The Belly of Paris Read online

  On a very dark night, he finally reached Courbevoie. Paris looked like a patch of starry sky that had fallen onto a blackened corner of the earth. It had a stern look, as though angered by Florent's return. Then he felt faint, his wobbly legs almost collapsing as he walked down the hill. While crossing the pont de Neuilly he supported himself, clinging to the stone railings, and leaned over to look at the inky waves of the rolling Seine between the thickly grown banks. A red signal lantern on the water followed him with its bloodshot eye. Now he had to pull himself up to climb to Paris at the top of the hill. But the boulevard seemed endless. The hundreds of leagues he had already traveled seemed as nothing compared to this. In this last stretch he was losing faith that he would ever reach the top of the hill with its crown of lights.

  The flat boulevard stretched before him with its lines of tall trees and squat houses. Its wide grayish sidewalks were blotchy with the shadows of branches. The darkened gaps where the boulevard met the side streets were all in silence and shade. Only the stumpy little yellow flames of the gas lamps standing straight at regular intervals gave some life to this desolate wasteland. And Florent seemed to be making no progress, the boulevard growing longer and longer and carrying Paris away into the depths of the night. In time he began hallucinating that the gas lamps on both sides of him were running away, carrying the road off with them, until, completely losing his bearings, he fell on a pile of paving stones.

  And now he was gently tossing and turning on his bed of vegetables, which felt more like a soft feather bed. He raised his head a little to watch the incandescent mist spread over the black silhouettes of the rooftops just visible along the horizon. He was approaching his destination, being carried there with nothing more to do than absorb the slow-motion bumps of the wagon, and, freed from the pain of fatigue, he now suffered only hunger. But his hunger was reawakened and becoming unbearable. His limbs had fallen asleep, and he could feel only his stomach, cramped and twisted as though by a red-hot iron. The ripe smell of vegetables that surrounded him, the piercing freshness of the carrots, made him almost faint.

  With all his might he pushed his chest into this deep bed of food, trying to pull in his stomach as tightly as he could to suppress its loud rumblings. Behind him, the nine other wagons piled high with cabbages, mountains of peas, heaps of artichokes, lettuce, celery, and leeks, seemed to be slowly gaining on him as though to overtake him as he was racked with starvation and bury him in an avalanche of food.

  They came to a stop, and deep voices could be heard. It was customs inspectors examining the wagons. And so Florent, his teeth clenched, at last entered Paris, passed out on a pile of carrots.

  “Hey, you up there!” Madame François abruptly shouted. As he didn't move, she climbed up and shook him. Florent propped himself up. As he had slept, the hunger pains had stopped, but he was disoriented.

  The woman made him get down, saying, “Can you help me unload?”

  He helped her.

  A heavyset man with a walking stick and a felt hat, with a badge on the left lapel of his coat, was growing angry and tapping the tip of his stick on the sidewalk. “Come on, come on, faster than that. How many meters do you have there? Four, isn't it?”

  He gave Madame François a ticket, and she took a large coin out of her canvas bag. He moved on to vent his anger and tap the tip of his stick farther down the line. The market woman took Balthazar by the bridle and backed him up until the wagon wheels were against the curb. Then she opened the back of the wagon, marked off her four meters of curb with pieces of straw, and asked Florent to start passing the vegetables down. She arranged them in her alotted space with an artistic flair, so that the tops formed a green wreath around the bunches. She arranged the display with dazzling speed in the dank morning light that made it resemble a tapestry with geometric splashes of color.

