The Belly of Paris Read online

  “This is the disreputable record of a man who has never managed to make a home. I understand why he wants to hear gunshots. He can go stand in their path for all I care, but let him leave decent folk and their families alone. Then too, I just don't like him. At night at the table he smells of fish. I can't eat my food. He, on the other hand, never skips a bite, for all the good it does him. His bad instincts feed on him so that he can't even gain a few pounds.”

  While she was speaking, she went to the window. And now she saw Florent crossing rue Rambuteau on his way to the fish market. A huge shipment of fish had arrived that morning. Baskets were filled with rippling silver, and the auction room roared with the commotion of selling it all. Lisa kept her eyes fixed on her brother-in-law's bony shoulders as he made his way through the overwhelming smells of the market, stooped by the nauseating odors. Her stare as she followed his steps was that of a fighter ready for combat and determined to win.

  When she turned around, Quenu was getting up. Still warm from the pleasant shelter of the quilt, he sat at the edge of his bed in his nightshirt, his feet resting on the fluffy rug. He looked pale and upset by the misunderstanding between his wife and brother. But Lisa gave him one of her loveliest smiles. And he was moved when she handed him his sock.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Marjolin had been found at the Marché des Innocents asleep on a pile of cabbages under an enormous white cabbage whose broad leaves had flopped over, hiding his rosy face. No one knew whose wretched hands had placed him there. He was already a sweet little boy of two or three when he was found, chubby and full of life, but so backward, so slow, that he barely managed a few words. All he could do was smile. When a vegetable seller found him underneath the big white cabbage, she let out a shriek that was so loud, her neighbors rushed over to see what was wrong and watched with wonder as the child, still in baby clothes and wrapped in a scrap of old blanket, reached out his arms to embrace her.

  He wasn't able to say who his mother was. His eyes were wide with astonishment as he clung to the shoulder of the tripe merchant who had picked him up. He was the focus of the market until nightfall. He felt reassured and ate buttered bread, and he smiled for all the women. The hefty tripe seller took him for a while, then gave him to a neighbor, and a month later a third woman took him in.

  When someone asked, “Where's your mama?” he would make an adorable gesture, a sweep of his hand that included every woman in sight. He was a child of the market, always clinging to the skirts of one woman or another, eating where he found a meal, clothed by the grace of God, and somehow he always had a few sous in the bottom of his threadbare pocket. A handsome redheaded girl who sold medicinal plants named him Marjolin, though no one knew why.

  When Marjolin was nearly four years old, Mère Chantemesse happened to find a child, a little girl, on the sidewalk of rue Saint-Denis by the corner of the market. The little thing looked to be about two years old. She was already chattering like a magpie, strangling words in her incessant childish babble. But Mère Chantemesse was able to glean that her name was Cadine and that her mother had left her sitting in a doorway the night before with instructions to wait for her return.

  The child had slept there and did not cry. She said that she had been beaten at home, and she seemed happy to follow Mère Chantemesse, enchanted by the large square full of so many people and so many vegetables. Mère Chantemesse, who sold retail, was a kind old witch, nearly sixty years old. She loved children and had lost three boys of her own when they were babies. She thought, “This little character is far too tough to die on me.” So she adopted Cadine.

  But one evening, as Mère Chantemesse was leaving, holding Cadine's right hand, Marjolin came up and unceremoniously took the little girl's left hand.

  “Well, young fellow,” said the old woman, stopping. “This place is taken. Have you given up Thérèse? You're getting a reputation as a flirt, you know.”

  The boy looked at her, smiling and not letting go of the girl's hand. But he looked so pretty with his curly hair that she couldn't remain stern. “Well, come along then, you little rascal. I'll put you to bed too.”

  And so she arrived at rue au Lard, where she lived, with a child in each hand. Marjolin made himself at home at Mère Chantemesse's. She smacked the two children when they got too noisy. She delighted in having them to shout at and get angry with and tuck into bed beneath the blankets. She had made them a little bed in an old street vendor's wheelbarrow with the wheels missing. It resembled a big cradle, a little bit hard and still smelling of vegetables that had long been stored there, cool and fresh under a damp cloth. And there, only four years old, Marjolin and Cadine slept in each other's arms.

