The Belly of Paris Page 10

  “But I'm not asking for anything,” Florent protested. “I don't want anything!”

  Quenu had known nothing of his wife's intentions. His face had become a bit pale and showed a slight touch of anger. Of course he loved his brother, but it was not really necessary to throw this question of his uncle's inheritance in his face. They could have broached the subject another time.

  “I understand perfectly well, my dear Florent,” Lisa started up again, “that you did not come back here just to claim what is yours. However, business is business; it's better to settle it right away. Your uncle's savings came to eighty-five thousand francs. I have therefore put into an account for you forty-two thousand five hundred francs. Here it is.”

  She showed him a figure on the sheet of paper.

  “Unfortunately, it's not quite that easy to determine the value of the shop, equipment, stock, clientele. I can only estimate, but I think I've figured it all out, and without any skimping. I've come up with a figure of fifteen thousand three hundred and ten francs, which for you comes to seven thousand six hundred and fifty-five francs. See for yourself.”

  She had recited the figures in a clear voice, and she now held out the sheet of numbers, which he felt obligated to take.

  “But wait a minute!” Quenu cried out. “Since when was the old guy's shop worth fifteen thousand francs? I wouldn't have given you ten thousand for it, myself.”

  His wife was beginning to annoy him. You didn't take honesty quite this far. It wasn't as though Florent had ever even mentioned the charcuterie. Besides, he didn't want anything, he had said so.

  “The charcuterie was worth fifteen thousand three hundred and ten francs,” Lisa calmly repeated. “You see, my dear Florent, there's no point in calling in a lawyer. It's up to us to share since you've come back. I started thinking about it the moment you showed up, and the whole time you were upstairs in a fever, I've been working on an inventory as best I could. You see, it's all set out in every detail. I looked through all our old papers and tried to remember as best I could. Read it out loud, and I will explain anything you'd like to know about.”

  Florent started to smile. He was amused by this honesty, which seemed to come so easily and naturally. He lay the sheet of figures on the young woman's lap. Then he took her hand.

  “My dear Lisa,” he said. “I'm very glad to see that you're doing so well. But I don't want your money. This inheritance is for my brother and you, who looked after this uncle to the last. I don't need anything, and I don't want to interfere in your business.”

  She insisted and even got a little angry, whereas Quenu sat in silence, biting his fingernails.

  “Besides,” said Florent, bursting into laughter, “if Uncle Gradelle could hear you, he'd find a way to come back and take the money away … He wasn't very fond of me, Uncle Gradelle.”

  “That's true, he didn't like you very much,” Quenu, at the end of his patience, muttered.

  But Lisa was still arguing. She said that she didn't want to have money that was not hers in her secretary, that it would always bother her, that she couldn't be at peace knowing it was there. But Florent continued to joke, offering to buy shares in the charcuterie. Besides, it wasn't that he was refusing their help, since there was little chance of his finding work right away, and then too he would need some clothes since he was not presentable.

  “There you are!” exclaimed Quenu. “You'll sleep with us, eat with us, and we're going to buy you everything you need. That goes without saying. My God, you didn't think we would throw you out in the street, did you?”

  Quenu felt emotional and even a little ashamed for having been alarmed at the idea of having to hand over so much money at once. He managed to joke, telling his brother that he was going to fatten him up. Florent nodded, and Lisa folded the sheet of figures and stored it in the secretary.

  “You're wrong,” she said to conclude the discussion. “I've done what I should have. Now it will be the way you want it. But as for me, I could not have lived in peace without making the offer, my conscience would have plagued me.”

  Then they talked about other things. Florent's presence had to be explained without attracting the attention of the police. He told them how he had managed to return to France, thanks to the papers of a poor devil who had died of yellow fever in Suriname. By an odd coincidence, this fellow had also had the first name Florent. Florent Laquerrière had only a female cousin left behind in Paris, and he had learned of her death while he was in America. Nothing could be easier than to pass himself off as the other Florent. Lisa offered to play the part of the cousin. They agreed to tell a story of cousin Florent returning from America, where he had failed to find his fortune, and they, the Quenu-Gradelles, as they were known in the neighborhood, were putting him up until he could find work. Once everything was settled, Quenu insisted on his brother taking a tour of the house down to every last stool. In the empty room, where there was nothing but chairs, Lisa pushed open a door, showed him a small dressing room, and said that the girl in the shop could sleep there and he could keep his room on the fifth floor.

