CHAPTER TWO

Florent had just begun studying law in Paris when his mother died. She lived in Le Vigan in the Gard.¹ She had taken a second husband, someone named Quenu from Yvetot in Normandy. Some subprefect had sent Quenu to the Midi and then forgotten him. He continued working at the subprefect's office, finding the region charming, the wine good, the women pleasant. Indigestion took him away three years after his marriage. All he left his wife was a hefty boy who looked like him. The mother was already struggling to pay for the education of Florent, her first son from a previous marriage. He was her great joy sweet-natured and hardworking and always winning the school prizes. It was on him that she lavished her affections and pinned all her hopes. It might be that her favoritism for the pale, skinny boy came from her fondness for her first husband, a Provençal with warm country charm who had been devoted to her. Perhaps Quenu, whose good humor had at first touched her, had shown himself to be too self-satisfied and confident. She decided that her younger son—and in southern families the younger son is often sacrificed—would never amount to much. So she sent him to a school run by a neighbor, an old spinster, where the boy learned nothing but how to be footloose on the neighborhood streets. The two brothers grew up far apart from each other, like strangers.

By the time Florent got to Le Vigan, his mother had already been buried. She had insisted on concealing her illness from him until the last moment because she did not want to disturb his studies. He found the little Quenu, then twelve years old, sitting at a table, crying. A furniture dealer, a neighbor, had told him of his poor mother's suffering. She had run out of money and had worked herself to death so that her older son could finish studying law. To her little ribbon business, which never brought in very much money, she'd had to add other activities that kept her working late into the night. An obsession with this singular idea to see Florent become a lawyer, a man of substance in the town, had turned her hard and miserly and pitiless to herself and everyone else. Little Quenu ran around with holes in his pants and shirts with frayed sleeves. He never served himself at the table but waited for his mother to cut him his share of bread. And she cut thin slices. This was the way of life that had destroyed her, along with the great despair of having failed to accomplish her goal.

This story had a terrible impact on Florent's gentle character. He choked with tears. Taking his brother in his arms, he held him to his chest and kissed him as though trying to give him back the love of which he had deprived him. Then he looked at the boy's worn-out shoes, his torn sleeves and dirty hands, all the wretchedness of an abandoned child. Over and over again, he told him that he would take him away and they would be happy together.

The next day, when he reviewed the situation, he was afraid that he would not even have enough money to pay the fare back to Paris. At any cost, he did not want to stay in Le Vigan. Fortunately he was able to sell the ribbon business, which raised enough money to pay his mother's debts. Despite her frugality she had run up bills. Since there was nothing left for him, the neighbor, the furniture merchant, offered him five hundred francs for the furniture and linens of the deceased. It was a bargain for the dealer, but the young man nonetheless thanked him with tears in his eyes. He bought his brother new clothes and took him away that same evening.

Back in Paris there was no question of his continuing law school. Florent deferred all his ambitions. He took on a few pupils and set himself up with little Quenu on rue Royer-Collard at the corner of rue Saint-Jacques in a large bedroom that he furnished with two iron frame beds, a wardrobe, and a table with four chairs. From now on he would raise a child, and he was pleased by this sudden paternity. At first he tried to give Quenu lessons when he came home in the evening, but the thickheaded child barely listened and refused to learn anything. Instead he would start sobbing and recall with nostalgia the days when his mother had let him run in the streets. In despair, Florent stopped the lessons and promised the boy an indefinite vacation. He excused his own weakness by repeatedly arguing that he had not brought the boy to Paris to harass him. His singular code of conduct became making sure that the boy's childhood was a happy one. He adored him, was enthralled by his laughter, took endless delight in being surrounded by the child's well-being and carefree life.

Florent remained skinny in his threadbare black coat, his face yellowing with the grinding burden of teaching, while Quenu became a cheerful, plump man, a bit slow, barely able to read, but with a pleasant good spirit that nothing could shake. He gave brightness to the large, somber room on the rue Royer-Collard.

The years went by. Florent, with a devotion like that of his mother, kept Quenu at home as though he were his grown-up, shiftless daughter. He did not even bother Quenu about household tasks, doing the shopping and cooking the food himself. This, Florent reasoned, helped him to escape his own dark thoughts. He had a sad nature and thought he had evil tendencies. In the evening, when he returned home, splattered with mud, his head bowed by his irritation with other people's children, he would be revived by the big, chunky boy whom he found spinning a top on the tile floor. Quenu laughed at his brother's ineptitude at making omelettes and the seriousness with which he prepared a pot-au-feu. When the lamp was put out, Florent sometimes grew sad again as he lay in his bed. He dreamed of returning to his law studies and plotted how to divide his time in order to take courses at the law school. Once he had figured this out, he felt content. But then a slight bout of fever that kept him home for eight days created such a hole in his budget and worried him so much that he dropped all thoughts of returning to his studies.

