The Belly of Paris Read online

  “One evening the man sank up to his waist. With each effort to pull himself out, the mud seemed to rise to his mouth. He remained quietly for almost two hours. Just as the moon rose, he was fortunately able to grab a tree branch over his head.

  “When he finally reached a dwelling, his hands and feet were bruised and bleeding and swollen with poisonous bites. He was so piteous and starving a figure that he was frightening to look at. They tossed some food for him fifty steps away from their house, and the owner stood guard at the doorway with a rifle.”

  Florent stopped talking his voice cut off, his eyes with a far-off stare. He seemed to no longer be talking to anyone but himself. Little Pauline was falling asleep and had tried to prop her head back while lying in his arms, trying to force her wondering eyes to stay open. Quenu was irritated.

  “You dumbbell!” he shouted at Léon. “Don't you know how to hold a sausage casing? What are you looking at me for? Don't look at me. Look at the casing! There! Just like that. Now, don't move!”

  Léon was holding up a long ribbon of casing with his right hand. A funnel had been inserted into one end. With his left hand he coiled the boudin on a round metal platter as rapidly as Quenu could stuff the funnel with big spoonfuls of the filling. The filling ran, black and steamy, from the funnel, slowly filling out the casing, which dropped down filled and softly curled. Quenu had removed the pot from the fire, and Léon and Quenu, the thin-featured boy and the broad-featured man, stood in the stark glow of the stove, which heated their pale faces and white clothing to a rosy hue.

  The operation attracted the interest of Lisa and Augustine. Lisa in particular criticized Léon for pinching the sausages too tight and, she said, causing knots to form. When the casing was completely filled, Quenu slid it into a pot of boiling water. He seemed relaxed again, with nothing left to do but let it cook.

  “And the man, the man,” Pauline was muttering, opening her eyes again and surprised to find that her cousin was no longer speaking.

  Florent rocked her on his knee and began again in a murmur, like a nurse singing a baby to sleep.

  “The man,” he said, “came to a large town. He was immediately taken for an escaped convict and spent several months in prison. Then he was released and took up a variety of trades. He kept books and taught children to read and even hired out as a laborer digging earthworks. But always the man dreamed of returning to his country. He managed to save the necessary money. Then he got yellow fever. He was thought to be dead, and everyone divided up his possessions so that when he recovered he did not have so much as a shirt. He had to start all over. The man was very weak and was afraid he would have to stay there, but finally he made it back.”

  Florent's voice became lower and lower and at last faded into a last quiver of the lips. Little Pauline was asleep, sent off by the end of the story, her head fallen against her cousin's shoulder. He held her with one arm and gently rocked her on one knee. Since no one seemed to pay any more attention to him, he remained there without moving, holding the sleeping child.

  Now for the last round, as Quenu liked to put it. He took the boudin from the pot. So that it would not break or tangle, he drew it out by rolling it around a thick wooden stick and then took it into the courtyard, where it was hung on screens to dry rapidly. Léon helped him, lifting up the ends when a piece was too long. The pungent garlands of blood sausage left a trail of strong steam that thickened the air. Auguste shot one last glance at the pots of melted lard and lifted the lids off, each bursting bubble releasing acrid steam. The haze of grease had been rising slowly since the beginning of the evening. Now it was drowning the gaslight, taking over the room, covering the ruddy pale color of Quenu and his two assistants. Lisa and Augustine had stood up, and they were all huffing and puffing as though they had eaten too much.

  Augustine carried the sleeping Pauline upstairs in her arms. Quenu, who preferred to close the kitchen himself, sent Léon and Auguste off to bed, saying that he would put the boudin away himself. The apprentice went off very red-faced, having managed to hide in his shirt almost a yard of boudin, which was doubtless scalding him. Then Quenu and Florent were alone, saying nothing. Lisa, standing up, tasted the boudin, but it was very hot and she took little nibbles, careful not to burn her pretty lips, and the piece vanished bit by bit into her rosy mouth.