  That evening Florent was suited up in new clothes. Against the advice of Quenu, who found them depressing, he insisted on having another black coat and black pants. They no longer tried to conceal Florent in the house, and Lisa told the story they had worked out to everyone who asked. He spent almost all of his time in the charcuterie, daydreaming on a chair in the kitchen or leaning against the marble in the shop. When they dined, Quenu tried to stuff him with food and became irritated at what a light eater his brother was, leaving half his food on the plate.

  Lisa had returned to her easy, kind ways, tolerating Florent's presence even in the morning when he was in the way. She was apt to forget about him, and then, when the figure dressed in black would suddenly appear, it would startle her. But she would somehow produce her beautiful smile so that his feelings would not be hurt. She was struck by this thin man's indifference, and she felt a combination of respect and fear. As for Florent, he felt surrounded by warmth and affection.

  At bedtime, he climbed the stairs, a little weary from his empty day, along with the two boys who worked in the charcuterie, who stayed in the attic eaves next to him. One of them, Léon, was barely fifteen years old, a thin boy with a sweetness about him, who stole the first cuts from hams and the forgotten ends of sausages. He hid them under his pillow and ate them at night without bread. A number of times Florent had the impression that Léon was hosting a banquet at about one in the morning. First came the sound of hushed whispering voices and then chewing and the crackling of paper, and then ripples of laughter, girlish laughter, would break into the still of the sleeping house.

  The other boy Auguste Landois, was from Troyes. Bulging with unhealthy fat and with an oversize head that was already balding, he was twenty-eight years old. The first night he went up the stairs with Florent, he told him his life story in a rambling, confused narration. He had come to Paris only to perfect his skills so he could open a shop back in Troyes, where his cousin Augustine Landois was waiting for him. They had the same godfather and he and she had been given the same first name. But he had grown ambitious in Paris and now hoped to set up shop in Paris, with the help of the money his mother had left him, which he had entrusted to a lawyer before leaving Champagne. At this point in the story they had reached the fifth floor, but Auguste delayed Florent on the landing to tell him how wonderful he thought Madame Quenu was. She had agreed to send for Augustine to replace a girl who had not worked out. Though he now knew the trade thoroughly, she was just beginning to learn. In a year or eighteen months, they would get married and set up a charcuterie in Plaisance or some busy Parisian neighborhood. There was no hurry to get married because pork fat products were not getting a good price that year. He went on to say that they had been photographed at a fair in Saint-Ouen. Then he went into the attic to have another look at the picture, which he had left on the mantel so the room for Madame Quenu's cousin would look nice. />
  For a moment, he was lost standing there in the pale yellow glow of a candle, studying the room in which that young woman still had a presence. Then he walked up to the bed and asked Florent if it was comfortable. She, Augustine, now slept downstairs and would be better off there. The attic was very cold in the wintertime. Finally he departed, leaving Florent alone with the bed and the photograph in which Auguste appeared as a pale Quenu and Augustine as an unripened Lisa.

  Florent, befriended by the boys, spoiled by his brother, and accepted by Lisa, ended up completely bored. He had looked for classes to teach but had not been successful. He had avoided the Quartier des Ecoles, where he was afraid of being recognized. Lisa had very gently suggested that he approach some of the commercial houses, where he might take care of the correspondence and keep the books. She kept coming back to this idea and finally offered to find him a spot herself. It was slowly getting on her nerves, seeing him not working and idly wondering what to do with himself. At first it was only a normal dislike of seeing someone dividing his time between eating and folding his arms. She wouldn't have dreamed of asking him to eat elsewhere, but she would say to him, “Personally, I couldn't bear spending all my time daydreaming. I can't imagine how you can feel hungry in the evening … you know, you need something to tire you out.”

