The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [63]
Lisa finished her piece of boudin, slowly wiping her fingertips on the end of her apron. She readied her brother-in-law's candle while Gavard and Quenu praised him for his decision. After all, there had to be an end to all this. Political fanatics get nothing to eat. And as for her, standing with the candle lit, she looked at Florent with satisfaction in her lovely face, as peaceful as the smile of a golden calf.
CHAPTER THREE
Three days later the formalities were finished and the prefecture accepted Florent on Monsieur Verlaque's recommendation, almost without looking, as his replacement. Gavard had wanted to accompany Florent, and when they were alone again on the sidewalk, Gavard kept poking him in the ribs with his elbow, laughing without saying anything, winking his eye cunningly. The police he met on the quai de l'Horloge suddenly seemed absolutely ridiculous, and he tensed up slightly the way someone does to avoid laughing in a person's face.
The following morning, Monsieur Verlaque began to brief the new inspector on his duties. It was arranged that he would take Florent around for the next few days and introduce him to the stormy arena that he would have to oversee. Poor Verlaque, as Gavard called him, was a pale little man, who constantly coughed and walked on the spindly legs of a sickly child through the cool damp air and puddling water of the fish markets, wrapped in flannels, scarfs, and handkerchiefs.
The first morning, when Florent started at seven o'clock, he felt lost, his head pounding and his eyes dazed. Stall keepers were already stalking the auction pavilion, clerks arrived with ledgers in hand, and shipping agents with leather bags hung around their necks sat backward in chairs against the sales booths while they waited to get paid. The fish was being unloaded and unpacked in the enclosure, spreading out to the sidewalks, where there were piles of small baskets. Hampers, bins, and bags of mussels trailing water arrived without end. The auction checkers, very businesslike, leaped over the piles, yanked off the straw coverings, emptied the baskets, then tossed them aside with a sweep of the hand that shook up the fish in their two-handled round baskets and showed them to their best advantage. Once the baskets were all out, it looked to Florent as though a huge school of fish had run aground on the sidewalk, still quivering in opalescent pink, bloodred coral, milky pearl, all the greenish silken pastels of the sea.
Jumbled together by the chance scoop of a fishing net, in the mysterious depths the great sea had given up everything: codfish, haddock, flounder, plaice, dabs—common fish, murky gray with white splotches; eels—thick murky blue snakes with black slits for eyes, so slimy they seemed to still be alive and slithering. The wide, flat skates had a pale underbelly edged with soft red and an upper side marbled along a bumpy back down to the ribbing of the fins, a cinnabar red striped with Florentine bronze, in the somber palette of toads and poisonous flowers. There were roundheaded, horrible dogfish with their mouths gaping like Chinese gargoyles and short fins the shape of bat wings—fitting monsters to stand guard over treasures in ocean grottoes.
Then came the deluxe fish, displayed individually on wicker trays: the salmon, gleaming like well-buffed silver, each scale with its outline seemingly etched by a burin on a polished metal plate; the mullets with the cruder markings of larger scales; the large turbots and mullets with tight white patterns like curdled milk; the tunas, smooth and lustrous, like bags of sleek blackened leather; and roundish bass with huge mouths torn wide open, as though to let an oversize spirit escape at the agonizing moment of death. And everywhere there were soles, beige or gray in pairs. Stiff, slim sand eels looked like pewter shavings. The herring were slightly twisted, with the bruises on their bleeding gills showing against the silver skin. Fat porgies were tinged