The Belly of Paris Read online

  But the others seemed to drink up his every word. Charvet, faced with Florent's clothes hanging from every hook, would pretend not to know where he could hang his hat without getting it dirty. He shoved back the papers that were scattered around and said that they could no longer feel at home there since “this ‘monsieur’ has taken over everything here.” He even complained to the wine merchant, asking him if the room was for everyone or just one customer. This invasion of his domain was the final blow. Men were just dumb animals, after all. It gave him tremendous contempt for the human race to watch Logre and Monsieur Lebigre with their eyes fixed on Florent. Gavard exasperated him with his revolver. Robine, who remained silent behind his mug of beer, seemed to him the most solid one of the group. No doubt he judged men by their true value and not their words. As for Lacaille and Alexandre, they confirmed his belief that people are too stupid and need to live under a revolutionary dictatorship for at least ten years to learn how to act.

  Logre confirmed that all the sections would soon be completely organized. Florent began to give out assignments. Then one night, after a final discussion in which he again came out the loser, Charvet got up, grabbed his hat, and said, “Good night to you all. Go get your heads beaten in, if that's what you want. But I won't be there, you understand? I have never worked for anyone's personal ambition.”

  Clémence, who was putting on her scarf, added coldly, “The plan is inept.”

  And since Robine was watching them with a gentle look, Charvet asked if he was coming with them. Robine, who still had three fingers of beer left in his mug, thought it would be enough to offer a handshake. The couple never came back. Lacaille learned one day that Charvet and Clémence had started frequenting a brasserie on rue Serpente. He had seen them through the window gesticulating a great deal, surrounded by an attentive group of very young people.

  Florent was never able to enlist Claude. There was a moment when he fantasized about indoctrinating Claude with his political ideas, making him a disciple who could help him in the work of his revolution. With this in mind, one evening he took him to Monsieur Lebigre's. But Claude spent the evening doing a sketch of Robine, with his hat and his brown coat, his beard resting on the knob of his cane.

  Leaving with Florent, he said, “No, you see, all those things you were talking about in there are of no interest to me. Maybe it's brilliant, but it goes right by me. You have that outstanding fellow there, Robine. He's deep as a well, that one. I'm coming back, but not for the politics. I want to sketch Logre and do another of Gavard, to put them with Robine into a fantastic painting that came to me while you were discussing the question of—how was it you put it—the question of the two chambers, wasn't that it? Can't you picture it, Gavard, Logre, and Robine talking politics from behind their beer mugs? It would be the hit of the Salon, my good friend, a tremendous success, true modern painting.”

  Florent was saddened by Claude's skepticism about politics. He made him come up to his room, and they talked until two in the morning on the narrow balcony facing the blue vastness of Les Halles. He questioned and instructed, gave him a catechism, telling him he was less than a man if he was indifferent to the well-being of his country.

  The painter shook his head and answered, “You may be right, I am selfish. I can't even say that I paint for my country, in the first place because everyone who looks at my paintings is horrified, and in the second place because when I am working on a painting, I think only of pleasing myself. It is as though I tickle myself when I paint. It makes my whole body laugh. What do you want? It's just the way I'm built. I'm not going to throw myself in the river over it. Also, France does not need me, as my aunt Lisa is always pointing out. And if you will excuse me for being frank … the reason I like you is that you approach politics exactly the way I approach painting. You like to tickle yourself with it, my friend.”

  When Florent tried to deny it, Claude continued, “Wait a minute. You're an artist in your own field. You dream politics. I imagine you spend entire evenings here, gazing at the stars, interpreting them as infinity's ballots. Then you tickle yourself with your ideas of justice and truth. It's also true that your ideas, like my paintings, strike terrible fear into the hearts of the bourgeoisie. And furthermore, just between you and me, do you think I would have any fun being your friend if you were Robine? Ah, no, great poet that you are.”

  Then Claude started joking around, saying that politics didn't bother him anymore, that he had gotten used to them in the brasseries and the studios. While on the subject, he told Florent of a café on rue Vauvilliers, the café on the ground floor of the building where La Sarriette lived. That smoky room had booths upholstered in worn velour and marble tables yellowed by coffee spills mixed with rum. It was the usual place for the modern young people of the neighborhood to meet. There Monsieur Jules reigned over a crowd of porters, shop boys, and the white shirt and velvet cap crowd.11 At either temple a curl was glued to his cheek. Every Saturday he had his neck shaved to keep it white at a barber's on rue des Deux-Ecus, where he paid by the month. He set the tone, playing billiards with a studied grace, employing his hips, bending his arms and legs, nearly lying over the edge in a position to best use his loins. When the game ended, it was time for talk. The crowd was very reactionary and very materialistic.

  Jules read the fluffy newspapers. He knew the people in the small theater world, talked with familiarity about the celebrities of the day, and always knew which plays had bombed and which had been cheered in the previous night's openings. But he had a weakness for politics. His ideal was Morny12 as he liked to call the duc de Morny. He read the annals of the sessions of the Corps Législatif and laughed merrily at Morny's most trivial comments. Morny ridiculed those dumb republicans. Then he would go on to say that only the scum of society hated the emperor, because the emperor cared for the well-being of all respectable people.

