The Belly of Paris Read online

  Mademoiselle Saget, who was thrilled by the scene, crossed rue Rambuteau with a light step with her head hidden deep in her black hat. In fact, her little feet barely touched the ground. She was carried by her delight as though caressed by a breeze. At last she had found out. After almost a year of aching to find out the truth, here she was, all of a sudden, entirely in possession of Florent. It was more than she had hoped for, like a cure for a disease, because she felt that she could have slowly burned herself out because of this man and for a long time held off death only with the strength of her curiosity. Now the whole Les Halles neighborhood belonged to her. There was no longer a missing piece. She could tell the story, shop by shop, on every street in the area. She uttered little sighs of pleasure as she entered the fruit pavilion.

  “Well, Mademoiselle Saget,” shouted La Sarriette from her fruit stand, “what's happened to you, laughing to yourself? Have you won the big pot in the lottery?”

  “No, no. Oh, my child, if you only knew.”

  La Sarriette looked irresistible, with the wildness of a beautiful woman amid all her fruit. The locks of her curly hair fell over her forehead like wild grass. Her bare arms and bare neck, every bare and pink part of her that she was showing, had the freshness of cherries and peaches. Just for the fun of it, she had hung cherries from her ears, black cherries that bounced against her cheeks when she leaned forward with earthy laughter. What was amusing her was that she was eating red currants in a way that was covering her from nose to chin in red juice. Her mouth was lipstick red from the red currant juice, as though she had been painted and perfumed with some cosmetic. A smell of plums came from her skirts, and her loosely tied scarf had the scent of strawberries.

  And mountains of fruit surrounded her in the narrow shop. Behind her were shelves of melons: cantaloupes, with warty little bumps; maraîchers, with their skin like gray lace; and culs de singe,6 with their smooth bare humps. The beautiful fruits were on display, delicately arranged with the roundness of their cheeks, half hidden in the baskets like faces of beautiful children, partly concealed by leaves. The peaches were especially beautiful, peaches from Montreuil with clear, soft skin like northern girls' and yellow sunburned peaches from the Midi, tanned like Provençal women. The apricots lying in moss had the amber glow of sunset shining on dark-haired girls. The cherries stacked in neat rows looked like the narrowed lips of smiling Chinese women; the Montmorency cherries like the chubby lips of fat women; the English cherries, longer and more serious; the heart cherries with dark flesh bruised by kisses; the bigarreaus with pink and white splotches and a smile both joyful and angry. The apples and pears were in piles as regular as architecture, tall pyramids with the flushed color of developing breasts, golden shoulders and hips—discreetly naked among the ferns. The apples all had different skins: the baby-soft pommes d'api, the shapeless rambourgs, the calville dressed in white, the ruddy Canadas, the blotchy-faced crab apples, and the freckly reinettes.

  Then came the pears, the blanquettes, the anglais, the beurrés, the messire-Jeans, the duchesses, either stubby or elongated with swan necks, yellow- or green-bellied, flushed with a touch of red. Beside them lay the plums, transparent and anemic with virginal softness. Greengage plums, a favorite of men, were as pale as the blush of innocence. The mirabelles, gathered like golden beads of a forgotten rosary, were stored in a box with sticks of vanilla beans.

  The strawberries exhaled a scent of youth, especially the smaller ones, which are gathered in the woods, rather than the larger garden variety, which give off the dull scent of a watering can. The raspberries added their scent to this pure fragrance. The currants, both red and black, and the hazelnuts all smiled with an air of confidence, while the baskets of grapes in weighty bunches, heavy with drunkenness, swooned over the edge of the trellis, their colors deepening in spots where they were touched by the sun's voluptuous warmth.

  This was where La Sarriette lived, in an orchard of intoxicating perfumes. The less expensive fruits—cherries, plums, strawberries— were piled in a flat, paper-lined basket in front of her. They bruised one another, staining the stand with juice, a strong juice that vaporized in the heat. On those sweltering July afternoons her head would spin with the powerful, musky odor of the melons. Then, slightly inebriated and showing some more flesh under her shawl, barely ripe and still fresh from springtime, her lips pouted: many had the urge to plunder those lips.