  Gavard, for his part, looked for a job for Florent. But he looked in strange and suspicious ways. He wanted to find some employment that was dramatic, had bitter irony, or was in someway suitable for “an outlaw.” Gavard had a contrary nature. He was just over fifty and prided himself in having already witnessed the fall of four governments. Charles X, the clerics, the aristocrats, the rabble shoved out the door, all that simply made him shrug his shoulders. Louis-Philippe had been an imbecile with his myth of the citizen king who concealed big money in his wool stocking. As for the republic of ‘48, it was a farce. The workers had sold out, but he no longer even admitted to having supported the coup d’état because he now regarded Napoleon III as his personal enemy, a reprobate who locked himself up with de Morny13 and the others to indulge in orgies. He never tired of this theme. Slightly lowering his voice, he would declare that every evening women were taken to the Tuileries in closed carriages and that he himself had one night heard the sounds of the revelries as he was crossing the place du Carrousel.

  To be as much in opposition as possible to any government in power was Gavard's religion. He committed the greatest outrages he could imagine against the political system, only to laugh about them later. To begin with, he always voted for the legislative candidate who would make the most trouble for the government at the Corps Législatif.14 Then, if he could steal public money, cause the police to stumble, or start some kind of trouble, Gavard would try to give the affair as much of an air of insurrection as possible. Also, he lied a lot to make himself appear tremendously dangerous and talked as though “the crowd up in the Tuileries”15 knew him well and trembled at the thought of him. He maintained that the next time things blew up, half of that bunch would have to be guillotined and the other half sent into exile. His violent political stance was fed by braggadocio, in far-fetched stories that demonstrated the same cynicism that leads a Parisian shopkeeper to take down his shutters on the day of a riot so he can count the corpses in the street. So when Florent got back from Cayenne, Gavard immediately sensed an opportunity and looked for some way, spiritually, to play some trick on the emperor, the ministers, the people in power, all the way down to the lowly sergents de ville.

  Gavard took a hidden pleasure in Florent. He winked at him and spoke to him in a lowered voice when talking of the most banal things and clasped his hands with all sorts of Masonic secrecy. At last he had found his adventure. He knew someone who really was in danger, who could speak, without exaggeration, of the perils he had faced. He could feel the unstated fear of this young man who had come back from the penal colony, whose thinness testified to his long hardship, but this same delicious fear made Gavard think even more of himself, convinced that he was doing something truly shocking in treating this dangerous man as his friend. Florent became sacred. Gavard swore by him. Florent's name would be invoked if his argument needed support. He was attempting to crush the government once and for all.

  Gavard had lost his wife on rue Saint-Jacques some months after the coup d'état. He had kept his rotisserie until 1856. At that time, it was rumored that he had made a considerable amount of money in association with a neighboring grocery store owner from a contract to furnish the Army of the East with dried vegetables. The truth was that after having sold the rotisserie, he had had enough capital to live on for a year. But he didn't like to speak of the source of this revenue. That was awkward for him and kept him from speaking candidly about the Crimean War, which he characterized as dangerous adventurism “undertaken merely to consolidate the throne and fill certain pockets with money.”

  After a year, he was nearly dead from boredom in his bachelor quarters. Since he dropped by at the Quenu-Gradelles almost every day, he moved nearer to them on rue de la Cossonnerie. It was there that he fell in love with Les Halles, its roar of noise and constant exchange of gossip. He decided to rent a stall in the poultry market just to keep himself amused, to fill his days with idle market gossip. Now he could live a life of endless chitchat, stay on top of all the petty scandals of the neighborhood, fill his head until it was dizzy with gossip. He tasted a thousand rarified pleasures, at last in his element, diving into it with the sensual pleasure of a carp swimming through sunlight.