His child grew. Florent found a position as instructor at a school on rue de l'Estrapade at a salary of eighteen hundred francs a year. This was a fortune. With some frugality he could even save some money for Quenu. When Quenu was already eighteen years old, Florent was still treating him like a daughter whose dowry must be set aside.

While his brother was having his brief illness, Quenu too had spent time reflecting. One morning he announced that he wanted to work, that he was now old enough to earn his living. Florent was deeply moved. Just across the street from them lived a watchmaker whom Quenu could see through the curtainless window, leaning over his little table all day, adjusting delicate things and patiently studying them through a magnifying glass. Seduced by this sight, the boy declared a taste for watchmaking. But after fifteen days, he became restless and started crying like a ten-year-old that the work was too complicated and that he would never know “all the dumb little things that go into a watch.”

Then he decided he would like to be a locksmith but found the work tedious. In the next two years he tried more than ten trades. Florent thought that Quenu was right, that he shouldn't take up a trade if his heart was not in it. Meanwhile, Quenu's noble ambition to earn his own living was putting a serious strain on the budget of the two young men. Since he had started hopping from craft to craft, there had been constant new expenses, the cost of clothing, outside meals, entertaining new colleagues. Florent's eighteen hundred francs were no longer enough. He had to take on two night students. For eight years now he had been wearing the same worn-out coat.

But the two brothers had made a friend. The building they lived in had a side on rue Saint-Jacques, where there was a shop that roasted chickens run by a respectable man named Gavard whose wife was dying of lung disease caused by the constant smell of chicken grease. On evenings when Florent came home too late to cook a bit of meat, he got into the habit of spending a dozen sous at the rotisserie for a piece of turkey or goose. Such an evening was like a feast day. Gavard became interested in the skinny young man and learned his story. He invited Quenu into the shop and soon the youth spent all his time there. As soon as his brother went to work, Quenu went downstairs and installed himself in the back of the shop, infatuated with the four giant skewers that turned with a soft noise in front of the high bright flames.

The large copper pots at the fireplace glistened, the birds smoked, the fat sang as it dripped in the pan. The spits seemed to chat with one another and eventually threw a few kind words toward Quenu, who, with a long-stemmed ladle, lovingly basted the golden breasts of huge turkeys and plump geese. He passed hours this way, his face turning red in the dancing flames, looking a bit stupid as he snickered at the large animals getting cooked. He didn't move until they were taken off the spits. The birds fell on the platters, the skewers slid from their stomachs, the stomachs emptied all steaming, with the juice running from the holes behind and at the throat, drenching the shop in the strong scent of roasted meat. Then the youth, who had stood up to follow the operation with his eyes, started clapping his hands and talking to the birds, telling them how nice they were and how they would be eaten up and there would be only bones left for the cats. And he jumped up if Gavard gave him a piece of crusty bread that he would put in the drip pan, leaving it there to stew for a half hour.

It was no doubt there that Quenu found his love of cooking. Later on, after trying out every other trade, he returned, as though it were his destiny, to the skewered animals whose juice made you lick your fingers. At first he was worried about irritating his brother, a man of little appetite who spoke of tasty things with the disdain of a man who has not tasted. But then, watching Florent listen to him as Quenu explained some very complicated dish, he decared it to be his true vocation and started working for a large restaurant. From that time on, a new pattern was established for the two brothers. They continued to live in the room on rue Royer-Collard, where they returned every evening—the one with a face lit by the heat of the ovens, the other with the beaten face of a mud-spattered teacher. Florent kept his old black coat, losing himself in his students' homework, while Quenu, to make himself comfortable, tied on his apron, put on his white coat and white chef's hat, and stood over the stove rattling the skillet and entertaining himself by cooking some delicacy.

Sometimes they smiled at the way they looked, the one all in black and the other all in white. The two contrasting outfits, one cheerful and one morose, seemed to make the big room half festive and half somber, in between merry and mournful. Still, never was a household marked by such disparity so harmonious. The elder brother grew ever thinner, consumed by the intensity he had inherited from his Provençal father, while the younger one grew ever fatter, like a true son of Normandy. But they loved each other with a brotherhood that came from their mother, a woman who had been nothing but love.

