The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [88]
Next came lunchtime espionage. Each knew the other's eating habits in detail, down to digestion. In the afternoon, the one seated among prepared meats and the other among her fish, they posed, taking great pains to be devastating in their beauty. The Beautiful Norman embroidered, choosing the most delicate and demanding needlework, which exasperated Beautiful Lisa.
“She'd be better off,” Lisa said, “mending her son's socks so he wouldn't go barefoot. Just look at that fine lady with her red hands stinking of fish.”
Lisa, on the other hand, usually knit.
“She's still on the same sock,” the other one commented. “She eats so much that she dozes off while working. I feel sorry for her poor cuckolded husband if he's waiting for those socks to warm his feet.”
Into the evening the two remained implacable, each noting the other's customers with keen eyes down to the most minute details, while other women said they could see none of this at such a distance. Mademoiselle Saget could not help but admire Madame Quenu's extraordinary eyesight when she noted a scratch on the left cheek of the fish vendor one day. “With eyes like those,” she said, “you could see through a door.” Often night fell without a decisive victor. Sometimes one was clearly down, but the next day she would get her revenge. Neighbors started waging bets, some putting their money on Beautiful Lisa and others on the Beautiful Norman.
They ended up forbidding their children to speak to each other. Pauline and Muche had been good friends despite Pauline's stiff petticoats and perfect-little-lady demeanor and Muche's foul mouth and tendency to act like a wagon driver. When they played together on the sidewalk by the fish market, Pauline always pretended to be a handcart. But one day when Muche went to Lisa's house looking for his playmate, with no idea that there was a problem, Lisa sent him away, saying that he was a street tramp.
“You never know what children brought up like that might do,” she said. “He's such a bad example that I worry what his influence might be on my child.”
The child was seven years old.
Mademoiselle Saget, who happened to be there, said, “You're absolutely right. He's always running around with little girls in the neighborhood. Once he was found in a basement with the coal seller's daughter.”
When Muche came home crying, the Beautiful Norman was furious. She wanted to run over to the Quenu-Gradelles' and wreck their shop immediately. Instead she gave Muche a beating. “If you ever go back there,” she shouted in a rage, “you'll answer to me for it!”
But the real victim of these two women was Florent, who in truth was the one who had set off this war. They wouldn't even be fighting if it wasn't for him. Ever since he had arrived, things had gone badly. He was the one who had compromised, angered, and disturbed this world, which until then had been sleepily peaceful. When he spent too much time with the Quenus, the Beautiful Norman wanted to claw him. Simply because of her rivalry with Lisa, she had to win Florent over. Meanwhile, Beautiful Lisa presented a judicial bearing when confronted with her brother-in-law's bad conduct, allowing his relationship with the Méhudins to become a neighborhood scandal. She was extremely annoyed, though she tried not to let her jealousy show. It was an odd jealousy, considering her disapproval of Florent and the appropriate coldness toward him that decency required. Yet she became exasperated every time he left the charcuterie to go to rue Pirouette, and she imagined the forbidden pleasures that he tasted there.
Dinner at the Quenus' became less cordial. The prim dining room took on an acidic character. Florent could sense reproach, a kind of condemnation in the white oak setting, the too-polished lamp, the too-new carpet. He could barely bring himself to eat for fear of dropping bread crumbs. Still he had a bright-eyed simplicity that prevented him from seeing clearly. He still told everyone how sweet Lisa was, and in fact, on the surface, she did still appear to treat him with great kindness.
One day