  Florent would sometimes visit him in his stall. The afternoons were still warm, and women sat plucking fowl along the narrow alleyways. Rays of sunlight fell between the awnings, and in the warmth, feathers slipped from fingers and looked like snowflakes dancing in the golden powder of sunbeams. Merchants shouted a long stream of sales pitches, offers, and seductions: “A beautiful duck, Monsieur? … Want to have a look … I have some really fine-looking fat chickens … Monsieur, Monsieur, don't you want to buy this pair of pigeons?”

  Florent managed to slip past, both embarrassed and deafened. The women continued plucking as they vied for his attention, and he was nearly suffocated by a cloud of down, thick as a puff of smoke with the stench of poultry.

  At last, in mid-alleyway by the water faucets, he found Gavard babbling away in shirtsleeves, his arms crossed over a blue apron. There Gavard ruled over a group of ten or twelve women like a benevolent prince. He was the only man in that section of the market. He had already been through five or six women to run the stall, all of whom had become angered by his long wagging tongue, so that he had decided he would run it himself, naively insisting that the problem was that the silly creatures wanted to pass the whole day gossiping and he could not control them. But since he did need to have someone to keep his place when he wasn't there, he had brought in Marjolin, who was drifting through the market trying out all the lesser positions Les Halles had to offer.

  Florent sometimes spent as much as an hour with Gavard, marveling at his endless babble and how confident he was surrounded by petticoats. Interrupting one woman, then picking an argument with another ten stalls away, and grabbing a customer from a third, he made more noise by himself than the hundred or so talkative neighbors who raised such a clamor that the steel girders thumped like tom-toms.

  The poultry seller's only relatives were a sister-in-law and a niece. When his wife had died, her older sister, Madame Lecœur, who had been widowed for a year, had mourned her in an exaggerated fashion, going every evening to console the bereaved husband. At the time she was entertaining the idea that she might somehow take the still-warm place of her dead sister. But Gavard could not bear thin women: he said it pained him to feel their bones under the skin. He didn't even pet cats and dogs unless they were very fat. He derived a personal satisfaction from the feel of round, well-fed backs.

  Madame Lecœur, her pride wounded, but worse, furious to watch all those hundred-sou coins the rotisserie brought in slipping from her gras
p, nurtured a deep grudge. Her brother-in-law became her enemy, and this animosity preoccupied her days. When she saw him set himself up in the market only two steps from where she sold her butter, cheese, and eggs, she accused him of having done it just to annoy her and bring her bad luck. From then on she was always complaining and turned so yellow and melancholy that she really did start losing customers and her business turned sour.

  For a long time she had been raising the daughter of one of her sisters; a peasant woman had sent her the child and never given her another thought. The child grew up in Les Halles. Since she was named Sarriet, which was her family name, she soon became known as La Sarriette. At the age of sixteen, La Sarriette was such an alluring young street wench that men would come and buy cheese just to see her. With her pastel face, dark brown hair, and eyes that burned like embers, she was not interested in gentlemen but preferred people from humbler classes. Finally she chose a fort from Ménilmontant who worked for her aunt. When she was twenty, she established a fruit-selling business with some funds from an unknown source, and from then on Monsieur Jules, as her lover was named, was seen with spotless hands, a clean shirt, and a velvet cap; and he came down to the market only in the afternoons, wearing slippers. They lived together on rue Vauvilliers on the third floor of a large house with a sleazy café on the ground floor. La Sarriette's ingratitude capped Madame Lecœur's growing bitterness, and she hurled barrages of scatological abuse at the girl whenever she spoke to her.

  The girl conspired with Monsieur Jules to invent stories that they spread throughout the butter pavilion. Gavard thought La Sarriette was funny and indulged her, stroking her cheeks whenever he ran into her. She was plump and succulent.

  One afternoon, while Florent was sitting in the charcuterie, weary from the useless trek he had made all morning in search of work, Marjolin entered. This chunky youth, with his Flemish blend of heft and sweetness, was Lisa's protégé. She would say that he had a complete absence of malice and was a little stupid, but was as strong as a horse and a bit interesting in that no one seemed to know anything about his mother or father. It was she who had gotten Gavard to give him a job.