A relative in Paris, their mother's brother, Gradelle, had a charcuterie in the Les Halles neighborhood, on rue Pirouette. He was a fat, cheap, heartless man, who received his nephews as starving street waifs when they first introduced themselves, and they had rarely returned. On his saint's day, Quenu would take him a bouquet of flowers and Gradelle would hand him a ten-sou coin. Florent, always proud, hated the way Gradelle would peruse his threadbare clothes with the worried, suspicious glance of a miser who feared being asked for a free dinner or a hundred sous. One day, without intending anything in particular, Florent asked his uncle to change a hundred-franc bill, and ever after that the uncle was less apprehensive when he sighted the “youngsters,” as he called them. But still the relationship never progressed.

To Florent, the years passed like a bittersweet dream. He tasted all the bitter joys of parenthood. At home there was nothing but love. But out in the world, with the humiliations of his students and the shoving and pushing of the streets, he felt himself souring. He was embittered by his crushed ambition. It was a long time before he could accept his fate as a plain, poor, and ordinary man. To escape turning mean, he embraced idealism and took refuge in principles of truth and justice. It was then that he became a republican,² entering republicanism the way a heartbroken girl enters a convent. If he could not find a republic warm and peaceful enough to numb his troubles, he would invent one. Books no longer pleased him; all the marked-up paper with which he was surrounded reminded him of the stinking classroom, the boys' chewed-up spit-balls, the agony of long, sterile hours. Besides, books spoke only of revolution and pride, and he felt an overwhelming need for peace and withdrawal. To soothe and still himself, to dream that he was serenely happy, that the entire world was reaching this same state, to construct in his imagination the ideal republican city in which he would like to live, became his recreation, the work of his leisure hours. He no longer read except what was necessary for teaching, preferring to wander the rue Saint-Jacques all the way to the outer boulevards, sometimes going even farther, returning by the barrière d'Italie with his eyes toward the Quartier Mouffetard, all the time working out measures of great moral import, humanitarian legal projects, that would transform this suffering city into a city of bliss.

When the days of February bloodied Paris, he became distraught and ran to all the “clubs,”³ demanding that they atone for the bloodshed with “the eternal embrace of republicans the world over.” He became an enraptured orator, preaching revolution as the new religion, full of gentleness and redemption. It took the dark days of December⁴ to break him from the doctrine of the brotherhood of man. But he was unarmed and let himself be taken like a sheep and was then treated as though he were a wolf. When he was awakened from the grip of the brotherhood of man, he found himself starving on the cold stones of a cell in Bicêtre.

Quenu, only twenty-two years old at the time, was overtaken with burning anguish when his brother did not come home. The following day, he went to look for him at the Montmartre cemetery among the dead from the streets, who had been lined up and covered with straw, their heads sticking out grotesquely. Quenu's courage failed, his eyes became blinded with tears, and he had to make a second pass along the row. Finally, after eight long days, he found out at the Prefecture of Police that his brother had been imprisoned. He was not allowed to see him, and when he tried to insist they threatened to arrest him. So he ran to Uncle Gradelle, whom he saw as a man of influence, hoping that he could help Florent. But Gradelle flew into a rage, saying that it served Florent right, that the idiot had no business being mixed up with those lowlife republicans. Then he added that he had always known that Florent would turn out badly, that it was written all over his face.

Quenu cried out every tear in his body, nearly choking. His uncle, feeling a bit ashamed, felt that he should do something for the young man and offered to take him in. He needed an assistant and knew that Quenu was a good cook. Quenu, finding the thought of returning to the large, empty room on rue Royer-Collard unbearable, accepted the offer. That same night he slept at his uncle's, in a dark hole of a garret where he had barely enough space to stretch out to his full length. But he cried less there than he would have across from his brother's empty bed.

After a long effort he managed to get permission to see Florent. But on his return from Bicêtre, he was bedridden with a fever. For nearly three weeks he lay in a lifeless, barely conscious state. That was his first and only illness. Meanwhile, Gradelle regularly cursed his republican nephew. One morning when he found out that Florent was being shipped to Cayenne, he went upstairs, tapped Quenu on the hand to wake him up, and brutally blurted out the news, provoking such a reaction that the next day the young man was up and out of bed. His sorrow melted, and his flabby flesh seemed to absorb all his tears. A month later he laughed and then grew angry with himself for laughing, but his lighthearted nature won out and soon he would laugh without reason.

