The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [66]
The Beautiful Norman, for her part, recognizing Madame Quenu's cousin, was surprised to see him and started gossiping about him to the women around her.
The roar of voices became so loud that Monsieur Verlaque gave up on his explanations to Florent. Nearby, men were calling out deluxe fish with prolonged shouts that sounded as though they came out of bullhorns. One man bellowed out, “Mussels! Mussels!” in such a loud, hoarse voice that it vibrated the roofs of the market. Some of the bags of mussels were dumped upside down, the shellfish poured into hampers, while other bags were emptied with shovels. An unending parade of straw trays with skates, soles, mackerel, eels, and salmon were carried back and forth to the cackling cries of pushing fish women getting louder and louder and leaning so hard on the iron rails that they were starting to creak under the weight. The auctioneer, the hunchback, now in his stride, protruded his jaw and flailed the air with his thin arms. And then, as though driven wild by the avalanche of numbers that shot from his mouth, he leaped onto a stool, where, with his twisted mouth and his hair flying behind him, he could wrench nothing more from his parched throat than unintelligible hisses. Meanwhile, up above, a little old man, his voice muffled in a collar of fake astrakhan,5 the collector of municipal fees, sat with nothing but his nose showing from beneath a black velvet cap. The tall brown-haired clerk, with flashing eyes in her calm face, slightly reddened by the cold, sat on a high wooden chair, peacefully writing, apparently undisturbed by the commotion of the hunchback, who seemed to ripple the edges of her skirts.
“That man Logre is fantastic,” Monsieur Verlaque said softly with a smile on his face. “He's the best auctioneer in the market. He could sell a pair of shoe soles as a pair of choice flounder.”
Then he and Florent went back into the pavilion. Passing by the fresh fish auction where there was less passion to the bidding, Monsieur Verlaque explained that river fishing in France was not doing well. The auctioneer, a light-haired, sorry-looking man without hand gestures, was auctioning off some lots of crayfish and eels in a monotonous voice while his helpers kept him in supply by scooping out the tanks with short-handled nets.
Meanwhile, the horde gathering around the sales desk was still growing. Monsieur Verlaque conscientiously served as Florent's instructor, elbowing a path, guiding his successor through the most crowded sections where the major retailers congregated, quietly waiting for the best fish and loading the porters' shoulders with tuna, turbots, and salmon they had bought. At ground level the street merchants were divvying up the herring and dabs they had bought together. And there were a few upper-middle-class gentlemen, small property owners who had come at four in the morning from the far corners of the city in search of one truly fresh fish but had ended up with an entire lot bid down to them, forty or fifty francs' worth of seafood, and were spending their day trying to sell off the ones they could not use. From time to time some rough shoving would break out in one corner of the crowd or another. A saleswoman who had gotten too pressed in would push her way free, raising her fists and cursing ferociously. Then the crowd would re-form tightly. Florent, feeling suffocated, announced that he had seen enough and now he understood everything he needed to know.
While Monsieur Verlaque was helping him extricate himself, they found themselves face-to-face with the Beautiful Norman. She stood with her feet planted firmly in front of them and asked, with her regal air, “Is it definite, Monsieur Verlaque, that you're leaving us?”
“Yes, yes,” said the small man. “I'm going to rest in the country, in Clamart. It seems that the smell of fish is bad for my health … By the way, here's my replacement.”
With that he turned to show her Florent. The Beautiful Norman nearly choked. As Florent walked away, he thought he could make out her whisper to