  It was she, it was her arms and her neck, that breathed life into the fruit with her satin-finished womanliness. One stall over, an elderly market woman, a terrible drunk, filled her display with shriveled apples, pears that sagged like empty breasts, and cadaverous apricots a foul witchlike shade of yellow. La Sarriette, on the other hand, gave her display a naked sensuality. You could imagine that the cherries had been placed in the stall one by one with kisses from her lips, that the peaches had fallen from her bodice, the plums had come from her softest skin—her temples, under the chin, the corners of her mouth. She had let her own blood run into the veins of the red currants. The heat of this beautiful woman excited the fruit that came from the earth, and they made love on a bed of leaves in the moss-spread nooks of the baskets. Compared to the smell of life that rose from her open baskets and disheveled clothes, the flower market behind her smelled dull.

  However, on this particular day, La Sarriette was in the throes of a shipment of mirabelles whose scent was overtaking the market. She could see that Mademoiselle Saget had some important news and she wanted to hear it, but the old woman was stamping around impatiently, shouting, “No, I don't have time. I'm on my way to see Madame Lecœur. But I have a good one. Come with me if you want.”

  The truth was that the only reason she had cut through the fruit pavilion was to get La Sarriette. And La Sarriette could not resist. Monsieur Jules was there squirming on a chair that was turned backward. He was clean-shaven and as fresh as a cherub.

  “Can you look after the shop?” she said to him. “I'll be back in a minute.”

  But he jumped to his feet and, as she was turning down the alleyway, shouted after her, “Hey, no, Lisette. You know I'm just about to leave. I don't want to get stuck here for an extra hour like happened last time. Besides, your plums give me a headache.” He sauntered off calmly with his hands in his pockets, leaving the shop unwatched.

  Mademoiselle Saget was forcing La Sarriette to run. At the butter market, a neighbor told them that Madame Lecœur was in the cellar. La Sarriette went down to get her while the older woman installed herself amid the cheeses.

  The cellars below were very dark; along the passageways the storage bins were protected against fire with fine-meshed wire netting. The gas jets, placed far apart, made yellow splotches in the air but did little to illuminate that humid, murky atmosphere, which grew thicker and thicker beneath the crushing weight of the roof.

  Madame Lecœur was working her butter on one of the tables under rue Berger. The gratings allowed some pale light to get in. The tables were continually being washed with water from the faucets so that they were as white as new. The butter merchant was kneading her mixture in an oak box at the far end with her back to the water pumps. She took samples of various kinds of butter that were beside her on the table and mixed them, adjusting the preparation with the addition of one or the other in much the same way as blends of wine are made. Bent over with her pointy shoulders, her thin, gnarled arms bare to the shoulders and looking like stakes, she was pounding her fist furiously into this mass of fat, which was now starting to get white and creamy. She was sweating, and she sighed with each stroke she took.

  La Sarriette said, “Mademoiselle Saget wants to talk to you, Aunt.”

  Madame Lecœur stopped and pulled her bonnet back over her hair with butter-covered fingers, not seeming to worry about grease spots.

  “I'm done. Just ask her to wait a moment,” she answered.

  “She's got something very interesting to tell you.”

  “Just wait a second, dear.”

 
She stuck her arms in again, and the butter was up to her elbows. Softened first in warm water, her parchment skin was oiled, which made the thick purple veins stand out like varicose ropes. La Sarriette was repulsed by such ugly arms laboring in the depths of the melting paste. She remembered this work. At one time she too had kept her lovely little hands buried in butter for entire afternoons. It had served as a substitute for hand cream, a lotion that kept her skin white and her nails pink and from which her well-formed fingers had become soft. After a silence she added, “This will not be a good blend, Aunt. Your butters are too strong.”

  “I know,” said Madame Lecœur with a grunt. “But what can I do? Everything's got to be used up. Some people want to buy cheap. So you have to make it cheap. It always ends up too good for the customers.”

  La Sarriette was thinking that she wouldn't want to eat butter mixed with her aunt's arms. She looked at a little jar containing red dye. “Your raucourt7 is too light,” she said.

