The Belly of Paris Page 24
This was how their long walks went. When Cadine was walking around by herself with her bouquets of violets, she filled out the itinerary, going back to certain shops she particularly liked, especially the Taboureau bakery, of which an entire window was devoted to displaying cakes. She worked up and down rue de Turbigo, retracing her steps ten times so that she could pass by almond cakes, Saint-Honoré cakes, savarins, flans, fruit tarts, platters of babas,4 éclairs, and cream puffs. She was especially taken with the pickling jars filled with cookies, macaroons, and madeleines. The bright bakery had large mirrors and marble and gilded ornaments, wrought-iron bread racks, and a second window where long glazed breads stood on one end on a crystal shelf, the other end leaning against a brass rod. When overcome by temptation, she would buy herself a brioche for a couple of sous.
There was another shop across from the square des Innocents that awakened the unrequited longings of her gluttonous searching. The shop specialized in meat turnovers. She would stop to reflect on the classic turnover but also pike turnovers and turnovers of foie gras and truffles. She would stand there motionless, dreaming of how someday she really must try one of them.
Cadine also had her vain moments and then she would imagine fantastic dresses that could be made for her from the window display at Fabriques de France, which adorned the pointe Saint-Eustache with great swaths of bright fabric, draped from the mezzanine to the street. Slightly hampered by her tray of violets among the women of Les Halles, who brushed their dirty aprons against her Sunday-bests of the future, she stroked the wools, the flannels, and the cottons, to make sure of the weave and suppleness of the material. She promised herself a flannel dress in vivid colors or a flowered cotton or a scarlet poplin. Sometimes she even chose from the windows displays. Among the draped fabrics set out by the window dresser, she would choose a soft pale silk in sky blue or apple green and imagine how she would look wearing it with pink ribbons.
In the evening she would stand in the glitter of the big jewelers on rue Montmartre. This harrowing street deafened her with its unending traffic and jostled her with its relentless wave of people. But nothing could make her move from her spot, and her eyes filled with the flaming splendor under the row of lamps in front of the shop. First there were the smooth bright white lights illuminating the silver: rows of watches and hanging chains, silverware displayed in crosses, cups and snuff boxes, napkin rings and combs, laid out on the shelves. She especially liked the silver thimbles, with their domes rising along the porcelain shelves, all covered by a glass dome. Then on the other side the amber glow of gold turned yellow in the mirrors. A panel of long chains hung like a curtain. Small ladies' watches draped over their boxes like fallen stars. Wedding rings were threaded on thin wire. Bracelets, brooches, and valuable jewels sparkled on the black velvet of their cases. Rings glowed with quick flames of blue, green, yellow, or mauve in their chubby square boxes, and all the shelves, in two or three rows, were arranged with earrings, crucifixes, medallions, decorating the glass cases with all the richness of an altar cloth. The reflection of such golden wealth shone out halfway across the street, as bright as sunshine.
To Cadine, there was something holy about this place displaying the emperor's treasures. She spent a long time staring at the kind of jewelry the fish vendors bought, carefully studying the price tag attached to each piece, written in large numbers. She decided on pear-shaped earrings made of artificial coral, dangling from golden roses.
One morning Claude happened upon her, mesmerized in front of a hairdresser's on rue Saint-Honoré. She was fraught with envy as she stared at the hair. High in the window hung manes and tails, unfastened plaits, cascading waves in three tiers, a flood of curls and silks with glowing red locks, thick blacks, and pale blonds, all the way to white hair for sexagenarian lovers. Lower in the window, discreet curls, tight ringlets, combed and scented locks and waves slept in cardboard boxes. In the middle of this picture, as if deep inside a chapel, under the fringe of springing curls, the bust of a woman was revolving. The woman wore a cherry red satin scarf fastened between her breasts with a copper brooch and a high bridal headdress adorned with orange blossom branches. She smiled with her doll mouth. Artificially long lashes stuck out stiffly from her light eyes. Her waxy cheeks and shoulders looked as though they had been smoked over gas. Cadine waited for her to come around again with that smile of hers, and her pleasure grew as the profile sharpened and the beautiful woman slowly turned from left to right.