  After Florent handed her a huge bouquet of parsley that he had found on the wagon floor, she asked him one more favor: “I would really appreciate it if you could keep an eye on my goods while I park the wagon. It's very close, at the Compas d'Or on rue Montorgueil.”3

  He told her not to worry. In truth, he was happy to sit there because moving around had started to revive his hunger. He sat down, leaning against a mound of cabbages by Madame François's stand. He told himself that he would be just fine sitting there, waiting and not moving. His mind was a void, and he could not even say exactly where he was. In the beginning of September the early morning was already remaining dark. The lanterns around him flickered in the dusky shadows. He was sitting by the side of a major street, which he did not recognize. It vanished into the night's blackness. He could see hardly anything except the produce he had been entrusted to watch. Down the market lanes he could make out only the outline of other heaps like a flock of sheep. In the middle of the route, blocking the street, he could see the outline of carts. From one end to the other, he could smell what he could not exactly see, a line of horses breathing in the dark. Shouts, a piece of wood or an iron chain hitting the pavement, the thumping of vegetables unloaded from wagons, and wheels scraping as carts were backed against the curb—these sounds loaded the still air with the exciting promise of dawn awakening.

  Turning his head, Florent noticed, on the other side of the cabbage, a snoring man wrapped like a package in his overcoat, his head resting on a basket of plums. A little closer on the left side, he could see a ten-year-old child with an angel's smile fast asleep between two stacks of endive. Looking down the pavement, he could see nothing that seemed awake except maybe the lanterns hanging from invisible arms, their light bouncing over all the sleeping vegetables and people spread out in piles, awaiting daybreak.

  What was surprising was the glimpse of two enormous pavilions on either side of the street, with grand roofs that seemed to rise out of sight amid a flurry of lights. In his weariness he imagined he was seeing an array of palaces, huge and orderly and light as crystal with streaks of light filtering through endless rows of venetian blinds. Between slender pillars, ladders of light rose into the shadow of the lower roof and then soared above it to a higher roof, giving the outline of large square halls where gray, slumbering heaps gathered under the glare of brilliant gaslight.

  Florent turned away, enraged that he could not grasp where he was, disturbed by this fragile but gigantic specter, and as he looked up he glimpsed the luminous clock dial of the massive gray Church of Saint Eustache. He was suddenly jolted by the realization that he was near Saint Eustache—he was at pointe Saint-Eustache!

  Just then Madame François came back, vehemently arguing with a man who was carrying a sack on his shoulders and offering only a sou per bunch for the carrots.

  “Come on, Lacaille, you're not being fair. You're going to sell them to the Parisians for four or five sous. I'll sell them to you for two.”

  As he left she said, “I swear, they act as though these things grow on their own. Let him go look for carrots at a sou a bunch. He'll be back, the drunk.”

  She was saying this to Florent as she sat down next to him. “So, if you haven't been in Paris in a long time, you probably don't know the new markets. It's only been at most five years since they were built. Over there, you see, the pavilion next to us, that's for fruit and flowers. Further down is the fish market and poultry, and behind us, there, vegetables, then butter and cheese. There are six pavilions on this side and over on the opposite side, another four: the meat market, tripe and organs. It's huge, but the problem is that it's freezing in the winter. I heard they're going to tear down the buildings around the grain market and build another two pavilions. Did you know about all this?”

  “No,” Florent answered, “I've been abroad. And this main street here, what's it called?”

  “It's a new street called rue du Pont-Neuf. It starts at the Seine and goes all the way to rue Montmartre and rue Montorgueil. You could have figured it out in daylight.” She got up, seeing a woman eyeing her turnips. “Is that you, Mère Chantemesse?” she said pleasantly.<
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  Florent looked down to the foot of rue Montorgueil. It was there that a group of sergents de ville had grabbed him on the night of December 4. He had been strolling boulevard Montmartre at about two in the afternoon, slowly ambling with the crowd, smiling at all the soldiers the government had posted in the streets so that it would be taken seriously, when suddenly the military had started making a sweep of the boulevard. It had gone on for a good quarter of an hour. Then someone had pushed him and he had been thrown to the ground at the corner of rue Vivienne. He wasn't sure what had happened after that because gunshots had rung out and the crowd had panicked and trampled him.

