The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [77]
Then matters grew even worse. Mother and daughter, wild with anger, fists raised, hurled abuses. The little maid, lost and confused, trapped between a hoarse voice and a screeching one and batted back and forth like a ball, sobbed ever louder.
“Get out of here! Your Madame Taboureau ought to be half as fresh as this fish is. Are we supposed to patch it up for her?”
“A whole fish for ten francs! That's enough out of you!”
“How much did those earrings cost? I bet you earned that lying on your back.”
“You bet she did. She probably works the corner of rue de Mondétour.”
The market guard fetched Florent, who arrived at the height of the quarrel. The pavilion was in revolt. The fishmongers, who would tear at each other over two sous' worth of herring joined ranks when challenged by a customer. They chanted a popular song: “The baker's wife has pots of gold that cost her almost nothing.” They were stamping their feet, egging on the Méhudins, as if urging dogs to attack, and some, from the other end of the alley, jumped out of their stalls, as though they were about to leap at the little maid's hair. And the maid was lost, drowning in the enormity of her mistreatment.
“Give the young lady back her ten francs,” Florent ordered sternly when the situation was explained to him.
But Mère Méhudin was in a state. “As for you, you little nothing, I am going … the hell with it. This is how I'm giving back the ten francs.” As she spoke she hurled the brill with all her might at the little maid from Auvergne, and it smacked her full in the face. Her nose started bleeding as the brill became unstuck and fell to the ground with the sound of a wet dishcloth. Florent was enraged by the brutality of this act. The Beautiful Norman became frightened and stepped back as he shouted, “I'm suspending you for eight days! I'll have your license suspended, do you hear me?”
Booing broke out behind him, but he spun around with such a menacing look that the fishmongers tried to look innocent. After the Méhudins gave back the ten francs, he had them close up their stall immediately. The mother suppressed her anger. The daughter remained silent and pale. She, the Beautiful Norman, driven from her stall! Claire said in her calm voice that it served them right, which almost brought the two sisters to blows at home on rue Pirouette.
After eight days, when the Méhudins came back to the market, they were correct, pulled in, very curt with an icy anger. They found the market calm and orderly. From that day on, the Beautiful Norman nurtured thoughts of terrible vengeance. She felt that the blow had come from the hand of Lisa. She had run into her the day after the fight, and Lisa had held her head so high that she vowed to make her pay for that look of triumph.
Endless debates took place in the market with Mademoiselle Saget, Madame Lecœur, and La Sarriette. But when they were at last worn out by tales of Lisa's carryings-on with her cousin and hairs found in Quenu's andouilles, they couldn't really go any further with it. She was looking for some cruel blow that would strike her rival in the heart.
The Beautiful Norman's child was growing up wild in the fish market. He had been brought there when he was only three and spent his days squatting on a rag surrounded by fish. He slept as though he were a brother of the great tunas, and he woke up among mackerel and whiting. The ragamuffin smelled so fishy that people almost wondered if he hadn't emerged from the belly of some giant fish. For a long time his favorite game when his mother wasn't looking was to build walls and houses of herring. He also had play soldiers arranging gurnard on the marble slab in opposing front lines, pushing the fish against one another, battering their heads into one another, while imitating trumpets and drums with his lips, after which he would throw all the fish back into a pile and pronounce them all dead. Later, he started hanging around his aunt Claire's stall for the purpose of gathering pike and carp bladders, which popped when