  “Sometimes I go to their café,” Claude told Florent. “That bunch is very funny too with their pipes, talking about balls at court as though they were ever invited. That little fellow who goes around with La Sarriette, you know, he made fun of poor old Gavard the other night. He calls him ‘uncle.’ When La Sarriette came downstairs looking for him, she had to pay his bill because he had lost all his money between drinks and billiards. Pretty girl, that Sarriette, isn't she?”

  “Ah, what a nice life you lead,” said Florent, smiling. “Between Cadine, La Sarriette, and all the others.”

  The painter shrugged. “You see, that's where you are mistaken. I don't want women. They upset everything too much. I wouldn't even know what to do with a woman. I've always been afraid to find out … Good night, sleep well. If you ever become a government minister, I would like to give you a few ideas for the beautification of Paris.”

  Florent had to give up on his plan to make Claude a disciple. That saddened him because despite his fanatic's blindness, he was beginning to sense a growing hostility around him. Even at the Méhudins' he was received a little more coldly. The old woman was cackling under her breath. Muche no longer listened to him. The Beautiful Norman treated him with curt impatience when she moved her chair close to him and he wouldn't respond. Once she said that he acted as though he were displeased with her, and when he only managed to respond with an embarrassed smile she angrily moved over to the other side of the table. And he had lost the friendship of Auguste. When the boy went up to bed, he never stopped in Florent's room anymore. Auguste was very frightened by the stories circulating about this man with whom he had spent so much time late at night. Augustine made him swear not to be so foolish anymore. But Lisa managed to end the friendship completely when she asked them to delay their marriage until the cousin had relinquished his upstairs room. She didn't want to put the new shopgirl into the tiny room on the first floor.

  From that moment Auguste longed for “the expulsion of the jailbird.” He had found his dream charcuterie not in Plaisance but a little farther away in Montrouge. Smoked pork products had become profitabl
e items, and Augustine had said that she was ready, laughing in that chubby-girl way she had. Every night Auguste would lurch out of sleep at the slightest sound, feeling a surge of false hope, thinking the police had come for Florent.

  At the Quenu-Gradelles' no comment was ever made about these things. The staff of the charcuterie had a tacit understanding to shroud Quenu in silence. Quenu, saddened by the rift between his brother and his wife, consoled himself by stringing his sausages and salting his strips of pork fat. He sometimes went to the doorway of the shop to air his thick ruddy skin, which laughingly bulged out of the tight white apron stretched across his belly. He never realized how his appearance at the door always stirred up the Les Halles gossip mill. People sighed for him. People found that he was losing weight, overlooking the fact that he was enormously fat. On the other hand, there were those who accused him of being too fat, considering the shame he should be feeling for having a brother such as his.

  Like a cheated husband, who is always the last to learn of his misfortune, he had an impenetrable ignorance that kept him in a happy frame of mind as he stopped some neighbor on the street to inquire after her Italian cheese or her pig's head in aspic. The neighbor would always assume a look of condolence, as though all the pigs in his charcuterie were suffering from jaundice.

  One day he asked Lisa, “What's going on with all these women? They look at me as though we were at a funeral. Do I look ill or something?”

  She reassured him that he looked fresh as a rose, because he had a terrible fear of illness, moaning and disrupting the entire household with the least sniffle. But the truth was that the handsome Quenu-Gradelle charcuterie was becoming a gloomy place—the mirrors looked pale, the marble was white as ice, the cooked meats on the counter lay sleeping under a cover of yellow fat or sitting in lakes of troubled jelly Even Claude dropped in one day to tell his aunt her display looked “all agitated,” and it was true. The stuffed tongues from Strasbourg on their bed of blue shredded paper had white spots like the tongues of sick people. The fine yellow faces of the jambonneaux looked sickly, garnished with sorry wilted green pom-poms. Furthermore, customers never came into the shop to ask for a link of boudin or six sous' worth of saindoux without lowering their voice as though in the room of a dying man. There were always two or three despondent-looking women lingering by the cooled-off warming oven.

  Beautiful Lisa supervised the charcuterie-in-mourning with perfect dignity. She smoothed her white apron over her black dress with even more than the usual correctness. Her clean hands were clasped at the wrists by long sleeves, and her face was even more lovely with this proper sorrow, all of which sent a clear message to the neighborhood and all the inquisitive women who stopped there from morning until night that they were the victims of undeserved misfortune, but that knowing the cause of it, she would triumph in the end. Sometimes she would bend down and with her eyes reassure the two goldfish who swam joylessly in their aquarium that better days were coming.

