The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [73]
Mère Méhudin, according to neighborhood gossip, must have earned a large fortune, although this was evident only on holidays, when she appeared with solid gold jewelry around her neck, arms, and waist.
Later, her two daughters quarreled. The younger one, Claire, a lazy blonde, complained of the viciousness of her sister, Louise, saying in a leaden voice that she would never submit to being her sister's maid. Since this was going to end up with the girls coming to blows, the mother separated them. She gave Louise her stall in the fish market, and Claire, whom the smell of skates and herring gave coughing fits, set up a booth in the freshwater fish section. Although the mother then claimed to be retired, she would go from one stall to the other, getting involved with sales and continually annoying the daughters with her crude way of dealing with customers.
Claire was an unusual creature, very soft and yet somehow always fighting with everyone. She listened only to herself, people said. She had a dreamy, virginal face but a silent determination, an independent spirit that drove her to live by herself, never accepting anything from other people, exhibiting great righteousness one day and infuriating unfairness the next. Some days she would throw the market into chaos by suddenly raising or lowering her prices without explanation. By the time she reached thirty, her delicate build and fine skin, which the water in the tanks seemed to keep forever fresh, her small and undistinguished face, and her agile limbs would all thicken like those of a saint who had stepped down from a stained-glass window and was degraded by the company of market vendors. But at twenty-two she was a Murillo, to use Claude Lantier's term, among the carp and eels—a Murillo, however, with disheveled hair, clunky shoes, and badly cut dresses that rendered her shapeless. She was not a coquette and showed her contempt when Louise, all festooned in ribbons and bows, teased her about her clumsily knotted scarf. It was said that the son of a wealthy shopkeeper in the neighborhood had angrily taken off on a long trip after failing to get one word of encouragement from her.
Louise, the Beautiful Norman, was of a gentler nature. She had been engaged to marry a worker in the grain market, but the unlucky young man had died when a falling sack of flour broke his back. Seven months later Louise had given birth to a large baby boy. In the Méhudin circle, she was regarded as a widow. Her mother would sometimes say in conversation, “When my son-in-law was alive …”
The Méhudins were powerful. When Monsieur Verlaque had finished training Florent for his new position, he advised him to appease certain vendors if he wanted life to be bearable, and he was even so helpful as to share little tricks of the trade such as at which violations to wink, at which to fake extreme displeasure, and under what circumstances he should accept a small gift. A market inspector is both a policeman and a government official, maintaining both order and cleanliness and resolving in a conciliatory manner any disputes between vendors and customers. Florent, who was soft at heart, wore an artificial sternness when exercising his duties and generally overplayed his part. His somber nature, the result of long suffering, and his outcast mentality worked against him.
The Beautiful Norman's strategy was to find a way of dragging Florent into an argument. She swore that he wouldn't keep his job fifteen days.
“I'm telling you,” she said to Madame Lecœur, whom she ran into one morning. “If that fat Lisa thinks we want any of her leftovers … We have better taste than she does, and he's just awful, that man.”
After the auction, when Florent would begin his rounds,