  When he heard no more noise, he tried to get up but realized that a young woman in a pink bonnet was lying on top of him. Her shawl had slipped off her shoulders, and he could see her undergarment, a bodice tucked in little pleats. Just above her breasts were two holes where bullets had entered, and when he tried to move her gently to free his legs, two dribbles of blood had leaked out of the holes and over his hands. He had leapt to his feet and bolted, without a hat, blood moist on his hands. He had wandered around, delirious, until evening fell, constantly seeing the woman who had lain across his legs, her face so pale, her eyes so blue and large, her lips grimacing at the shock of being there, dead so soon.

  At the age of thirty, he was a bashful young man who could barely bring himself to look a woman in the face, and now he would be seeing her face, carrying it in his heart and memory, for the rest of his life. It was as though she had been his beloved wife.

  In the evening, his mind still blurred by the afternoon's horror, he had somehow, not really knowing how, found himself in a wine shop on the rue Montorgueil, where men were drinking and threatening to throw up barricades. He had gone with them, helping them pull up a few paving stones. He had sat on the barricade, worn out from wandering the streets, and he had vowed to himself that when the soldiers came he would fight. He wasn't even carrying a knife, and his head was still hatless. Around eleven o'clock, he nodded off, and in his sleep he saw the two holes in the white bodice staring at him like two bloodshot, tearstained eyes. When he woke up, he was being taken by four sergents de ville, who were beating him with their fists. The men at the barricade had all fled. The sergents had become enraged and almost strangled him when they found that he had blood on his hands. It was the young woman's blood.

  Florent, lost in all these memories, looked up at Saint Eustache without noticing the hands of the clock. It was almost four o'clock. Les Halles was still asleep. Madame François was standing and arguing with Mère Chantemesse about the price of a bunch of turnips. Florent was remembering how he had almost been executed right there, against a wall of Saint Eustache. There a police detachment had just blown the heads off five unlucky souls, taken at a barricade on rue Grenéta. Five bodies had been piled on the sidewalk at a spot where he now saw what seemed to be a heap of bright pink radishes. He had avoided being shot only because sergents de ville carried only swords. They had taken him to the nearest police station and left him with the precinct chief, who was given a note written in pencil on a scrap of paper. It said, “Taken with his hands covered in blood. Very dangerous.”

  He had been dragged from station to station until morning. Everywhere he was taken, the scrap of paper had accompanied him. He had been handcuffed and guarded as though he were a raving lunatic. On rue de la Lingerie, some drunken soldiers had wanted to shoot him and had already lit a lantern in preparation when the order had come to take him to the prison at police headquarters. Two days later he was in a dungeon at Fort Bicêtre. He had been suffering from hunger ever since. The pangs of hunger that had visited him in that dungeon had never left.

  He had been one of a hundred men at the bottom of that cellar, where there was barely air enough to breathe, scrambling like captive animals for the few pieces of bread thrown to them. When he had been brought before the judge without any witnesses and with no opportunity to defend himself, he had been accused of belonging to an underground group, and when he swore that it was not true, the judge had pulled the scrap of paper from a file. “Taken with his hands covered in blood. Very dangerous.” That was all they had needed. He had been sentenced to deportation to the penal colony.

  On a January night six weeks later, a guard had awakened him and taken him to a courtyard with about four hundred other prisoners. An hour later this first convoy had been marched in handcuffs between two columns of gendarmes with loaded rifles, to be shipped into exile. They had crossed the Austerlitz bridge and followed the boulevards to the Gare du Havre.

  It was a festive carnival night. The windows of the restaurants along the boulevards were open. At the top of the rue Vivienne, right where he had found the dead woman—that unknown woman whose face he always carried with him—there was now a large carriage full of masked women, bare-shouldered and with laughing voices, irritated by being held up and appalled by “this interminable line of prisoners.”

  From Paris to Le Havre the prisoners had not been given a drink of water or a mouthful of bread. Someone had forgotten to distribute rations before they left. For thirty-six hours they had had nothing to eat, until they were packed into the hold of the frigate Canada.

  The hunger had never left him. Florent searched through his past and could not recall a moment of plenty. He had become dry and emaciated, with a shrunken stomach and skin that drooped from his bones. And now that he was back in Paris, it seemed to him to be fat, haughty, and overloaded with food, while surrounded by sadness. He had returned on a bed of vegetables, rolling into town on a huge wave of food that troubled him.