Claude was indignant. He shook Cadine and demanded to know what she was doing in front of this trash, “this dead woman taken from a morgue.” He ranted against the nudity of the cadaver, the ugliness of this beauty, saying that women did not even wear their hair like that anymore.
But the little girl remained unconvinced and insisted that the woman was beautiful. Then, yanking herself away from the painter, who held her by one arm, and scratching her thicket of black hair with annoyance, she pointed out to him an enormous tail of red hair that had been torn from some sturdy, handsome horse and insisted that that was the kind of hair she wished for.
When all three of them—Claude, Cadine, Marjolin—went on their wanderings around Les Halles, they caught a glimpse of a steel giant at the end of every street. There were sudden glimpses at unexpected angles defining the horizon. Claude would turn around, especially on rue Montmartre after they had passed the church. Seen from a distance at the right angle, Les Halles filled him with enthusiasm. The broad arcade and a tall gaping doorway would appear and the pavilions crowded one on top of another with their two lines of roofs, their row of jalousies. It seemed that the profiles of houses and palaces had been superimposed to create an immense oriental metal structure, as delicate as the hanging gardens of Babylon, crisscrossed by descending terraces of roofs, passageways, and flying bridges.
They always went back to this, the city where they loved to roam, never straying more than a hundred yards from its center. They meandered back to the warm afternoon of Les Halles. Above, the shutters were closed, the blinds lowered. In the covered galleries, the air slept—an ash gray air with yellow stripes of sunlight cutting across it from the high windows. Soft sounds drifted through the market, the footsteps of busy pedestrians rang out from time to time from the pavement, while the porters, wearing their badges, sat in a row on the stone borders in the corners of the pavilions, taking off their heavy boots and tending their aching feet.
This was the peace of a colossus at rest, broken by the occasional cock's crow from out of the darkness of the poultry cellars. They would often go to see the wagons that came in the afternoon to collect the empty baskets and carry them back to the suppliers. The baskets, labeled with black letters and numbers, were piled into mountains in front of the pawnshops on rue Berger. The men built the piles systematically, and when a tower of baskets on a wagon was a story tall, the man on the ground balancing the baskets had to take a wide swing to toss them up to his coworker, who was perched on the top with his arms outstretched to catch them. Claude, who enjoyed displays of strength and dexterity, would spend hours watching the flight of wicker, laughing when an over-ambitious throw sent a basket soaring over the top and landing on the other side.
He also enjoyed the fruit market at the corner of rue Rambuteau and rue du Pont-Neuf, where a few of the vegetable merchants were based. Vegetables in the open air, spread out on tables covered with damp black cloth, delighted him. At four o'clock sunlight streamed across these patches of green, and he walked down the rows, pleased to take note of the different-colored faces of the vendors—the young women with their hair pulled back into nets, already sunburned from their hard lives, and the old ones, broken and shrunken and red-faced under their yellow head scarves.
Cadine and Marjolin stopped following Claude if they saw Mère Chantemesse in the distance, shaking a fist at them, angered at the sight of them dawdling around together. Claude would meet them across the street, where he found a glorious subject for a painting: vendors under their
large faded blue, red, and violet umbrellas on poles. They were little knolls of color dotting the market, catching the fire of the setting sun in their domes, a sun that was fading away on the carrots and turnips. One vendor, an old hag about a hundred years old, was sheltering three scrawny lettuce heads under a sad worn-out pink silk umbrella.
One day while Léon, the apprentice at the Quenu-Gradelle charcuterie, was delivering a meat pie in the district, Cadine and Marjolin ran into him. They saw him raise the lid of a baking crock in a dark corner of rue de Mondétour and delicately extract a meatball with his fingers. They grinned at each other, for it had given them a fine and mischievous idea. Cadine devised a plan to fulfill one of her greatest ambitions. When she next met the boy with his baking dish, she was very friendly and she got him to offer her a little meatball. She licked her fingers and laughed. She might have been a little disappointed, for she had imagined that it would taste better than it did. But nevertheless, the boy amused her, dressed all in white like a girl on her way to communion but with a cunning, hungry face.
