like embers, she was not interested in gentlemen but preferred people from humbler classes. Finally she chose a fort from Ménilmontant who worked for her aunt. When she was twenty, she established a fruit-selling business with some funds from an unknown source, and from then on Monsieur Jules, as her lover was named, was seen with spotless hands, a clean shirt, and a velvet cap; and he came down to the market only in the afternoons, wearing slippers. They lived together on rue Vauvilliers on the third floor of a large house with a sleazy café on the ground floor. La Sarriette's ingratitude capped Madame Lecœur's growing bitterness, and she hurled barrages of scatological abuse at the girl whenever she spoke to her.
The girl