The Belly of Paris Read online

  In front of Claude and Florent on rue Berger they saw, in the glow of gaslight, bare retail shops, open on one side, with baskets and fruit surrounded by three grimy walls covered with arithmetical calculations scribbled in pencil. As they stood there they saw a well-dressed woman curled up with an air of weary contentment in the corner of a cab that looked misplaced in the procession of carts as it made its way along.

  “There's Cinderella heading home without her slippers,” said Claude with a smile.

  They chatted now as they went back to the market. Claude, his hands in his pockets, whistled and expounded on his love for this great mountain of food that rose up every morning in the heart of Paris. He roamed the streets every night dreaming of colossal still lifes, extraordinary works. He had even begun one. He had made his friend Marjolin and that slut Cadine pose, but it was hard. Those damn vegetables and the fruit and fish and meat—it was all too beautiful!

  Florent listened to the artist's exuberance with his own belly aching from hunger. It was obvious that it had not occurred to Claude at that moment that all those beautiful objects were there for people to eat. He loved them for their colors. But suddenly he stopped talking and tightened the long red belt that he wore under his greenish coat, an old habit. Then he continued with a sly look.

  “And here, this is where I have my breakfast, at least with my eyes, which is better than nothing at all. Sometimes when I forget dinner the night before, I work myself into indigestion the next morning by watching the carts come in here, filled with all sorts of good things. On such a morning I love my vegetables more than ever. Oh, the thing that exasperates me, the real injustice of it, is that those good-for-nothing bourgeois actually eat all this.”

  He remembered a dinner that a friend had bought him at Baratte's8 one glorious day. They had had oysters, fish, and game. But Baratte's had gone under and all the carnival life of the old Marché des Innocents was now buried, and everything had been replaced by the huge central market, a steel giant of a new town. “Fools can say what they like, but this was the quintessence of the era.”

  At first Florent could not decide if he was criticizing the picturesqueness of Baratte's or its cheerful atmosphere. But Claude was on a rant against romanticism. He preferred his piles of cabbage to the rags of the Middle Ages. And he wound up by denouncing the weakness of an etching he had done of rue Pirouette. “All those grubby old places ought to be torn down and replaced by modern ones.”

  “Listen,” he said, stopping. “Look over there in the corner. Isn't that a ready-made painting, infinitely more human than all their beloved pretentious paintings?”

  Along the covered street women were selling coffee and hot soup. In a corner a crowd of customers had gathered around a man selling cabbage soup. The galvanized tin bucket full of broth was steaming on the little heater, whose holes emitted the pale glow of embers. The woman, armed with a ladle, took thin slices of bread out of a cloth-lined basket and dipped yellow cups into the soup. She was surrounded by tidy saleswomen, farmers in overalls, forts with coats stained by the foods they had carried and their backs bent by the weight of the loads, poor ragged drifters—the entire hungry early-morning crowd of Les Halles, eating, scalding themselves, sticking their chins forward so that the trickle from their spoons would not stain their clothes.

  And the passionate painter blinked his eyes, thrilled by the scene, looking for the best vantage point, working out the painting's best composition. But the goddamn cabbage soup smelled impressive.

  Florent turned his head, unable to watch the customers emptying their soup cups in silence like a cluster of distrustful animals feeding. Claude himself was overwhelmed by pungent steam rising from someone's spoon that struck him in the face.

  He tightened his belt, smiling as though he was annoyed. Then, as they continued their stroll, he alluded to the punch Alexandre had bought them, saying in a low voice: “It's a funny thing, but have you ever noticed that you can always find someone to buy you a drink but there is never anyone who will pay for something to eat?”

  It was daybreak. The houses at the end of rue de la Cossonnerie along boulevard Sébastopol were still black, but above the clean line of their slate roofs, a patch of blue sky framed in the arches of the covered street shone like a half-moon. Claude, who had been bending down to look through some ground-level gratings, peering down into the glimmering gaslight of deep cellars, glanced up at the opening between the pillars, as though studying the dark roofs on the edge of the clear sky. Then he stopped again, this time to inspect an iron ladder, one of those that connected the two levels of roofing. Florent asked him what he was looking at up there.