She invited him to a gigantic lunch that she was giving within the baskets of the butter market. The three of them—Marjolin, Léon, and herself—sealed themselves off from the world in four walls of wicker. The table was set on a large flat basket. There were pears, walnuts, fromage blanc,5 shrimp, fried potatoes, and radishes. The fromage blanc came from the fruit stand on rue de la Cossonnerie. It was a gift. A fry shop on rue de la Grande-Truanderie had sold them two sous' worth of fried potatoes on credit. The rest—the pears, the walnuts, the shrimp, the radishes— were stolen from all over Les Halles. It was a grand banquet. Léon could not rest until he had returned the favor, so he invited them to dinner in his room at one in the morning. He served cold boudin, slices of dried sausage, a piece of petit salé, some cornichons, and goose fat. The Quenu-Gradelle charcuterie had supplied everything. And that was not all. Fine suppers followed delicate lunches, invitations upon invitations. Three times a week they had intimate little parties amid the baskets or in the attic. On sleepless nights Florent could hear the muffled sounds of chewing and laughter until nearly daybreak.
The love between Cadine and Marjolin was still growing. They were completely content. He played the gentleman and took her dining in a private room, where they crunched on apples or celery hearts in some shadowy corner of a basement. One day he stole a pickled herring, which they savored on the roof of the seafood pavilion, sitting on the edge of a gutter. There was hardly a shadowy recess of Les Halles where they had not enjoyed their tender banquets. The neighborhood, the rows of shops full of fruits and cakes and tidbits, was no longer the forbidden paradise where they displayed their hunger and desire. They passed the displays with a hand stretched out to pilfer a prune, a fistful of cherries, or a chunk of cod. They also got supplies from within Les Halles, keeping an eye out in the rows of the market, grabbing anything that fell, sometimes helping make things fall with a nudge of the shoulder to a basket of merchandise.
But despite these raids, a serious debt was accruing at the fry shop on rue de la Grande-Truanderie. The fry man, whose shop was propped up by a rickety house supported by planks that were green with moss, kept cooked mussels swimming in clear water at the bottom of a large earthen casserole, dishes of little dabs, yellow and stiff with too thick a breading, cubes of gras-double6 simmering at the bottom of the skillet, and grilled herring, blackened and so hard that it made a sound like a piece of wood.
Some weeks Cadine owed as much as twenty sous, a crushing debt that required the sale of an indeterminable number of bouquets of violets because she could not count on Marjolin for anything. But she had to repay Léon's hospitality. As a matter of fact, she was a little ashamed that she never had any meat to offer him. As for Léon, he stole entire hams. Normally he stashed everything inside his shirt. At night when he went upstairs, he pulled out of his chest pieces of sausage, slices of pâté de foie gras, and bundles of pork cracklings. There was no bread, and they did not drink. One evening Marjolin caught Léon kissing Cadine between two bites of food. It made him laugh. He could have knocked the little boy out with one punch. But he did not get jealous over Cadine. He treated her like an old friend.
Claude did not take part in these parties. He caught Cadine stealing a beet from a little straw-trimmed basket, and he boxed her ear and called her a bum. “That's that,” he then said. He could not help feeling a kind of admiration for these sensual creatures, scroungers and gluttons who lived for the pleasures of the moment, picking up the crumbs that fell from the giant's table.
Marjolin was working for Gavard, content to have nothing to do but listen to an endless stream of stories from his boss. Cadine still sold her little bouquets and was resigned to the griping of Mère Chantemesse. Their childhood continued, shamelessly and indulgently, laced with their innocent vices. They had become a kind of vegetation growing up from the greasy pavement of Les Halles, where even in the best of weather the mud was always black and mucky. The girl at sixteen and the boy at eighteen still retained the great impudence of the young, who can openly urinate on fences.
But troubling dreams stirred in Cadine as she walked down the street twisting the stems of her violets. Marjolin also felt an uneasiness that he could not explain. Sometimes he slipped away from his little girl, skipped their meanderings, even missed some of the parties, to instead go and look at Madame Quenu through the charcuterie window. She was so beautiful, so full, so round that it made him feel good just to look. He experienced a sense of gratification whenever he saw her, as though he had just eaten something delicious or had a good drink. And when he left, he had a hunger and a thirst to see her again. This had gone on for several months.