He learned the charcuterie trade. It gave him even more pleasure than being a cook. Uncle Gradelle told him that he should not neglect the pots, that it was rare to find a charcutier who was also a good cook, and that he was lucky to have trained at a restaurant before coming to him. Gradelle made full use of Quenu's talents, having him cook dinners sent out to customers and putting him especially in charge of grilling and pork chops with cornichons.⁵ Since the young man was actually of great help, Gradelle grew fond of him in his way and would pinch his chubby arm when in a good mood. He sold the cheap furniture from the rue Royer-Collard and kept the money, forty francs and change—for safekeeping, he said, so that Quenu wouldn't just let the money slip through his fingers. Instead he gave him six francs each month for spending money.

Quenu, short of money and sometimes abused, was perfectly happy. He liked to have life parceled out for him. Florent had indulged him like a lazy daughter. Besides, he had made a friend at his uncle's. When his wife died, Gradelle had had to hire a girl to look after the shop and had deliberately chosen one healthy and attractive-looking, knowing that a good-looking girl would show off his charcuterie and charm his clients. He knew a widow living on rue Cuvier, near the Jardin des Plantes, whose late husband had been postmaster at Plassans,⁶ the seat of a subprefecture in the south of France. This woman, who lived modestly, her rent subsidized by an annuity, had brought to town a plump, pretty child whom she had raised as her daughter. Lisa, as the child was named, looked after the woman with a tranquil air, an even temper, and a serious demeanor, but she was lovely when she smiled. In fact, her great charm appeared on the rare occasions on which she showed her smile. Then she could caress with her eyes, and her usual seriousness gave an incalculable value to this unpredictable science of seduction. The elderly woman often said that Lisa's smile would lead her to perdition.

When the woman died of asthma, she left all her savings, some ten thousand francs, to her adopted daughter. Lisa stayed by herself at the rue Cuvier apartment for eight days before Gradelle went there to look for her. He knew her because the elderly woman had often brought her along on visits to the rue Pirouette. But at the funeral she was so strikingly beautiful and sturdily built that he followed her all the way to the cemetery. As the coffin was being lowered, he was thinking what a great thing it would be to have her at the charcuterie counter. He pondered and finally resolved to offer her thirty francs a month with room and board. When he made the proposal, Lisa asked for twenty-four hours to think it over. In the morning she turned up with a small bundle of clothes and ten thousand francs hidden in the bodice of her dress.

A month later she seemed to own the store, Gradelle, Quenu, and even the little kitchen boy. Quenu in particular would have chopped off his fingers just to please her. When she deigned to smile, he was frozen on the spot, laughing with delight as he looked at her.

Lisa, the oldest daughter of the Macquarts from Plassans, still had a father. But she said he lived abroad, and she never wrote him. She sometimes let it drop that her mother had been a very hard worker and that she took after her. In fact, she was indefatigable. She sometimes added that the good woman had worked herself to death in order to support her family. Then she would hold forth on the relative duties of husbands and wives, doing so with such wisdom and candor that Quenu was enchanted. He said that he completely agreed with her ideas. Lisa's ideas were that everyone should work to earn a living, that everyone had a duty to pursue his own happiness, that it was a mistake to encourage idleness, and that the presence of so much misery in the world was in large part due to laziness. This pet theory was a sweeping condemnation of the drunkenness and legendary idleness of her father, the elder Macquart. But though she could not see it, there was much of Macquart in her. She was just a steady, sensible Macquart with a rational desire for comfort, who understood that the best way to fall asleep blissfully is to make a comfortable bed to lie in. She gave all her time and effort to the preparation of this fluffy soft couch. Even when only six years old, she was willing to sit still on her little chair all day, as long as she was given her evening cake.

At Gradelle's charcuterie her life was calm and dependable and periodically lit up by her beautiful smiles. She had not taken his offer with a sense of adventure; in Gradelle, she knew she could find a protector, and perhaps she saw in this somber shop on the rue Pirouette, where there were people on whom fortune had smiled, the future of her dreams of a healthy, pleasant life with steady work that was not exhausting, in which each hour brought its own reward. She looked after her counter with the same quiet care that she had given to the postmaster's widow. Soon the cleanliness of Lisa's aprons became legendary in the neighborhood. Uncle Gradelle was so pleased by this beautiful girl that he sometimes said to Quenu as he was tying up sausages, “If I wasn't over sixty, I swear to God, I'd be fool enough to marry her. She's like a bar of gold, my boy a woman like that in trade.”