  Now Beautiful Lisa allowed herself only one pleasure. She could chuck Marjolin under his satin chin without fear. He had just returned from the hospital with his skull restored, as fat and happy as ever—but stupid, even stupider than before, in fact a complete idiot. The blow seemed to have gone to his brain. He was stupid as an animal. With the body of a Goliath, he had the mentality of a five-year-old. He laughed and lisped, completely failing to pronounce some words, and was as obedient as a lamb. Cadine once more completely took him over, shocked at first but then thrilled with this wonderful pet with whom she could do as she liked. She would bed him down in a basket of feathers, take him to romp and play in the streets, use him according to her whims as a dog, a doll, or a lover. He was her cookie, a delicious little part of Les Halles, blond flesh available for whatever she wished. But though the girl took all he had and kept him trained at her heel, a submissive giant, she could not keep him from going back to Madame Quenu's. She would pummel him with her fists. He didn't even feel it. As soon as she slung her flower tray over her neck and left with her violets down rue du Pont-Neuf or rue de Turbigo, he wandered around in front of the charcuterie.

  “So come in!” Lisa would shout out to him.

  Usually she would give him cornichons. He loved them and ate them at the counter with his childish giggle. He was overcome by the sight of this beautiful woman, and it made him clap his hands together with joy Then he would hop around the shop letting out little shrieks, like a street child confronted with something exquisite.

  At first she had been afraid that he would remember. “Does your head still hurt?” she would ask.

  He said that it didn't and he balanced and swayed merrily. Gently she pushed on: “What happened? You fell?”

  “Yes. Fell. Fell. Fell,” he started singing to a happy tune as he started smacking his head.

  Then seriously and with excitement he started repeating the word “Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful.”

  Lisa was deeply moved. She urged Gavard to take him and look after him. It was when he sang his song of simple tenderness that she would stroke him under the chin and tell him that he was a good boy. Her hand would linger there for an instant, warmed by a discreet pleasure, a sign of friendship, accepted by the giant with a child's trusting eyes. He would bend his neck a bit and close his contented eyes like an animal being petted. In order to convince herself of the respectability of this pleasure she indulged in with him, Lisa told herself that she was making it up to him for the blow she had dealt him in the poultry cellar.

  But the charcuterie remained a sorrowful place. Florent occasionally ventured in to shake his brother's hand, in the face of Lisa's icy silence. Sometimes, not very often, he would even dine there on a Sunday. Quenu would make a tremendous effort to be jolly but he never managed to bring any warmth to the meal. He ate badly and ended up angry. One evening after one of these frigid family reunions, almost in tears, he said to his wife, “What in the world is wrong with me? Are you telling the truth when you say I'm not sick? You don't think I've changed? It's as though there is a weight pressing on me somewhere. And I'm feeling very sad, and I don't even know why. I swear I don't. You don't know, do you?”

  “It's probably just a bad mood,” Lisa answered.

  “No, no, it's lasted too long to be just a bad mood. It's choking me. Our business is not going badly. I've got nothing to be sad about. Everything is chugging along in its usual way. And you too, dear, you're not well. You seem overtaken with melancholy. If this keeps on like this, I'm going to see a doctor.”

  The beautiful charcutière looked at him very soberly.

  “There's no need for a doctor,” she said. “It'll pass. You'll see. There's an ill wind blowing at the moment. Everyone in the neighborhood is sick.” Then, as though suddenly overtaken by motherly love, she said, “Don't worry, my darling. I don't want you to get sick. That would be too much.”

  Usually she sent him back to the kitchen, knowing that the sound of cleavers, the sizzling of fat, the clanking of pans, made him feel more cheerful. Also, she now avoided the indiscretions of Mademoiselle Saget, who had gotten into the habit of spending whole mornings in the charcuterie. The old woman had made it her job to shock Lisa, to push her to extreme measures.

  First she tried to win her confidence. “Oh my, what evil people there are,” she said. People who should really just mind their own business. “If you only knew, my dear Madame Quenu … But I wouldn't dream of repeating this to you.”

  Lisa insisted that she was not at all interested, that she was above listening to malicious tongues. Then the old mademoiselle leaned over the meat counter and murmured in her ear, “Well, they say that Monsieur Florent isn't your cousin.”

  Then, little by little, she showed that she knew the whole story. All of this was simply a way to put Lisa at her mercy. When Lisa confessed the truth, also for tactical reasons, to have someone at her disposal who could keep her up to date on the neighborhood gossip, the aged mademoiselle swore that she would be mute as a fis
h about it and would deny everything, even if they put her head on a block. She then took profound pleasure in the drama. Every day she delivered troubling news that she further enlarged upon.

  “You should be careful,” she murmured. “At the tripe shop I heard two women talking about you-know-what. I can't tell people that they're lying, you see. It would look odd … But it spreads, it spreads. No one can stop it. The truth will come out.”

  A few days later the real attack was launched. She arrived in a panic and made impatient gestures, waiting for everyone else to leave the shop. Then she hissed, “You know what they're saying? The men who meet at Monsieur Lebigre's, they all have rifles and they want to start up again just like in the uprising of '48. What a shame to see that good Monsieur Gavard, so rich and decent, mixed up with that trash. I wanted to warn you, because of your brother-in-law.”

  “It's all nonsense, none of this is real,” said Lisa to push her into saying more.