  “Oh, well,” she said, “the Norman was rude and wrong. The boudin is very good today.”

  There was a knock at the back door. Gavard, who spent the evenings until about midnight at Monsieur Lebigre's, had come for a final answer about the job of fish inspector.

  “You have to understand that Monsieur Verlaque cannot wait any longer, he's really too sick … Florent has to make up his mind. I promised to give my answer first thing in the morning.”

  “But Florent accepts,” Lisa calmly answered, taking one more nibble at her boudin.

  Florent, who had still not gotten out of his chair as he felt oddly dejected, tried in vain to raise a hand in protest.

  “No, no,” insisted Lisa, “it's settled … You see, my dear Florent, you have already suffered enough. What you have just been telling us makes a person shudder. It's time for you to settle down. You come from a respectable family, you've had a good education, and it is really inappropriate for you to be wandering like a vagrant. You're too old for childishness. You've been foolish, but all that is forgotten and forgiven now. You can return to your social class, the class of respectable people, and finally live the way everyone else does.”

  Florent listened, astounded, unable to find words to speak. No doubt she was right. She looked so healthy and serene that she could not possibly want anything but what was good. He was the one, the skinny man with the dark and undependable face, who must be in the wrong, indulging in unworthy dreams. He no longer knew why he had been resisting up until now.

  But she was not through with her flood of words, speaking to him as though he were a little boy who had been bad and was being threatened by the police. She was very maternal and found very persuasive arguments.

  And the final argument:

  “Do it for us, Florent,” she said. “We have a certain standing in the neighborhood that requires us to act appropriately. To be honest, just between us, I'm afraid that people will begin to talk. This job fixes everything. You'll be someone. You'll even improve our standing.”

  She became tender, and Florent felt surrounded by prosperity. It was as though he were permeated by the smell of the kitchen, the nourishment of all the food that had been loaded into the air. He slid into the happy lethargy that is brought on by eating well and living in fat, as he had for the past fifteen days. He felt a tingling on his skin, the seduction of fat slowly invading his entire being, rendering him soft and easy like a contented shopkeeper. At this late hour of night, in this overheated room, all his bitterness and determination melted away. He felt so indolent in the calm of the night, adrift in the scent of boudin and lard, by the chubby Pauline asleep in his lap, that he found himself wishing for more, for an endless succession of such evenings, slowly fattening him.

  But more than anything, the sight of Mouton made up his mind. Mouton was in a deep sleep, belly up, one paw on his nose, his tail wrapped around his side as though it were a quilt, and he slept with that feline sense of well-being. Florent looked at him and said, “No! In the end it's just too stupid … I accept. Tell him I accept the position, Gavard.”

  Lisa finished her piece of boudin, slowly wiping her fingertips on the end of her apron. She readied her brother-in-law's candle while Gavard and Quenu praised him for his decision. After all, there had to be an end to all this. Political fanatics get nothing to eat. And as for her, standing with the candle lit, she looked at Florent with satisfaction in her lovely face, as peaceful as the smile of a golden calf.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Three days later the formalities were finished and the prefecture accepted Florent on Monsieur Verlaque's recommendation, almost without looking, as his replacem
ent. Gavard had wanted to accompany Florent, and when they were alone again on the sidewalk, Gavard kept poking him in the ribs with his elbow, laughing without saying anything, winking his eye cunningly. The police he met on the quai de l'Horloge suddenly seemed absolutely ridiculous, and he tensed up slightly the way someone does to avoid laughing in a person's face.

  The following morning, Monsieur Verlaque began to brief the new inspector on his duties. It was arranged that he would take Florent around for the next few days and introduce him to the stormy arena that he would have to oversee. Poor Verlaque, as Gavard called him, was a pale little man, who constantly coughed and walked on the spindly legs of a sickly child through the cool damp air and puddling water of the fish markets, wrapped in flannels, scarfs, and handkerchiefs.