Quenu was becoming infatuated with her. He laughed with slightly too broad a smile one day when a neighbor accused him of being in love with her. But he wasn't bothered by it. They were great friends. In the evening they climbed the stairs together to go to bed. Lisa slept in a small room adjoining the young man's black hole. She had brightened her room with muslin curtains. The couple would stand together for a moment on the landing, each holding a candle, and chat as they put their keys in the locks. And as they closed their doors they would say, in a friendly tone:

“Good night, Mademoiselle Lisa.”

“Good night, Monsieur Quenu.”

As Quenu undressed, he would listen to Lisa getting ready for bed. The partition between them was so thin that they could hear each other's every move. He would think, “Ah, now she's closing the curtains. I wonder what she's doing in front of the dresser. There, now she's sitting down and taking her shoes off. Well, good night, she's blown out the candle. Let's sleep.” When he heard the bed creak, he would chuckle to himself, “Damn, she's no feather, that Lisa.” This thought amused him and made him laugh, but then he would fall asleep dreaming of hams and strips of petit salé⁷ that he had to prepare the next day.

It went on like this for a year without a blush from Lisa or any embarrassment from Quenu. In the morning, the busiest time of day, when the young girl came down to the kitchen, their hands would meet amid the ground meat. Sometimes she helped him, holding the sausage skins with her chubby fingers while he stuffed them with meats and lardoons.⁸ Sometimes they tasted the raw sausage meat on the tips of their tongues, to make sure it was well seasoned. She helped him with her knowledge of recipes from the Midi, with which he experimented with great success. Often he could feel her over his shoulder, looking into his pots, leaning so close he felt her neck in his back. She would pass him a spoon or a plate. The heat of the fire made their skin flush. Still, nothing in the world would have made this young man stop stirring his fatty bouillies⁹ that he was thickening on the stove, as she pronounced with gravity on the proper cooking time. In the afternoon, when the shop was quiet, they would chat together for hours.

Lisa sat at the counter, leaning back slightly, calmly knitting. Quenu sat on a big oak block, dangling his feet and tapping his heels against the oak. They reveled in each other's company, talking about everything from the most banal cooking discussions to Uncle Gradelle and life in the neighborhood. She told him stories the way you would to a child. She knew very pretty tales of miracles, full of lambs and little angels, which she told in a soft, high-pitched voice with an air of mock gravity. If a customer happened to come in, she asked Quenu to fetch the lard pot or the box of snails so that she did not have to disturb herself.

At eleven o'clock they slowly climbed the stairs as they did each night before. As they closed the doors they said in their peaceful voices:

“Good night, Mademoiselle Lisa.”

“Good night, Monsieur Quenu.”

One morning Uncle Gradelle dropped dead while making a galantine.¹⁰ He fell forward with his face on the chopping block. Lisa, without losing her composure, pointed out that the dead man could not very well be left sprawled in the middle of the kitchen and had the body dragged into the small back room where he had slept. Then she established the official story with the helpers. They all had to agree that he had died in his bed because otherwise the entire neighborhood would be repulsed and they would lose business. Quenu helped carry the dead man away, feeling amazed and very surprised at his inability to produce any tears. But later on, he and Lisa cried together. Quenu and his brother, Florent, were the sole heirs. The neighborhood gossips claimed that Gradelle had a considerable fortune. But the truth was that there was not one piece of silver to be found. Lisa grew uneasy, and Quenu noticed how pensive she had become, always looking around as though she had lost something. Finally she decided to undertake a massive shop cleaning, claiming that people were beginning to talk, that the story of the old man's death had gotten out and they had to have a spotless shop.

One afternoon, after having spent the past two hours in the basement washing the salting tubs, Lisa came up carrying something in her apron. Quenu was grinding up a pig's liver. She waited for him to finish, chatting with him in a nonchalant way. But her eyes had a special glow and she smiled her beautiful smile, while saying she wanted to talk to him about something. She climbed the stairs awkwardly, her legs impeded by whatever it was she was carrying that was almost bursting her apron open. At the third floor she had to stop and lean on the banister to catch her breath. Quenu, taken aback, said nothing and followed her into her bedroom. It was the first time she had ever invited him in. She closed the door and, releasing the corners of her apron, which her cramped fingers could no longer hold up, she let softly rain on her bed a shower of gold and silver coins. She had found Uncle Gradelle's treasure at the bottom of the salting tub. The pile of money made a deep depression in the young woman's delicate, fluffy bed.

