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By Root 1388 0

A few hairpins were still on the mantel, along with gilded cardboard boxes of buttons and hard candies, some pictures clipped from publications, empty jars of lotion still smelling of jasmine. In the drawer of the sad white wood table were needles, thread, a prayer book, a tattered old copy of The Guide to Dreams.8 A yellow-dotted white summer dress hanging forgotten on a hook. Behind a water pitcher on the board that served as a dressing table there was a large stain from a spilled bottle of lotion. Florent might have been miserable in a woman's dressing nook, but this room, with its narrow iron bed, the two caned chairs, even the faded gray wallpaper, gave a sense of simple innocence, a sense of an awkward, childish girl. The whiteness of the curtains, the juvenile gilded boxes, the book on dreams, the clumsy coquettishness of the walls—it was all somehow refreshing, taking him back to his own youthful dreams. It would have been better had he not known Augustine with her frizzy hair, so that he could imagine himself in the room of a sister, a lovely girl whose budding womanhood shone in all the little things around him.

Another great pleasure of this room in the evening was to lean out the window, which cut a narrow balcony into the roof. It was enclosed by a tall iron balustrade where Augustine was cultivating a pomegranate plant in a window box. Since the weather had turned cold, Florent had taken the plant in at night and kept it by the foot of the bed. He would remain at the window for several minutes, deeply inhaling the fresh air from the Seine that blew in above the buildings on the rue de Rivoli. Below, the confusion of roofs of the Les Halles market spread into the grayness. They looked like sleeping lakes on which occasional lit windows cast the glow of a silvery ripple. In the distance the roofs of the meat market were dark shadows on the horizon. He delighted in the enormous stretch of sky before him, the great expanse of Les Halles, which seemed, amid Paris's strangled streets, like a faint vision of a seashore, the still, gray bay barely moving against the distant rolling tide. He would lose himself in this every night and imagine a new coastline. It saddened him to reflect on the eight wretched years he had spent away from France, but he nevertheless enjoyed the reflection. Then, shivering, he would pull the window shut. Often as he stood in front of the fireplace removing his collar, he was disturbed by the photo of Auguste and Augustine. As he undressed, he studied their bland smiles, standing there hand in hand.

The first few weeks in the fish market were extremely hard. He had run into the open hostility of the Méhudin family, which put him at odds with the entire market. The Beautiful Norman was determined to have her vengeance on Beautiful Lisa, and her cousin was the anointed victim.

The Méhudins came from Rouen. Louise's mother still told the story of how she had come to Paris with a basket of eels and had been in the fish business ever since. She had married a toll collector who later died, leaving her with two young daughters. It was she who had originally, with her ample hips and a wonderful ripeness, worn the nickname “the Beautiful Norman,” which her daughter had inherited. Today, she was a squat, shapeless sixty-five-year-old matron; the dampness of the fish market made her voice hoarse and gave her skin a bluish hue. A sedentary life had made her flabby and thick-waisted, and a rising tide of blubber from her bosom forced her head back. She had never been willing to renounce the fashions of her youth and still wore her flower-print dress, her yellow kerchief, and the turbanlike headgear once customary for fishmongers, which matched her loud voice and fast gestures as she stood, hands on her hips, a litany of standard market vulgarities flowing from her lips.

She missed the Marché des Innocents, reminisced a lot about the ancient rights of the women of the old market, told stories about brawls with police inspectors, described visits to the court in the times of both Charles X and Louis-Philippe,