  “It's that bastard Marjolin,” said the painter, not in answer to Florent's question. “You can bet he's lying in some gutter, unless he spent the night with the animals in the poultry cellar. I need him to do a study.”

  And he told the story of how his friend Marjolin had been found by the market women one morning on a pile of cabbages and how he had grown up wild on the neighborhood streets. When they wanted to send him to school, he would suddenly become ill and they had to take him back to the markets. He knew the most hidden nooks and loved them as if they were his family moving with squirrellike agility through his ironwork forest. What a pretty couple they made—he and the slutty Cadine, whom Mère Chantemesse had picked up one night at the old Marché des Innocents. He was beautiful, this big oaf, golden as a Rubens with a reddish down that caught the light; she was a little thing, lithe and slender, with an odd face beneath a tangle of frizzy black hair.

  Claude, engrossed in his talk, walked quickly, bringing his companion to the pointe Saint-Eustache. But Florent, whose legs were starting to buckle again, finally collapsed on a bench near the horse trolley station. There was a cool breeze. At the bottom of the rue Rambuteau, a bright pink light was streaking the milky sky, which higher up was cut by broad gray patches. With the dawn came such a sweet balsamic scent that for a minute Florent thought he was sitting on a hillside in the country. But Claude pointed out to him that on the other side of the bench was the herb market. All along the walkway, around the triperie9 there were, in a manner of speaking, fields of thyme, lavender, garlic, and shallot. The merchants had adorned the young plane trees all along the walkway with long branches heavy with bay leaves as thick and green as a victor's wreath. The strong perfume of bay leaf dominated.

  The luminous face of the clock on Saint Eustache turned pale, a night-light surprised by the dawn. One by one, the gaslights in the wine shops in the neighborhood were extinguished, like stars faded away by a bright sky. And Florent looked at the huge market emerging from the shadows, coming out of a dreamland in which they had been held, the palaces sprawling along the streets. They seemed to solidify into a greenish gray color with their columns holding up an endless expanse of roof. They rose in a geometrical mass, and once all the lights had been extinguished and the matching square buildings were bathed in dawn light, they seemed like some kind of oversize modern machine, a kind of steam engine with a cauldron designed to serve all mankind, a huge riveted and bolted metal belly built of wood, glass, and iron with the power and grace of a machine with glowing furnaces and dizzily spinning wheels.

  Claude had enthusiastically leapt to his feet on the bench and forced his companion to admire daybreak on the vegetables. There was a sea of vegetables between the rows of pavilions from pointe Saint-Eustache to rue des Halles. At the two intersections at either end the seas grew higher, completely flooding the pavement. Dawn rose slowly in soft grays, coloring everything with a light wash of watercolors. The mounting piles, like a swelling sea, the river of greenery rushing through the streets like an autumnal torrent, took on delicate shadows and hues: tender violet, milk-blushed rose, a green steeped in yellows—all the soft, pale hues that change the sky into silk at sunrise. Step by step the fire of dawn rose higher, shooting up bursts of flame at the far end of rue Rambuteau as the vegetables brightened and grew more distinct from the blui
sh darkness that clung to the ground. Lettuce, escarole, and chicory, with rich earth still stuck to them, opened to expose swelling hearts. Bundles of spinach, bunches of sorrel, packets of artichokes, piles of peas and beans, mountains of romaine tied with straw, sang the full greenery repertoire from the shiny green lacquered pods to the deep green leaves—a continuous range of ascending and descending scales that faded away in the variegated heads of celery and bundles of leeks. But the most piercing note of all came from the flaming carrots and the snowy splotches of turnips, strewn in ample quantities all along the market and lighting it with their colors.

  At the intersection of rue des Halles were mountains of cabbages. There were enormous white cabbages that were hard and compact like metal balls, curly savoys whose great leaves made them look like basins of greening bronze, and red cabbages that the dawn seemed to change into exquisite flowery masses the color of wine, crimson and deep purple. At the other end, where pointe Saint-Eustache intersects rue Rambuteau, the route was blocked by swollen-bellied orange pumpkins crawling across the ground in two lines. The varnished brown of onions shone here and there in baskets and the bloodred heaps of tomatoes, the muted yellow of cucumbers, and the deep purple of eggplants, while thick black radishes in funereal drapes still held memories of the night amid this vibrant, jubilant new day.