Quenu and Lisa suppressed their joy as they sat on the bed, Lisa at the head, Quenu at the foot, on either side of the money pile, counting it out on the bedspread to muffle the sound of the coins. They had forty thousand francs in gold, three thousand francs in silver, and forty-two thousand francs in banknotes in a tin box. It took a good two hours to add it all up. Quenu's hands were shaking, and Lisa did most of the work. She stacked the gold on the pillow, leaving the silver in the hollow of the bed. When they had reached the total, eighty-five thousand francs, an enormous sum for them, they began to discuss their future, their marriage, without having ever talked about love. The money seemed to loosen their tongues. They gradually slid themselves farther back on the bed so that they were leaning against the wall under the white muslin curtains with their legs stretched out. As they chattered on, their hands, caressing the silver coins between them, met and stayed together against a pile of one-hundred-sou coins.

They were surprised by twilight. Lisa suddenly blushed at finding herself lying next to a man. They had messed up the bed, the sheets were hanging off, and the gold made dents in the pillow between them, looking like the imprints of two heads that had rolled there in hot passion.

They got up awkwardly with the confused look of two lovers who had just committed their first transgression. The unmade bed covered in money stood like an accusation of forbidden pleasure behind a closed door. That was the moment of their fall. Lisa, who straightened out her clothes as though covering up her guilt, started looking for her ten thousand francs. Quenu wanted her to add them to his uncle's eighty-five thousand. Laughing, he mixed the two sums, saying that the money too should marry, and it was agreed that Lisa should keep “the stash” in her dressing table. When she had locked it up and remade the bed, they went calmly downstairs. They were man and wife.

The wedding took place the following month. The neighborhood considered it a completely suitable match. They heard vague stories of a treasure, and Lisa's honesty was a subject of endless eulogies. After all, she could have said nothing to Quenu and kept it all for herself. The fact that she had said something was testimony to her impeccable honesty. She was certainly a worthy mate for Quenu. This Quenu was a lucky man. He was not very good-looking, and he had found himself a pretty woman who had dug up a fortune. Admiration for her went so far that people ended up saying that Lisa was stupid to have done it. Lisa smiled when people hinted at this. She and her husband lived as they had before, in a close and contented friendship. She helped him, touched his hand over the ground meat, leaned over his shoulder to examine the pots. And still it was only the enormous fire in the kitchen that could bring heat to their blood.

But Lisa was an intelligent woman who quickly understood the folly of leaving ninety-five thousand francs in a dressing table drawer. Quenu would have gladly returned the money to the bottom of the salting tub until he had earned an equal amount and they would have enough to retire to Suresnes, an outlying area they both loved. But she had other ambitions. Rue Pirouette wounded her sense of cleanliness, did not fulfill her need for fresh air, light, and a healthy environment. The shop where Uncle Gradelle had amassed his fortune, penny by penny, was a sort of black pit, one of those questionable charcuteries that old neighborhoods have, where the worn stones of the floor, despite frequent washing, retained the strong smell of meat. The young woman dreamed of a light, modern shop, luxurious as a drawing room and with a sparkling window bordering the sidewalk of some broad street. This was not a latent desire to play the grande dame behind the counter. She had a very clear concept of the prerequisite niceties of a modern business. Quenu was frightened the first time she spoke of moving and spending part of their money on decorating the new shop. Softly shrugging her shoulders, she smiled.

One day, as nightfall was blackening the charcuterie, the couple heard a woman by the shop door say to another woman, “Well, I wouldn't buy there anymore, not so much as a piece of boudin. You see, dear, they had a corpse in the kitchen.”

Quenu wept. The story of the death in the kitchen had gotten around. Now he blushed in front of his customers anytime he saw them bend down and sniff his foods. So he went to his wife and brought up her idea about moving. She had been working on it without saying anything and had found some possibilities in a prime location, a few steps away on rue Rambuteau. The new central market was being opened across the street, which would triple their business and make their shop known all over Paris.