At first he had shot her the kind of respectful glances he gave to the window displays of grocery stores and markets for salt-cured foods. But then, around the time they started raiding the market for food, when he looked at her he started to imagine taking her thick waist and ample arms into his arms, as though plunging his hands into an olive barrel or a cask of dried apples.
For some time, Marjolin had seen Beautiful Lisa every morning. She walked past Gavard's shop and paused to chat with the poultry seller. She told him that she did her own shopping to make sure she got good prices. But the truth was that she was trying to get Gavard to trust her. In her charcuterie he was very guarded, but in his own shop he held court and told anyone anything they wanted to know. Through him, she believed, she could find out what went on at Monsieur Lebigre's, for she had little confidence in her own secret police, Mademoiselle Saget. The information she got from this horrible old gossip troubled her deeply.
Two days after her scene with Quenu she returned from her shopping trip looking very pale. She motioned for her husband to follow her into the dining room. After shutting the door she asked, “Is your brother trying to send us to the gallows? Why did you hide information from me?”
Quenu swore that he knew nothing. He made a solemn declaration that he no longer went to Monsieur Lebigre's and was never going back there.
But she shrugged and said, “That's a good thing unless you want to lose your head. Florent is mixed up in something bad. I can feel it. I've learned just enough to figure out where he's headed. He'll go back to the penal colony, you know.”7
After a silence she continued in a calmer voice, “What a fool. Here he was sitting pretty. He could have become an upstanding citizen again. He was surrounded by good role models. But no, there's something in his blood. He's going to break his neck with his politics. I want all this to stop. Do you understand, Quenu? I've warned you.”
She said the last words with particular emphasis. Quenu lowered his head, awaiting sentencing.
“First of all, tell him that he can no longer eat here. It's enough he gets a place to sleep. But he earns money, and he can feed himself.”
He started to protest, but she cut him off with “Fine, choose between him or us. I swear to you, I will leave and take my daughter with me if he sta
ys. Do you want me to finally say it? He's a man who is capable of anything, and he has come here to wreck our home. But I'll fix that, I promise you. You've heard me. It's him or me.”
She left her husband silenced and went back into the charcuterie, where she served up a pound of foie gras with the friendly smile of the neighborhood charcuterie woman.
Gavard, in the course of a political discussion that she had slyly drawn out, had gotten worked up enough to tell her that she would soon see everything razed to the ground, that it would take only two men of real determination such as her brother-in-law and himself, to burn her shop down. This was the bad thing that she had told Quenu that Florent was mixed up in. There was some conspiracy to which the poultry man was constantly alluding with a furtive look and a sly grin, from which he hoped a great deal would be inferred. She could picture a detachment of sergents de ville forcing their way into the charcuterie, seizing the three of them— herself, Quenu, and Pauline—and throwing them into a dungeon.
That night at dinner she was an iceberg. She didn't even serve Florent, and several times she commented, “Isn't it funny how much bread we seem to be going through lately?”
Eventually Florent understood, feeling like a poor relative being shown the door. For the past few months Lisa had been dressing him in Quenu's old pants and coats, and since he was as skinny as his brother was fat, the clothes looked very odd on him. She had also been giving him Quenu's old linens, handkerchiefs mended in dozens of spots, ripped towels, sheets good only to be torn into dishrags, threadbare shirts stretched out by his brother's potbelly and so short that they would have worked better as jackets. Nor did he sense the warmth of earlier times. The entire household shrugged their shoulders at him, exactly the way they had seen Lisa do. Auguste and Augustine would turn their backs on him, and little Pauline, with the viciousness of a child, ridiculed him for the spots on his clothes and the holes in his linen. For the last few days mealtime had been particularly painful. He would see both mother and daughter glaring at him so hard while he cut a piece of bread that he didn't dare to eat it. Quenu gazed at his plate and avoided looking up so that he would not have to participate.