  The first morning, when Florent started at seven o'clock, he felt lost, his head pounding and his eyes dazed. Stall keepers were already stalking the auction pavilion, clerks arrived with ledgers in hand, and shipping agents with leather bags hung around their necks sat backward in chairs against the sales booths while they waited to get paid. The fish was being unloaded and unpacked in the enclosure, spreading out to the sidewalks, where there were piles of small baskets. Hampers, bins, and bags of mussels trailing water arrived without end. The auction checkers, very businesslike, leaped over the piles, yanked off the straw coverings, emptied the baskets, then tossed them aside with a sweep of the hand that shook up the fish in their two-handled round baskets and showed them to their best advantage. Once the baskets were all out, it looked to Florent as though a huge school of fish had run aground on the sidewalk, still quivering in opalescent pink, bloodred coral, milky pearl, all the greenish silken pastels of the sea.

  Jumbled together by the chance scoop of a fishing net, in the mysterious depths the great sea had given up everything: codfish, haddock, flounder, plaice, dabs—common fish, murky gray with white splotches; eels—thick murky blue snakes with black slits for eyes, so slimy they seemed to still be alive and slithering. The wide, flat skates had a pale underbelly edged with soft red and an upper side marbled along a bumpy back down to the ribbing of the fins, a cinnabar red striped with Florentine bronze, in the somber palette of toads and poisonous flowers. There were roundheaded, horrible dogfish with their mouths gaping like Chinese gargoyles and short fins the shape of bat wings—fitting monsters to stand guard over treasures in ocean grottoes.

  Then came the deluxe fish, displayed individually on wicker trays: the salmon, gleaming like well-buffed silver, each scale with its outline seemingly etched by a burin on a polished metal plate; the mullets with the cruder markings of larger scales; the large turbots and mullets with tight white patterns like curdled milk; the tunas, smooth and lustrous, like bags of sleek blackened leather; and roundish bass with huge mouths torn wide open, as though to let an oversize spirit escape at the agonizing moment of death. And everywhere there were soles, beige or gray in pairs. Stiff, slim sand eels looked like pewter shavings. The herring were slightly twisted, with the bruises on their bleeding gills showing against the silver skin. Fat porgies were tinged with a touch of carmine red, whereas the mackerel were golden with green-striped backs and sides with a mother-of-pearl glow, and the pink gurnard,1 with their white bellies, lay with their heads in the center of the baskets so their tails radiated around and made an odd blossom of pearly white and vibrant red. There were also red mullets with exquisite flesh, with the blush of pink characteristic of the Cyprinid family, and the opalescent glow of boxes of whiting. And there were smelts in small, clean baskets like the pretty little ones used for strawberries, which released a strong scent of violets. Meanwhile, the little pink shrimp and the gray shrimp sharpened the softness of their piles with sharp little black dots of a thousand eyes. The spiny lobsters and the clawed lobsters striped black, still alive, made a grating sound as they tried to crawl off with their broken limbs.

  Florent only half listened to Monsieur Verlaque's lengthy explanations. A sunbeam streamed through the glass roof of the covered lane, lighting up the rich colors, washed and softened by the waves, the iridescent hues of the shellfish, the opalescence of the whiting, the pearly mackerel, the gold of the red mullets, the lamé suits of the herring, the great silvery salmon. It was as though the jewelry boxes of a sea nymph had been opened there—a tangle of unimaginable baubles, heaps of necklaces, monstrous bracelets, gigantic brooches, huge barbaric gems of no imaginable purpose. On the backs of skates and dogfish seemed to be huge dull green and purple stones set in some dark metal, while slender sand eels and the tails and fins of smelts suggested the delicacy of fine jewelry.

  But what struck Florent most was a fresh breeze, a whiff of the sea, that he recognized, bitter and salty. He recalled the Guianese coast and the fine days of his crossing. He half imagined staring at some bay in high tide with its algae baking in the sun, the bare rocks drying, and the strong breath of the sea. All around him, the fresh fish smelled good, with a sharp, bitter perfume that disturbed the appetite.

  Monsieur Verlaque coughed. The dampness was going through him, and he wrapped himself more tightly in his muffler. “Now,” he said, “we're going to go by the freshwater fish.”

