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By Root 1279 0

with a touch of carmine red, whereas the mackerel were golden with green-striped backs and sides with a mother-of-pearl glow, and the pink gurnard,1 with their white bellies, lay with their heads in the center of the baskets so their tails radiated around and made an odd blossom of pearly white and vibrant red. There were also red mullets with exquisite flesh, with the blush of pink characteristic of the Cyprinid family, and the opalescent glow of boxes of whiting. And there were smelts in small, clean baskets like the pretty little ones used for strawberries, which released a strong scent of violets. Meanwhile, the little pink shrimp and the gray shrimp sharpened the softness of their piles with sharp little black dots of a thousand eyes. The spiny lobsters and the clawed lobsters striped black, still alive, made a grating sound as they tried to crawl off with their broken limbs.

Florent only half listened to Monsieur Verlaque's lengthy explanations. A sunbeam streamed through the glass roof of the covered lane, lighting up the rich colors, washed and softened by the waves, the iridescent hues of the shellfish, the opalescence of the whiting, the pearly mackerel, the gold of the red mullets, the lamé suits of the herring, the great silvery salmon. It was as though the jewelry boxes of a sea nymph had been opened there—a tangle of unimaginable baubles, heaps of necklaces, monstrous bracelets, gigantic brooches, huge barbaric gems of no imaginable purpose. On the backs of skates and dogfish seemed to be huge dull green and purple stones set in some dark metal, while slender sand eels and the tails and fins of smelts suggested the delicacy of fine jewelry.

But what struck Florent most was a fresh breeze, a whiff of the sea, that he recognized, bitter and salty. He recalled the Guianese coast and the fine days of his crossing. He half imagined staring at some bay in high tide with its algae baking in the sun, the bare rocks drying, and the strong breath of the sea. All around him, the fresh fish smelled good, with a sharp, bitter perfume that disturbed the appetite.

Monsieur Verlaque coughed. The dampness was going through him, and he wrapped himself more tightly in his muffler. “Now,” he said, “we're going to go by the freshwater fish.”

This pavilion, next to the fruit market, was the last one before rue Rambuteau. On either side of the auction space were circular tanks divided into compartments by iron gratings. Brass faucets in the shape of swans spouted thin streams of water. And the compartments were full. There was a tangled swarm of shrimp, constantly moving carp with black backs, and tangles of eels perpetually knotting and unknotting themselves. Monsieur Verlaque was taken by a stubborn coughing bout. The dampness was milder here, and there was a soft scent of rivers and of tepid water asleep on the sand.

That morning, a huge quantity of crayfish had arrived in crates and baskets from Germany. The market was also flooded with whitefish from England and Holland. Some workers were unpacking shiny carp from the Rhine, all bronzed in beautiful rust-colored metallic, each scale like a piece of cloisonné enamel; others with huge pike, the coarse iron gray brigands of the water with long, protruding savage jaws; or magnificent dark tench,2 red copper stained with the blue green of corroded copper. Amid the glow of metallic skins, the baskets of gudgeon,3 perch, and trout—the dull flat-netted fish—took on a brilliant white appearance, the steel blue of their backs gradually fading away to the soft transparency of their bellies, and the fat snow white barbel4 providing the shimmer to this vast still life.

Bags of young carp were being gently emptied into the tanks; the carp flipped over, then remained still for an instant before darting away and disappearing. Little eels were dumped from their baskets in a clump and fell to the bottom of the boxes like a single knot of snakes, while the big ones, thick as a child's arm, raised their heads and then slid under the water, slick as snakes hiding in the brush. Meanwhile, the