The Belly of Paris Read online

  Truthfully, Lisa was not the one who had handed Florent over to the police. She was suddenly struck by this thought, surprised by it. Would it, then, have been a terrible sin if she had handed him over? She was confused, disturbed by the possibility that she might have been misled by her conscience. The anonymous letters were clearly wrong. But she had gone openly and given her name, trying to save everyone. When she thought suddenly of old Gradelle's inheritance, she searched her conscience and found herself perfectly willing to throw all the money into the river, if that would clear the charcuterie of any wrong. No, she wasn't greedy. It wasn't the money that had motivated her. Crossing the pont au Change, she calmed herself and regained her equilibrium. It was good that the others had beaten her to the police. Now there was no need to lie to Quenu, and for that she would sleep better.

  “Did you get the seats?” Quenu asked when she got back. He wanted to see them and to have explained to him the exact location of their balcony seats. Lisa had imagined the police rushing to the scene of the crime as soon as she warned them, and her plan to go to the theater had simply been a clever ruse to get her husband away from the house while Florent was being arrested. The plan called for her to take him for a walk in the afternoon, one of those excursions that they sometimes took, taking a cab to the Bois de Boulogne, eating in a restaurant, and lingering at a café-concert.

  But now it seemed pointless to go out. She spent the day in the usual way, behind the counter, her complexion pinker than normal, her mood merrier and friendlier, as though she were finally recovering from an illness.

  “I told you fresh air would do you good,” Quenu repeated. “Your morning out has perked you up.”

  “That's ridiculous,” she finally answered, giving him a stern look. “The streets of Paris are not exactly good for your health.”

  That evening at the Gaîté they saw La Grâce de Dieu. Quenu in his overcoat and gray gloves, hair carefully combed, was absorbed by the actors' names in the program. Lisa was stunning with her bare shoulders, draping her wrist on the red velvet balcony, displaying the sheen of her too-tight white gloves. They were both very moved by Marie's misfortunes. The commandant was truly evil, and Pierrot made them laugh from his first entrance. Lisa wept. The death of the child, the prayer in that virginal bedroom, the return of the poor mad girl, moistened her beautiful eyes with discreet tears that she dabbed away with her handkerchief.

  But the evening turned into a veritable triumph for her when, looking up, she caught a glimpse of the Norman and her mother in the second gallery. That made her swell with pride, and she sent Quenu to buy some caramels at the food concession and played with her fan, a mother-of-pearl fan with a lot of gold. The fish seller had been defeated and lowered her head to listen to her mother, who whispered to her. On the way out, Beautiful Lisa and the Beautiful Norman greeted each other with vague smiles.

  That day Florent had eaten an early dinner at Monsieur Lebigre's. He waited for Logre, who was to introduce him to a retired sergeant, a capable man with whom they could discuss the plan of attack on the Palais Bourbon and the Hôtel de Ville. Night fell, and a fine rain that had started in the afternoon drowned the market in grayness. The buildings stood out in black against the rust-colored sky, while clouds like dirty dishrags ran above the line of roofs as though caught and torn by the row of lightning rods.

  Florent was depressed. The trash in the streets and the stream of yellow water seemed to blur and smother the sunset in the mud. He gazed at the people ducking under the porticos, the umbrellas darting by in the downpour, the cabs speedily echoing past in the empty streets. Then the weather cleared for a moment. A reddish glow rose in the sunset. An entire army of sweepers appeared at the entrance to rue Montmartre, pushing along a lake of liquid muck with strokes of their brooms.

  Logre did not bring the sergeant. Gavard had gone to dine with friends in Batignolles. So Florent was reduced to spending the evening alone with Robine. He talked continually but ended up feeling sad. The other man gently stroked his beard, and every fifteen minutes he would reach out his arm for a gulp of beer. Bored, Florent went back up to his room. Robine, left alone, did not leave, but frowning thoughtfully beneath his hat, stared at his beer mug. Both Rose and the waiter, who had hoped that since the group wasn't in the little room they could shut down early, had to wait more than a half hour before he finally left.