  This pavilion, next to the fruit market, was the last one before rue Rambuteau. On either side of the auction space were circular tanks divided into compartments by iron gratings. Brass faucets in the shape of swans spouted thin streams of water. And the compartments were full. There was a tangled swarm of shrimp, constantly moving carp with black backs, and tangles of eels perpetually knotting and unknotting themselves. Monsieur Verlaque was taken by a stubborn coughing bout. The dampness was milder here, and there was a soft scent of rivers and of tepid water asleep on the sand.

  That morning, a huge quantity of crayfish had arrived in crates and baskets from Germany. The market was also flooded with whitefish from England and Holland. Some workers were unpacking shiny carp from the Rhine, all bronzed in beautiful rust-colored metallic, each scale like a piece of cloisonné enamel; others with huge pike, the coarse iron gray brigands of the water with long, protruding savage jaws; or magnificent dark tench,2 red copper stained with the blue green of corroded copper. Amid the glow of metallic skins, the baskets of gudgeon,3 perch, and trout—the dull flat-netted fish—took on a brilliant white appearance, the steel blue of their backs gradually fading away to the soft transparency of their bellies, and the fat snow white barbel4 providing the shimmer to this vast still life.

  Bags of young carp were being gently emptied into the tanks; the carp flipped over, then remained still for an instant before darting away and disappearing. Little eels were dumped from their baskets in a clump and fell to the bottom of the boxes like a single knot of snakes, while the big ones, thick as a child's arm, raised their heads and then slid under the water, slick as snakes hiding in the brush. Meanwhile, the rest of the fish, whose agonizing death in the soiled wicker trays had been lasting the entire morning, at last perished with great silent gasps every few seconds, opening their mouths as though trying to suck in the humidity from the air amid the shouts and cries of the auction.

  But Monsieur Verlaque had brought Florent back to the saltwater fish, where he walked him around and explained intricate details to him. Along three sides of the pavilion, where there were desks for nine salesmen, the crowd surged with swaying heads, and clerks appeared above them, perched in high chairs from which they marked entries in their ledgers.

  “Are all these clerks working for the same salesmen?” Florent asked. In reply, Monsieur Verlaque took a detour along the sidewalk outside, which led him to one of the enclosures used for auctioning. He explained to him how the large office made of yellow wood, stained in splotches and stinking of fish, was staffed. At the top of the glassed-off room, the municipal fee collector took notes on the sale prices of the different lots of fish. A little lower down, seated on raised chairs with their wrists resting on high little desks, were two women clerks who monitored the transactions on behalf of the salesme
n. At each end of a stone table in the front of the office was an auctioneer who brought out the straw trays and stated prices per lot or per fish, while above him the women clerks, pen in hand, waited to hear the final prices. Monsieur Verlaque showed Florent the cashier, a fat old woman outside the enclosure, shut up in another yellow wooden office, arranging piles of coins.

  “You see,” said Monsieur Verlaque, “there's a double control, the Prefecture of the Seine and the Prefecture of Police. The latter licenses the salesmen and maintains the right of supervision over them, while the local prefecture has an interest in the transactions since they are taxable.”

  He continued in his cold, feeble voice, explaining the competing interests of the two prefectures. But Florent was barely listening; his attention had been drawn to one of the female clerks in front of him on a high chair. She was a tall, brown-haired woman of about thirty with big black eyes and a great deal of composure. She wrote with outstretched fingers, like a young woman who had been carefully instructed.

  But his attention was again diverted by the bellowing of the auctioneer holding a magnificent turbot.

  “I hear thirty francs! That's thirty francs! Thirty francs … at thirty francs!”

  He repeated these words in various voices, up and down a strange scale of notes with abrupt changes. Hunchbacked, with a crooked face and disheveled hair, he wore a huge blue apron with a bib. With eyes aflame and arms outstretched he shouted, “Thirty one! Thirty-two! Thirty-three! Thirty-three fifty! Thirty-three fifty!”