  They grew up together, always seen with their arms around each other's waists. At night Mère Chantemesse would hear them chatting softly. For hours Marjolin listened with gasps of astonishment to endless tales told in Cadine's melodious voice. She was very mischievous, inventing stories to scare him, telling him that the other night she had seen a man all in white at the foot of their bed staring at them and sticking out a large red tongue. Marjolin, breaking into a sweat, asked for details. Then she laughed at him, calling him a “big dodo.”

  Other times they were silly and kicked each other under the bedding, Cadine snickering as she pulled her legs up to her chest so that Marjolin, striking with all his might, missed her and struck the wall. When that happened, Mère Chantemesse had to go and straighten out the covers, sending them both off to sleep with little smacks around the ears.

  For a long time their bed was a playground. They took their toys into it along with stolen carrots and turnips. Every morning their adopted mother was surprised to find various strange objects there, including stones, leaves, apple cores, and dolls made of rags. On the most bitterly cold days, she would leave them there sleeping all day, Cadine's shock of black hair mingled with Marjolin's blond curls, their mouths so close to each other that they seemed to keep each other warm with their breath.

  This room on rue au Lard was a big, shabby attic with only one window, which was clouded with rain spots. The children played hide-and-seek in the tall walnut wardrobe and under Mère Chantemesse's colossal bed. There were also several tables under which they would crawl on all fours. There was a charm to the place, dimly lit, its dark corners littered with vegetables.

  Rue au Lard was also fun. It was a narrow street with little traffic and a large arcade that opened onto rue de la Lingerie. Their house was actually right next to the arcade with a low doorway and a door that only half opened to show the greasy steps of a winding staircase. This gabled house, which swelled outward at every story stained dark with dampness and adorned with greenish casing around the drainpipes, was, to them, one more huge toy.

  Cadine and Marjolin spent their mornings tossing stones up into the gutters and listening to the happy clanking as they fell down the drainpipes. But they broke two windows and clogged the gutters with rocks, so that Mère Chantemesse, who had lived in the building for forty-three years, was nearly thrown out.

  Then Cadine and Marjolin moved on to the delivery vans, pushcarts, and wagons parked on the deserted street. They climbed on the wheels, balanced on the chains, and gallivanted among the piles of boxes and hampers. This was also the back lot of the commissioners on rue de la Poterie, opening onto huge, somber storage rooms that smelled of dried fruit, oranges, and fresh apples. When they had enough of all this, they went off to find Mère Chantemesse in the Marché des Innocents.

  They arrived there arm in arm, laughing as they crossed the streets through the traffic without the least fear of being run over. They knew the pavement well, burying their little legs up to the knees in vegetable refuse but never slipping. They made fun of the heavy-booted porters who would slip on an artichoke stem and be sent sprawling on the ground. They were rosy-cheeked elves, habitués of the slimy streets, and they were seen everywhere.

  When it rained, they walked somberly under a tattered parasol that had shaded Mère C
hantemesse's stall for twenty years. Planting it at a corner of the market, they called it their house.

  On sunny days they galloped with so much energy that by the end of the day they could barely move. They bathed their feet in the fountain, dammed up the gutters, hid themselves in piles of vegetables, and stayed there chatting away, just as they did in bed at night. People passing a huge pile of smooth-leaved lettuce or romaine often heard their muffled chitchat. And when the greens were removed, the two children would be revealed lying side by side on their salad couch, eyes glistening nervously like those of birds caught in a bush.

  By this time Cadine could not bear to be without Marjolin and Marjolin cried if he was apart from Cadine. If they became separated, they looked for each other behind every vendor's skirt, behind every box, under every cabbage. It was most especially under the cabbage that they grew up and where they came to love each other.