  Raucourt is used to give butter a nice yellow color. Merchants are believed to keep its formula a closely guarded secret, but the truth is that it is simply made from the seeds of the raucou tree. It is also true that it is sometimes made from carrots and marigolds.

  “Come on, let's go,” said the young woman, whose patience was running out. Also, she was no longer used to the foul smell of the cellar. “Mademoiselle Saget may have left already. She must have something serious to tell us about Uncle Gavard.”

  Madame Lecœur stopped. She left the mixture and the raucourt. She did not even wipe her arms. She adjusted her bonnet again with a light tap and followed quickly on the heels of her niece, climbing the stairway, asking anxiously, “Do you think she didn't wait?”

  But she was reassured when she saw Mademoiselle Saget seated among the cheeses. She was not going to leave. The three women took seats in the back of the narrow shop. They were almost on top of one another, talking nose to nose.

  Mademoiselle Saget remained silent for a good two minutes; then, when she could see that the other two were burning up with curiosity, she said in her piercing little voice, “You know this Florent. Well, now I can tell you where he came from.”

  She let the words hang on her lips an instant longer.

  “He comes from the penal colony,” she finally said, lowering and deepening her awful voice.

  All around her, cheeses were stinking. Huge blocks of butter were lined up on the two shelves at the back of the shop. Brittany butter was overflowing from its baskets. Normandy butters, wrapped in canvas, looked like models of stomachs onto which some sculptor had thrown wet cloths to keep them from drying out. Other blocks, already in use, cut with large knives into jagged rocks with valleys and crevices, looked like landslides on a mountain gilded by the pale evening light of autumn. Under the gray-veined red marble display counter were baskets of chalk white eggs, and in their crates on straw pallets were bondons, end to end, gourneys8 arranged on a platter like medals, in darker colors with greenish tints. But most of the cheeses were piled up on tables, and there, next to the one-pound packs of butter, was an enormous Cantal cheese on beet greens, looking as if it had been chopped with a hatchet, then a golden Chester and a Gruyère that looked like the fallen wheel of a primitive wagon. From Holland, there were balls like decapitated heads smeared with dried blood with the hard shell of an empty skull, which has given them the name “têtes-de-mort.”9

  A Parmesan added an aromatic pungence to the heavy smell. Three Bries on round boards were sad as waning moons. Two very dry ones were full. The third, in its second quarter, was oozing, emitting a white cream that spread into a lake, flooding over the thin boards that had been put there to stem the flow. Port Saluts shaped like ancient discuses had the names of the producers inscribed around the perimeters. A Romantour, wrapped in silver paper, was reminiscent of a nougat bar, a sugary cheese that had strayed into the land of sour fermentation. The Roqueforts, under their glass bells, had a regal bearing, their fat, marbled faces veined in blue and yellow as though they were the victims of some disgraceful disease that strikes wealthy people who eat too many truffles. Alongside them were the goat cheeses, fat as a child's fist, hard and gray like the stones rams kick down a path when they lead the flock.

  And then there were the smells: the pale yellow Mont d'Ors released a sweet fragrance, the Troyes, which were thick and bruised on the edges, were stronger-smelling than the others, adding a fetid edge like a damp cellar; the Camemberts, with their scent of decomposing game; the Neufchâtels, the Limbourgs, the Marolles, the Pont l'Evêques, each one playing its own shrill note in a composition that was almost sickening; the Livarots, dyed red, harsh and sulfurous in the throat; and the Olivets, wrapped in walnut leaves the way peasants cover rotting carcasses of animals lying by the side of the road in the heat of the sun with branches.

  The warm afternoon had softened the cheeses, the mold on the rinds was melting and glazing in rich reds and greens of exposed copper, looking like badly healed wounds. The skin of an Olivet beneath an oak leaf lifted up and heaved like the chest of a sleeping man. A flood of life had made a hole in the Livarot, releasing a cluster of worms. And behind the scale in a narrow box was a Géromé seeded with anise that was so tainted that flies had dropped dead all around it on the veined red marble.