  Up in his room, Florent was afraid to go to bed. He was in the grip of one of his nervous ailments that caused endless nightmares lasting until morning. The day before, he had attended Monsieur Verlaque's funeral in Clamart. The man had suffered horribly before his death. Florent still grieved, thinking of the narrow coffin being lowered into the ground. But most of all he could not get out of his head the image of Madame Verlaque, her voice full of tears but not one tear in her eyes. She followed him, talking of the coffin that still had to be paid for, the procession that she had no idea how to organize, having not a single sou left at home because the day before, the pharmacist, when he learned that the patient was dead, had demanded full payment. Florent had to advance the money for the coffin and the procession and even tip the undertakers. And as he was leaving, Madame Verlaque looked at him with such a woeful face that he gave her twenty francs.

  Now, this death was a problem. It called into question his job as inspector. It unsettled his position. Now he would be considered for the position of permanent inspector. And there were annoying complications that might draw the attention of the police. He wished the uprising could take place the next day and he could fling his gold-braided hat into the street. With his head full of these worries, he went out onto the balcony with his forehead burning up, longing for fresh air from the warm night. The showers had made the wind die. The dark blue, cloudless sky was still filled with stormy heat. Washed clean by the rain, Les Halles below him stretched out its massive body, the same color as the sky, and, also like the sky, it twinkled with yellow stars—the gas lamps.

  Leaning his elbows on the iron balustrade, Florent was thinking that sooner or later he would be punished for having taken the job of inspector. It was a blemish on his life story. He was in the accounts of the prefecture. He had betrayed himself by serving the empire, despite all the vows he had made when in exile. His desire to please Lisa, the charitable use of the money he earned, the honest way he had tried to carry out his duties—none of these seemed a strong enough argument to excuse his weakness. If he suffered in this fat and overfed setting, he deserved it. He thought back on the terrible year he had just endured, the persecution of the fish vendors, the illness of damp days, the indigestion of his thin man's stomach, the silent hostility he had felt building all around him— all this he accepted as his just deserts. The weighty grumbling of ill will from some cause he could never discover was the harbinger of some unknown catastrophe that had already bowed his shoulders with the shame of a sin he had to expiate. Then, just thinking of the popular movement he was organizing, he flew into a rage against himself. He no longer had the purity to succeed.

  How many dreams had he dreamed up there, his eyes wandering the sprawling market roofs? Most of the time he saw them as gray oceans that suggested distant places. On moonless nights they were darker, becoming dead lakes, polluted waters, stagnant and foul. Moonlit nights converted them into fountains of light, the moon drifting across the two roof levels, running down the great expanses of metal, and overflowing the edges of the huge basins. In cold weather the roofs were still and frozen, like Norwegian fjords where skaters glided, whereas warm June days overtook them with drowsiness.

  Once in December, he had opened his window and found the rooftops all white with snow, with a virgin whiteness that brightened the rusty sky. They were spread before him without the blemish of a single footprint, like arctic plains too vast for sleds. They had a lovely silence, the sweetness of an innocent giant. And Florent, with every new quality of his changing horizon, would give in to his thoughts—either tender or harsh. The snow calmed his soul, th
e broad sheet of white seemed to him a covering of purity over the filth of Les Halles. On moonlit nights, the moonbeams transported him to a fairyland. He suffered only on dark nights, the broiling nights of June, with the foul-smelling marshes spread beneath him, the sleeping waters of some cursed sea. And always the same nightmare returned.