  Had that festive carnival night continued all these seven years? Again he saw the open windows of the boulevard restaurants, laughing women, the city of gluttony he had left on that January day long ago. It seemed to him that everything had expanded and enlarged as though to keep up with the huge market, Les Halles, whose heavy breathing he was beginning to hear, still sluggish with yesterday's indigestion.

  Mère Chantemesse had finally decided on a dozen turnip bunches. She gathered them up in her apron, pressing them to her midriff, which made her look even plumper than usual, and she stayed on to chat some more in her drawling voice. When she finally left, Madame François sat beside Florent again.

  “Poor old Mère Chantemesse,” she said. “She must be at least seventy-two. I remember when I was a kid, her buying turnips from my father. And she has no family, only some little waif that she picked up God knows where, who gives her nothing but grief. But she gets by, selling a little and making a couple of francs' profit a day. If it were me, I could never spend all my days on the streets of Paris. She doesn't even have relatives.”

  Seeing that Florent was not talking, she asked, “Do you have relatives in Paris?”

  He seemed not to hear her. His old mistrust returned. His mind was swirling with old tales of police, their undercover agents on every street corner, and women selling the secrets they had pried loose from sad souls they took in. As he sat beside Madame François, she looked honest enough with her full, calm face and the black-and-yellow scarf around her head. She seemed about thirty-five, sturdy, with handsome good looks from her outdoor life. Her masculine bearing was softened by kind, soft dark eyes. She was a bit nosy, but it was a good-natured curiosity.

  “I have a nephew in Paris,” she said, continuing the one-sided conversation, not the least offended by Florent's silence. “He hasn't turned out to be any good. Now he's enlisted … It's always good to have somewhere to go. I suppose your parents will be surprised to see you. It feels good to get home, doesn't it?”

  All the while she talked, she never took her eyes off Florent, probably feeling sorry for him because he was so skinny. Then too, she guessed that there was a gentleman somewhere inside that tattered black overcoat, which was why she did not dare press a silver coin into his palm. But finally she did say, “You know, if you ever need anything—”

  But Florent cut her off with clumsy pride, saying that he
had everything he needed and knew exactly where he was going. This seemed to please her, and she repeated several times, as though to reassure herself, “Oh good, then you just have to wait for daybreak.”

  A huge bell at the corner of the fruit market, right above Florent's head, started ringing. Its slow, regular notes seemed to awaken the market little by little. The carts kept coming with the growing ruckus of shouting wagoneers, the cracks of their whips, the iron wheel bands and horseshoes grinding into the stone pavement. The wagons, unable to move forward except in sudden jolts, lined up and slowly faded into the distant gray. All along rue du Pont-Neuf the carts unloaded, pulled close to the sidewalk, where the horses stood motionless in a line as though at a horse fair.

  Florent examined a cart filled with magnificent cabbages. It had been backed up to the sidewalk with great care and effort, and its leafy pile rose above a gas lamp whose light fell on the large leaves, making them look like crimped pieces of green velvet. A young farm girl of about sixteen, wearing a blue linen coat and cap, climbed up on the cart and was up to her shoulders in cabbages. She began tossing them one by one to someone hidden in shadow below. Every now and then the girl would slip and disappear in a cabbage avalanche. Then her pink nose would be seen sticking out of the green and she would be heard laughing as the cabbages were tossed between Florent and the gaslight. He counted them automatically until the cart was empty, which left him feeling somehow disappointed.

  The piles of vegetables were now spilling into the road, with narrow paths between them so that people could pass. The sidewalk was covered end to end with the dark vegetable mounds. But in the flicker of lantern light, you could barely make out the lush fullness of a bouquet of artichokes, the delicate green of the lettuce, the flush coral of carrots, the soft ivory finish of turnips. Flashes of the bright colors skipped across the mounds with the flickering of the light.