Quenu let himself be talked into lavish expenditures—more than thirty thousand francs in marble, glass, and gilding. Lisa spent her time with the workers, giving her opinions on the most minute details. When at last she was installed behind the counter, customers lined up just to see the shop. The interior walls were lined in white marble from top to bottom. The ceiling was covered with an immense square mirror in an ornate gilded frame, while from the center hung a crystal chandelier with four arms. And behind the counter, on the left hand at the far end of the shop, were more mirrors, fitted between the marble panels and looking like doors that opened into an infinite series of brightly lit halls where meats were on display. To the right was a huge counter that was considered a particularly fine piece of work. At intervals along the front were diamond-shaped medallions of pink marble. The floor was covered in alternating pink and white tiles with a dark red pattern for a border. The neighborhood was proud of the charcuterie and no longer even mentioned the old one on rue Pirouette, where there had been a death. For a month, neighborhood women gathered on the sidewalk to look at Lisa across the cervelas and the caul fat¹¹ sausages displayed in the window. They admired her white-and-pink flesh, which matched the marble. She seemed to be the soul, the living glow, the healthy, sturdy goddess of charcuteries. And from then on she was known as “Beautiful Lisa.”

To the right of the shop was a dining room, a spotless room with a buffet, a table, and light oak chairs with cane seats. The mat that covered the floor, the soft yellow wallpaper, the imitation oak oilcloth, all gave a coolness to the room, slightly softened by the shine of a brass lamp that hung from the ceiling and sprawled above the table with its large transparent porcelain shade. A door from the dining room led to the huge square kitchen. Beyond this was a small tile-floored courtyard used to store lumber, tubs, barrels, pans, and all sorts of tools that were not being used. To the left of a water faucet, by the side of a gutter that drained off greasy water, were pots of withered flowers, removed from the window display and at their last gasp.

Business was thriving. Quenu, who at first had been panicked, now had great respect for his wife, who, according to him, “had a great head on her shoulders.” At the end of five years they had almost eighty thousand francs in solid investments. Lisa would say that they were not overly ambitious and she had no desire to accumulate money too quickly otherwise she would have encouraged her husband to get into the wholesale pig trade. They were still young and still had time ahead of them, they didn't want to be in some seedy business. They would work at their own pace, without wearing themselves out, and live a good life.

“You know,” Lisa would add in her more expansive moments, “I have a cousin in Paris. I don't see him, because the two families aren't speaking to each other. He has changed his name to Saccard¹² to let some things be forgotten. Well, they say this cousin has made millions. But he doesn't live well, he's always in a state of anxiety, always rushing here and there, doing business with the Devil. A man like that can't even eat his dinner in peace, can he? The rest of us, at least, can enjoy what we eat. You love money because you need it to live. It's natural to look after your own well-being. But to make money just for the sake of making money and giving yourself anxiety and more trouble than the pleasure it could bring, I tell you, I'd rather just sit here with my arms crossed. And I would just like to see my cousin's millions. I don't believe in millions like that. I happened to see him the other day in his carriage. His face looked yellow and kind of sly. A man who's making a lot of money doesn't look like that. Anyway, that's his problem. We would rather have a hundred sous and have a good time earning it.”

Things went well at home. In the first year of their marriage they had a daughter. The three of them were a beautiful sight. The business prospered without their overworking, just the way Lisa wanted. She had carefully sidestepped any possible cause of trouble, allowing the days to flow on in the luxurious air of this lumbering prosperity. It was a little corner of stable contentment, a cozy manger where mother, father, and little girl could grow fat.

Quenu alone was occasionally sad when he thought of poor Florent. Until 1856, he received letters from him, though rarely. Then there were no more letters. Quenu learned from a newspaper that three convicts had attempted to escape from Devil's Island and drowned before they were able to reach the mainland. The police had no definite information, but it was likely that his brother was dead. Quenu still hoped, but the months passed. Meanwhile, Florent was wandering in Dutch Guiana but refrained from writing because he hoped to get back to France. Finally Quenu started to mourn for his brother the way people mourn for someone with whom there was no chance for a farewell. Lisa had never known Florent. When Quenu mourned his loss in front of her, she always found kind words to say, and she showed no impatience when, for about the hundredth time, he began to tell some story of the old days in the big room on rue Royer-Collard, the thirty-six trades he had taken up one after the other, and the little delicacies he had cooked at the stove all dressed in white, while Florent was all dressed in black. She listened peacefully to such talk, with infinite acceptance.