  This Géromé was almost directly under the nose of Mademoiselle Saget. She recoiled and leaned her head against the large sheets of yellow and white paper that hung by a corner at the back of the shop.

  “Yes,” repeated Mademoiselle Saget, grimacing with disgust, “He came from Cayenne … The Quenu-Gradelles don't have any reason to act so smug.”

  But Madame Lecœur and La Sarriette were crying out in surprise, “That can't be true! What would he have been sent to prison for? Who would have thought that Madame Quenu, whose impeccable character is the pride of the neighborhood, would have a convict for a lover?”

  “Well, you don't see it!” the old woman shouted impatiently. “Listen to me. I knew I'd seen that big oaf somewhere before.”

  She told them Florent's story. Now she remembered rumors going around at the time that one of old Gradelle's nephews had been sent to Cayenne for killing six gendarmes at a barricade. She had even seen him once on rue Pirouette. And this was him, all right. That was the so-called cousin. She started feeling sorry for herself, complaining that she was losing her memory, she was through and soon would remember nothing at all. She bemoaned this memory loss like a scholar who sees a lifetime of notes being scattered in the wind.

  “Six gendarmes!” sputtered La Sarriette with admiration. “He must have a hard fist, that one.”

  “That's probably not all he has,” Mademoiselle Saget added. “I would advise you not to meet him at midnight.”

  “What a thug!” stammered Madame Lecœur, completely overcome.

  The sun angled into the pavilion, making the cheese smell even stronger. At this point the Marolles were particularly powerful. They let out a smell like the stink of an uncleaned stable into the dull smell of butter. Then the wind shifted and the three women were struck by a deadly whiff of Limbourg, bitter and sour like the breath of a dying man.

  “But wait a minute,” Madame Lecœur said, returning to the subject. “If he is Fat Lisa's brother-in-law … then he's not sleeping with her.”

  They stared at one another, surprised by this new side of the case of Florent. It was annoying to have to change the original version. The old spinster shrugged her shoulders. “That wouldn't necessarily stop him … It does seem a bit much … but I wouldn't put anything past him.”

  “Oh, well,” said La Sarriette. “That's an old story, anyway. He wouldn't still be sleeping with her, since you've seen him with both the Méhudins.”

  “Absolutely. As sure as I'm standing here looking at you, my sweet!” Mademoiselle Saget cried, annoyed that she was being questioned. “Every evening he's there in the Méhudins' skirts. But what do we care? He can sleep with whomever he likes, don't you think? As for u
s, we're respectable women. What a rogue he is.”

  “He certainly is,” the other two agreed. “He's as sly as they come.”

  Now the story was becoming tragic. They were feeling sorry for poor Lisa. There was nothing to do but wait for Florent to bring about some terrible calamity. Of course he was up to some evil. People like that escape only to breathe fire wherever they go. He certainly wouldn't have come to Les Halles if he were not planning something. The most extraordinary plots were proposed as to his likely mission. The two shopkeepers declared that they would put an additional padlock on their storage areas. La Sarriette recalled that just the other week a basket of peaches had been stolen from her. But Mademoiselle Saget terrified them by informing them that this was not the way the “reds” operated. They didn't care about baskets of peaches. They organized into groups of two or three hundred, killed everyone, and then helped themselves to whatever they wanted.

  “That's their approach,” she said with the superiority of someone who knows. Madame Lecœur was starting to feel queasy. She could picture Les Halles in flames with Florent and his cohorts hiding deep in a cellar, ready to spring on Paris.

  Suddenly the elderly woman said, “Now that I think about it, there is the inheritance from old Gradelle. My, my, the Quenus have nothing to laugh about.”

  Now she was happy. The gossip continued. They started talking about the Quenus, and she told the story of the treasure in the salting tub, which she knew down to the most petty detail. She could even cite the figure of eighty-five thousand francs, though neither Lisa not her husband could recall telling this to a single soul. It didn't matter. The point was that they had not given “the skinny man” his fair share. He was too poorly dressed. Maybe he didn't even know the story about the salting tub. The whole bunch of them were thieves.