  When Marjolin was nearly eight and Cadine six, Mère Chantemesse started scolding them for their laziness. She told them that she would take them into her vegetable business and pay them a sou a day if they would trim the vegetables. At first the children were very enthusiastic. They set up on either side of the big basket, with slender knives and eagerly worked away. Mère Chantemesse specialized in peeled and trimmed vegetables. On a table spread with a damp black wool cloth, she lined up potatoes, turnips, carrots, and white onions, arranged in pyramids, three at the base and one on top, all ready to be tossed into the pot of a busy household. She also had bundles tied with string for pot-au-feu1— four leeks, three carrots, one parsnip, two turnips, two ribs of celery. There were also thinly chopped vegetables laid out on sheets of paper, and quartered cabbages, piles of tomatoes, and slices of pumpkin looking like red stars and gold crescents next to all the other pale vegetables washed in running water.

  Cadine proved to be much more skillful than Marjolin, even though she was younger. She could cut such a thin peel from a potato that you could see daylight through it. She tied the pot-au-feu bundles so prettily that they looked like bouquets of flowers. And she knew how to make a pile of vegetables look large even though it contained only three carrots and three turnips. Passersby would stop and laugh when she called out in her little waif's voice, “Madame, Madame, come over here. Only two sous a pile.”

  She had her regulars, and her little piles were well known. Mère Chantemesse, seated between the two children, laughed a private laugh that made her bosom rise almost to her chin, to see them working away with such earnestness. She religiously paid them their daily sou. But in the end they grew bored with making the little pyramids. They were growing up and looking for more lucrative work. Marjolin remained a child for a long time, which tried Cadine's patience. “He has the brains of a cabbage,” she would say. And, if truth be told, it was pointless for her to come up with a money-earning plan for him, as he never earned any. He could not even do a simple errand. But she was extremely shrewd. When she was eight, she was hired by one of the women who sat on a bench in the Les Halles neighborhood with a basket of lemons and enlisted street children to work the area, hawking them. She held the lemons in her hands, selling them two for a sou, running after passersby shoving the merchandise under women's noses. When her hands were empty, she hurried back for more. She earned two sous for every dozen lemons she sold, and in good weather she could earn five or six sous a day.

  The following year she sold bonnets for nine sous, which was an even better business except that she had to be on her guard because that kind of street vending was illegal without a license. But she could smell the police a hundred steps away, and the bonnets vanished under her skirts while she nonchalantly munched on an apple.

  Then she started selling cakes, cookies, cherry tarts, almond croquets, little corn cakes, thick and yellow, on wicker trays. But Marjolin ate most of her inventory.

  Finally, at the age of eleven, she carried out the big idea that she had long contemplated. She saved up four francs in two months' time and with it bought a basket to carry on her back, and she started selling chickweed.2

  This was a lucrative business. She got up early in the morning and bought chickweed from the wholesalers—birdseed on stalks and seed cakes. Then she set out, crossing the river, touring the Latin Quarter from rue Saint-Jacques to rue Dauphine up to the Luxembourg Gardens. Marjolin went with her. She did not want him even to carry the basket. She said he was fit only to call out, so he shouted in his thick drawl, “Chickweed for the li'l birdies!”

  Then Cadine, her voice melodious as a flute, would take up the call in a strange musical passage ending on a clear deep note, “Chickweed for the li'l birdies.”

  They took to opposite sides of the street, both looking up in the air. At the time Marjolin had an oversize red jacket that went down to his knees. It had belonged to the late Monsieur Chantemesse, a cabdriver. Cadine wore a blue-and-white plaid dress, made from an old skirt belonging to Mère Chantemesse.

  They were known to every canary in every garret of the Latin Quarter. As they passed by, repeating their call, all the cages started singing.

  Cadine also sold watercress. “Two sous a bunch! Two sous a bunch!” Marjolin would run into the shops and offer “beautiful watercress, good for your health.”

  The central market had just been built, and the two would stand and stare awestruck at the lane of flower vendors that ran through the fruit pavilion. There on both sides along the market stalls, like the edges of a garden, blossoms burst in huge bouquets. It was a perfumed harvest, a double hedge of roses, through which the neighborhood girls loved to pass, smiling, faint from the overpowering fragrance, with shelves of artificial flowers above, paper flowers with drops of glue that looked like dew, funeral wreaths with black and white pearly beads that gave off a bluish glow. Cadine widened her rosy nostrils with the sensuousness of a cat, stopping in the sweet air and soaking up all she could from the perfume. When Marjolin caught a scent of her hair, he would say that it smelled of carnations. She claimed that she no longer needed to use anything for her hair, she had only to pass down that alley.

