The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [82]
Florent saw her some mornings when it had been raining hard since the day before. Between Nanterre and Paris the cart wheels had sunk up to the axle in mud, and Balthazar was encrusted in it up to his belly. She would take pity on him and wipe him down with old aprons.
“These animals are very fragile,” she said. “It takes nothing for them to get sick. Oh, my poor old Balthazar. When we were crossing the pont de Neuilly it was raining so hard I thought we were going to fall into the Seine.”
Balthazar went to the stable at an inn, but Madame François stayed out in the downpour to sell her vegetables. The road had become a sea of liquid mud. The cabbage, the carrots, the turnips, were pelted by gray water, drowned in the muddy deluge that rushed down the sidewalk. There was no trace of the dazzling greens that were there on a clear morning. The market men huddled in their heavy coats and cursed the market authorities, who, after looking into the matter, had decided that rain did not harm vegetables and therefore there was no need to build a shelter for them.
Those rainy mornings depressed Florent. He thought about Madame François and always slipped away for a brief exchange with her. She was never melancholy. She shook herself like a poodle and declared that she was used to such weather and, after all, it was not as though she were made of sugar and would melt in a few raindrops. But he made her duck under one of the covered ways for a few minutes and often took her to Monsieur Lebigre's for a mulled wine together. When she looked at him warmly with her tranquil face, he was charmed by the healthy smell of the fields that she carried with her into the foul air of Les Halles. She smelled of the earth, the hay the fresh air and wide-open sky.
“My boy you must come to Nanterre,” she said, “and see my garden with borders of thyme everywhere. My God, Paris has an evil smell.”
Then she was off, dripping wet. Florent always felt rejuvenated when he left her. He resolved to try to use work to fight off his depression. He was a very methodical man, and once he had devised a plan for the allotment of his time, it became an obsession. He locked himself away two nights a week to work on an exhaustive study of Cayenne. He found his little room to be an excellent place to work. He lit his fire, checked that the pomegranate at the end of the bed was doing well, then sat down at the little table and worked there until midnight. He had pushed the prayer book and the book on dreams back in the drawer and little by little filled the drawer with his notes, memos, and manuscript pages.
The work on Guiana barely made progress because he was constantly distracted by other projects, plans for grand, ambitious projects that he sketched out in a few lines. He drafted a plan to reform the administrative system of the markets, a scheme for transforming the fees the city charged for produce as it entered Paris into a tax on sales at the market. He also devised an improved system for provisioning the poorest neighborhoods and a humanitarian law— the idea was still not fully formed—for managing the food that arrived each day in a way that would guarantee a minimum of nutrition to every Paris household. Sitting there bent over the table, immersed in these weighty issues, his figure cast a dark shadow on the gentle little garret. And sometimes a finch Florent had rescued one snowy day in the market would mistake the lamplight for daybreak and interrupt the silence with its chirp, the only interruption in the scratching noise of Florent's pen on paper.
As was his destiny, Florent returned to politics. He had been through