  Claude clapped his hands at the sight. He found something extravagant, crazy, and sublime in all the jaunty vegetables. He insisted that they were absolutely not dead but, after being pulled from the earth the day before, were awaiting the next sunrise to make their farewells from the cobblestones of Les Halles. He saw them as alive, their leaves wide open, as though their roots were still embedded in warm, well-manured soil. He also claimed to hear in the market the death rattle of all the little gardens on the outskirts of the city.

  A crowd of white caps, black jackets, and blue overalls was converging in the narrow passages between piles. The forts' huge baskets made their way slowly over the heads of the crowd. The saleswomen, grocers, and fruit sellers were doing a brisk business. A group of corporals and a few nuns were huddled around mountains of cabbages, and institutional cooks were hunting for bargains. The unloading continued, the carts tossing their loads to the ground as though they were shipments of cobblestones, adding more and more waves to the sea of produce that was now spreading to the opposite pathway. And from the far end of the rue du Pont-Neuf, carts kept coming in a line without end.

  “It is phenomenally beautiful,” cooed the enraptured Claude.

  But Florent was in pain. He believed himself to be tested by some supernatural temptation and turned to look at the side facade of Saint Eustache, unable to look at the market any longer. From this view it seemed washed in sepia against the blue sky with its rosettes and broad arched windows, its bell turret and slate roof. Then his eyes rested on the somber depths of rue Montorgueil, where gaudy signs stood out. On the corner of rue Montmartre, gilded balconies gleamed in the sunlight. When he looked back at the intersection, his eyes were drawn to other signboards with inscriptions such as DRUGGIST AND PHARMACY and FLOUR AND DRIED BEANS in large red and black letters on dull backgrounds.

  By now the households in the corner buildings with their narrow windows were waking up, and the airy new rue du Pont-Neuf was showing a touch of the remaining facades of old Paris, yellowing and sturdy. Standing at the empty windows of the large store at the corner of rue Rambuteau, smart-looking attendants in tight pants with large cuffs were arranging their displays. Further away, in the Maison Guillout, severe as a barracks, cookies in gilded wrappers and ornate petits fours were artistically set out in glass cases. All the shops were now open, and workers in white smocks carrying tools under their arms were hurrying up the street.

  Claude was still standing on the bench on his tiptoes, trying to see farther down the streets. Suddenly, coming from the crowd that he was not even focusing on, he caught a glimpse of a head draped in blond hair, followed by a smaller one covered in frizzy black curls.

  “Hey, Marjolin! Hi, Cadine!” he shouted.

  Since his voice was lost in the noise of the crowd, he jumped off the bench and took off. Then he remembered that he had left Florent behind and came back. “You know, I live at the end of the impasse des Bourdonnais,” he said. “My name's written in chalk on the door: Claude Lantier. Come and see my etching of the rue Pirouette.”

  Then he vanished. He did not even know Florent's name. After having offered him his views on art, he disappeared in the street the same way he had appeared.

  Now Florent was alone. At first he welcomed this solitude. Ever since Madame François had picked him up on avenue de Neuilly he had been moving in a world part sleep and part pain, which had kept him from completely grasping anything. Finally he was free to do exactly what he felt like and to shake himself free of this nightmare of overflowing food following him everywhere. But his mind remained blank, and he could find nothing within him except a vague sense of fear. The day had brightened, and everything could be seen clearly now. He looked at his pants and his pathetic coat. He buttoned the first, dusted off the second, and attempted to straighten himself up, afraid that his black rags would scream out from where he had come. He was seated in the middle of a bench alongside some homeless people who had settled there to wait for sunrise. The nights at Les Halles are good to drifters and vagabonds.