  She managed to land a job working for a flower vendor. Once she started the new job, Marjolin found that she had the most wonderful smell from head to toe. She lived among the roses, the lilacs, the lilies of the valley. He would playfully sniff at her skirts, pretending to reflect deeply, and finally pronounce, “Ah, yes, lily of the valley.”

  Then he would rise to her waist, sniff even harder, and declare, “This smells of wallflowers.”

  Then, at her sleeves and her wrists, “And this smells of lilacs.”

  At the back of her neck and at her throat, her cheeks, her lips— “That smells of roses.”

  Cadine laughed and called him a dodo, and cried out for him to stop because the tip of his nose tickled her. Her breath smelled of jasmine. She was a warm, living bouquet.

  Now the young girl got up at four in the morning to help her employer with the purchases. Every morning they went to suburban gardens to buy armfuls of flowers, packages of moss, and bunches of ferns and periwinkle branches with which to surround bouquets. Cadine was enthralled by the daughters of the wholesale gardeners of Montreuil, with their jewels and lace, surrounded by bouquets.

  On the most popular saints' days—Mary, Peter, and Joseph— sales started at two o'clock. More than a hundred thousand francs in cut flowers were sold on the street, and a vendor could make two hundred francs in a few hours. On those days all that could be seen of Cadine was a frizz of hair above the bouquets of pansies, mignonettes, and daisies. She was drowned, lost under the flowers. All day long she was hanging flower arrangements on bamboo sticks.

  In only a few weeks she had mastered a skill with her own graceful style. Her bouquets did not suit everyone's tastes. They could make you smile, or they could upset you with an unintended savageness. Reds dominated, mingled with blues, yellows, and purples, creating a barbarous charm.

  On mornings when she pinched Marjolin, teased him to the brink of tears
, she made ferocious bouquets, the bouquets of an angry girl, with strong perfumes and garish colors. Other mornings, when she felt sad or joyful, her bouquets showed silvery gray, subtle with a soft perfume. Other times she used roses, bloody as a heart slashed open, swimming in a lake of white carnations with irises sticking out wildly like flames among the greens, like a Smyrna carpet with a complicated pattern created flower by flower, like painting a canvas, spreading out with the delicacy of lace. There would be a bouquet of an engaging purity, then a plump nosegay, whatever could be dreamed of, for the hand of a fish seller or a marquise, the awkwardness of a virgin and the sensuality of a girl. In other words, her bouquets revealed all the endearing and quaint fantasies of a twelve-year-old girl in whom womanhood was dawning.

  There were only two flowers that Cadine respected: white lilacs, which in winter cost fifteen to twenty francs for a bunch of eight or ten branches, and camellias, which were even more expensive and came in boxes of a dozen on a bed of moss covered with cotton wool. She handled them the way you would handle jewels, gingerly, without breathing, afraid of wilting them with a sigh, and with painstaking care attached their short stems to bamboo sticks. She spoke of them with great gravity.

  She told Marjolin that a good white camellia, without any rust spots, was a rare and beautiful thing. One day she held one up for him to admire, and he said, “Yes, that's nice, but I would rather have that spot under your chin there, right there. It's prettier and more delicate than your camellia. The blue and pink veins are like the veins in a flower petal.”

  Then he touched her with his fingertip and sniffed her. “Funny. Today you smell of orange blossoms.”

  Cadine had a difficult personality. She was not suited for the role of employee. Finally she managed to set up her own business. She was then only thirteen years old and couldn't even dream of having a large-scale enterprise such as her own stall along the flower alley. So she sold bouquets of violets for a sou apiece, which she displayed on a bed of moss in a bamboo tray that hung from her neck. She wandered all day in Les Halles and the neighborhood, carrying her little garden.