  The markets were always there. He couldn't open his window or lean on the balcony rail without seeing them there, filling the horizon. He would leave the market in the evening only to find when he went to bed, once again, the endless expanse of rooftops. They cut him off from the rest of Paris, imposed their massive presence on every hour of his life. That night his nightmare returned, brought on by the anxieties that plagued him. The afternoon rain had filled Les Halles with an infectious dampness. It blew a foul breath into his face, a breath that had rolled around the city like a drunk under a table with his last bottle. It seemed to him that each pavilion exhaled its own thick vapor. From a distance the meat market and the tripe market discharged steam with the dull scent of blood. The vegetable and fruit markets exhaled the smell of sour cabbage, rotten apples, and greens chucked into the street. The butter stank, the fish market had a peppery freshness. And at his feet he could see the poultry market pushing a blast of hot air through its ventilation turret, a stench that poured out like soot from a factory. The cloud of all these breaths gathered over the rooftops, drifted to the neighboring houses, and spread into a heavy cloud over all of Paris. It was Les Halles bursting out of its steel belt and warming the sleep of the overfed city, belching with indigestion.

  Below, on the sidewalk, he heard the sound of voices, the laughter of happy people. The alley door was shut noisily. Quenu and Lisa had returned from the theater. Then Florent, dizzy, as though drunk from the air he had been breathing and with an uneasy fear of the storm he could feel brewing over his head, went inside. Below him lay his misery, in Les Halles, still hot from the day. He shut the window violently, abandoning the roofs, leaving them sprawling in the shadows, naked, sweating, and uncovered, exposing their bloated bellies and stretched out under the stars.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A week later, Florent thought he was finally ready for action. The government had made a move unpopular enough to send groups of rebels into the streets of Paris. The Corps Législatif, divided on a pension law, were now in the process of debating an extremely unpopular tax,1 and all over the city people were muttering against it. Fearing defeat, the government was fighting with all its might. It might be a long time before a better pretext came along.

  Early one morning Florent explored the Palais Bourbon. He forgot about his responsibilities as inspector and stayed there studying the area until eight o'clock, without a moment's thought as to how his absence from the fish market might be causing a revolution. He visited every street: rue de Lille, rue de l'Université, rue de Bourgogne, rue Saint-Dominique; he went as far as the parade ground in front of the Invalides, stopping at certain selected intersections, measuring distances by taking huge steps. Then, sitting on the wall back at the quai d'Orsay he decided that the attack should come from all sides at once: the Gros-Caillou group would arrive along the Champ de Mars, the group from northern Paris would come in by the Madeleine, and the groups from the west and south would come along the quais or fight their way along the streets of the Saint Germain suburb.

  But he was worried by the Champs-Elysées on the other bank, with its wide-open avenue. He could see how they would place cannons there and fire at the quais. So he modified some details of the plan and marked combat positions for the various groups in a notebook he carried in his hand. The primary assault would definitely occur along rue de Bourgogne and rue de l'Université, while a diversion was created along the Seine. The sun at eight o'clock could be felt, warm on the back of the neck, lighting the pavement and gilding the columns of the large buildings across the way. Already he could envision the battle, groups of men clinging to those columns, the gates bursting open, the invasion penetrating past the columns, and then suddenly a glimpse of thin arms planting a flag.

  Slowly he walked back with his head lowered. A cooing noise grabbed his attention. He realized that he was crossing the Tuileries Garden. A band of pigeons strutted on the lawn, puffing out their necks. He leaned for a moment against the stand of an orange tree and looked at the grass and the pigeons all bathed in sunlight. Across the way, chestnut trees were blackened by shadows. A warm silence reigned, disturbed only by the continual distant rumbling behind the railings of rue de Rivoli. The smell of the greenery affected him greatly because it reminded him of Madame François. The pigeons were scared away by a young girl chasing a hoop and flew to the marble arm of an ancient wrestler in the middle of the lawn, still cooing and puffed out but in a gentler way now.

  As Florent returned to Les Halles by rue Vauvilliers, he heard the voice of Claude Lantier calling him. The painter was going into the basement below the poultry market.

  “Hey, come with me,” he shouted. “I'm looking for that thug Marjolin.”

  Florent followed him, to forget his work for a few more seconds, to delay his return to the fish market. Claude said that now his friend Marjolin no longer wanted anything—he had become nothing more than an animal—he was considering having him pose on all fours with his childlike grin. Whenever he was driven to tear up a sketch in a rage, he could spend hours in that imbecile's company, not speaking, trying to make him smile.