  Two sergents de ville, still in night uniforms with their greatcoats and képis,10 paced back and forth on the sidewalk, side by side, with their hands folded behind their backs. Each time they passed the bench, they cast a glance at the prey whose presence they could sense. Florent thought they recognized him and were about to arrest him. Anxiety overtook him, and he was gripped by a mad compulsion to run. But he didn't dare and had no idea how to get away. The frequent glances shot at him by the sergents de ville, their slow and icy perusal, kept him on the verge of panic. Finally he got up from the bench and, fighting the urge to flee as fast as his long legs would carry him, managed to stroll away quietly, though his shoulders trembled with the fear that at any second he would feel a rough hand grabbing the back of his collar.

  Now he had but one thought, one idea, and that was to get away from the market as fast as he could. He would put off his research until later, when the area had emptied out. The three streets that intersected here, rue Montmartre, rue Montorgueil, and rue de Turbigo, worried him. They were blocked by all kinds of vehicles, and the sidewalks were clogged with vegetables. Florent continued until rue Pierre-Lescot, but there he ran into the watercress and potato markets, and it seemed to him there was no way past them. It looked better to take rue Rambuteau. But once he reached boulevard Sébastopol he ran into such a barricade of carriages, wagons, and carts that he turned off to rue Saint-Denis. But there he was back with the vegetables. Retailers had just set up their stands—thick planks propped up on tall baskets—and the flood of cabbages, carrots, and turnips started again. Les Halles overflowed. He tried to escape the flood, but it ran after him. He tried rue de la Cossonnerie, rue Berger, the square des Innocents, rue de la Ferronerie, rue des Halles. He was trapped, disheartened, afraid that he was unable to hop off this carousel of vegetables, which would end up prancing around him, thin vines wrapping around his legs.

  The eternal trail of carts and horses stretched all the way to rue de Rivoli and place de l'Hôtel de Ville. Huge vans were hauling away supplies for all the district's grocers and fruit sellers. Large covered wagons with straining, groaning flanks were starting for the suburbs. In rue du Pont-Neuf, Florent became completely disoriented. He stumbled upon a row of handcarts where numerous vendors were arranging their goods. Among them, heading off down rue Saint-Honoré pushing a cart of carrots and cauliflower, he sighted Lacaille.

  Florent followed him, hoping he would help him find his way out. Even though the weather was dry, the pavement was very slippery, and discarded artichoke stalks and leaves of all kinds made walking a bit perilous. He slid with each step. He lost track of Lac
aille in rue Vauvilliers and, heading into the grain market, once again found his route blocked by vehicles. He no longer tried to fight. Les Halles had defeated him, the tide had overtaken him. Slowly he worked his way back to pointe Saint-Eustache.

  Now he heard the loud rumbling of the wagons setting out from the market. Paris was dispersing the mouthfuls that would feed its two million inhabitants. These markets were like a huge central organ, furiously pulsating and pumping the blood of life through the city's veins. The uproar from all the stocking and provisioning was like the chomping of the jaws of a colossus, at one end the cracking of whips of the big buyers driving their wagons to the local markets, at the other the plodding clogs of the poor women who sold lettuce from door to door carrying off their baskets.

  Florent entered a covered passage on the left between a group of four pavilions, which, he had noticed when it was nighttime, had no lights on. There he hoped to find refuge, some corner in which he could hide. But now these pavilions were as packed and lively as everywhere else. He went to the end of the street. Wagons were arriving at a quick rate, congesting the market with cages of live poultry and deep square baskets in which dead birds were laid. On the opposite sidewalk, other wagons were unloading whole calves, lying on their sides like children wrapped in shrouds so tailored that only the bloody stumps of their chopped-off legs were showing. There were also whole sheep and sides of beef, legs and shoulders. Butchers in long white aprons stamped the meat, carried it off, weighed it, and hung it on hooks in the auction room.

  With his face close to the grating, Florent studied the rows of hanging cadavers—the red cattle and sheep, the pale calves flecked with the yellow of fat and tendons and with gaping bellies. Then he passed along the sidewalk by the triperie with its calves' feet and heads, the rolled tripe neatly packed in boxes, the brains fastidiously laid in flat baskets, the bloody livers, the purplish kidneys. He paused to inspect long two-wheeled carts covered with a round tarpaulin loaded with halved pigs hung on either side over a bed of straw. Seen from behind, the inside of the cart looked like a tabernacle lit by the rows of naked flesh. On the straw were tin cans catching the dripping blood.