  “He's probably feeding the pigeons,” Claude said. “The problem is that I don't know where Monsieur Gavard is.”

  They searched everywhere in the cellar. In the pale shadows in the center, two water taps were running. The cages were reserved exclusively for pigeons. Along the chicken wire there was a constant plaintive hooting, the unassertive song of birds from under the leaves at dusk. It made Claude laugh to hear this music. “You would swear that every lover in Paris was snuggling under there,” he said.

  Not one of the coops was open, and Claude was starting to think that Marjolin was not down there after all when the sound of kisses, real, loud kisses, stopped him in his tracks in front of a partly open door. He opened it and saw Marjolin, the animal, whom Cadine had made kneel on the straw-covered ground so that his face rose just to the level of her lips. She was kissing him gently, everywhere. She parted his long blond hair so that she could reach behind his ears, on the cheeks, behind the neck, coming back to his eyes, his mouth, slowly, devouring his face in tiny caresses, as though it were a scrumptious treat that she was consuming at her leisure. Contentedly he remained as she had placed him. He was no longer completely aware of things. He offered her his flesh, no longer even afraid of being tickled.

  “Will you look at that,” said Claude. “Aren't you even embarrassed? You have no shame, you huge good-for-nothing. Teasing him like that in all this filth. He's up to his knees in dirt.”

  “So what,” said Cadine brazenly. “He's not unhappy. He likes being kissed. Because he's afraid of the dark now. Aren't you? You're afraid.”

  She had pulled him to his feet. He rubbed his hands across his face as though groping for the kisses she had placed there. He stammered that he was afraid. “Besides, I came here to help him. I was force-feeding the pigeons.”

  Florent looked at the poor creatures. On the planks surrounding the coops were uncovered boxes. Pigeons were jammed into them with mottled feathers and stiff legs. From time to time a shudder ran through the feathers and the bodies huddled even more tightly together, a chaotic chatter rising out of the boxes. Cadine had a pot next to her full of water and seeds: she filled her mouth and, one by one, blew the seeds into the birds' beaks. They choked and squirmed, then fell backward white-eyed into the darkness of the box, knocked senseless by the forcibly swallowed food.

  “The poor innocents,” said Claude.

  “Too bad for them,” said Cadine when she finished. “They're a lot better off after they've been well stuffed. You'll see, in a couple of hours we'll make them swallow saltwater, these birds o
ver here. That will make their meat white and delicate. Two hours after that, they'll be bled. But if you want to see bleeding, there's some over there all ready to go. Marjolin was just about to do them.”

  Marjolin was carrying about fifty pigeons in a box. Claude and Florent followed him. He settled himself on the floor by one of the faucets, putting the box next to him and placing a fine screen on a wooden frame in a deep zinc tray. Then he began. He moved the knife quickly in his fingers, grabbing pigeons by the wings, knocking them out with a blow on the head from the knife handle, then sticking the blade into the throat. The pigeons shuddered for an instant, and their feathers rumpled as he laid them out in rows, their heads stuck out on the screen over the zinc tray into which, drop by drop, their blood fell. All of this was done in an even rhythm— the whack of the handle on the smashed little skull in measured time with the hand that took the live birds on one side and the hand that placed the dead ones on the other side.

  Marjolin was going ever faster, enjoying the slaughter, crouching with gleaming eyes like a huge salivating mastiff. Finally he started laughing and sang, “Tic-tac, tic-tac, tic-tac,” accompanying the rhythm of his knife with the clicking of his tongue, making the sound of a head-grinding mill. The pigeons hung like swatches of silk.

  “So you think that's funny, you big dummy,” said Cadine, laughing too. “They look so funny, those pigeons, when they pull in their head between their shoulders and the neck is gone. They're mean little things anyway. They'd bite you if they could.”

  Marjolin laughed even louder at an ever more feverish pace. She added, “No matter how hard I try, I can't do it as fast as he does. One day he bled a hundred in ten minutes.”