It was into the middle of all this well-planned, mature domestic bliss that one morning in September Florent dropped in, just at the time when Lisa took her morning sun bath and Quenu, his eyelids still heavy from sleep, was absentmindedly fingering the congealed fat left in the pans from the day before. The shop was completely thrown by the event. Gavard advised them to hide “the outlaw,” as he somewhat pompously called him, puffing out his cheeks. Lisa, paler and more serious than usual, led him to the fifth floor, where she gave him the room used by the girl who worked in the shop. Quenu sliced him some bread and ham. But Florent could hardly eat anything. He was nearly overcome with light-headedness and nausea. He went to bed for five days in a state of delirium, the onslaught of brain fever, which, fortunately, he vigorously fought off. When he regained consciousness, he saw Lisa seated by his bed, silently stirring something in a cup with a spoon. When he tried to thank her, she told him that he must remain completely still and that they could talk later. In another three days, Florent was on his feet. Then one morning Quenu came up to tell him that Lisa was waiting for them in her room on the first floor.

Quenu and Lisa lived there in a little apartment, three rooms and a dressing room. The brothers passed through an empty room that contained only chairs, then a little sitting room in which the furniture was covered with white dustcovers in the half-light of closed venetian blinds to keep the soft blue of the covers from fading, and finally arrived in the bedroom, the only room that was used and was comfortably furnished in mahogany. The bed was particularly striking with its four mattresses, four pillows, a thick bundle of blankets, and an eiderdown. This was a bed made for sleeping in. A mirrored wardrobe, a washstand with drawers, a lace-covered table, and several chairs with lace-covered seats expressed solid middle-class comfort. Against the left-hand wall, on either side of the fireplace mantle—which was decorated with vases painted with landscapes and mounted on bronze stands, along with a gilded clock on which a statuette of a pensive Gutenberg, also gilded, pressed his fingers into a book—were hanging oil portraits of Lisa and Quenu in ornate oval frames. Quenu was smiling, Lisa had an air of propriety, and both were dressed in black with pinkish smooth skin and idealized features— all very flattering. The floor was covered by a rug with stars and rosettes. In front of the bed was a fluffy rug with long strands of curly wool, knit by the charcuterie mistress in long, patient hours at the counter. But the object that stood out amid all the new furniture was a heavy, square secretary, which had been refinished in vain, for the cracks and pockmarks in the marble top, the scratches in the mahogany, blackened with age, still showed. Lisa wanted to keep this piece, which Uncle Gradelle had used for more than forty years. She insisted that it would bring them good luck. In truth it had heavy metal hardware, a lock like one would find on a prison gate, and was so heavy that it could not be moved.

When Florent and Quenu entered, Lisa, seated in front of the writing flap of the secretary, was working on rows of numbers in a large, round, and very readable hand. She gestured not to interrupt her, and the two men sat down. Florent, with some amazement, took in the room: the two portraits, the clock, the bed.

“Here we are,” said Lisa after calmly checking an entire page of figures. “Listen … we have some accounts to settle with you, my dear Florent.”

It was the first time she had addressed him in this way. She held the sheet of paper with the figures and continued, “Your uncle Gradelle died without leaving a will; you are, you and your brother, the two sole heirs. Today we owe you your share.”

“But I'm not asking for anything,” Florent protested. “I don't want anything!”

Quenu had known nothing of his wife's intentions. His face had become a bit pale and showed a slight touch of anger. Of course he loved his brother, but it was not really necessary to throw this question of his uncle's inheritance in his face. They could have broached the subject another time.

“I understand perfectly well, my dear Florent,” Lisa started up again, “that you did not come back here just to claim what is yours. However, business is business; it's better to settle it right away. Your uncle's savings came to eighty-five thousand francs. I have therefore put into an account for you forty-two thousand five hundred francs. Here it is.”

She showed him a figure on the sheet of paper.

“Unfortunately, it's not quite that easy to determine the value of the shop, equipment, stock, clientele. I can only estimate, but I think I've figured it all out, and without any skimping. I've come up with a figure of fifteen thousand three hundred and ten francs, which for you comes to seven thousand six hundred and fifty-five francs. See for yourself.”

She had recited the figures in a clear voice, and she now held out the sheet of numbers, which he felt obligated to take.

“But wait a minute!” Quenu cried out. “Since when was the old guy's shop worth fifteen thousand francs? I wouldn't have given you ten thousand for it, myself.”

His wife was beginning to annoy him. You didn't take honesty quite this far. It wasn't as though Florent had ever even mentioned the charcuterie. Besides, he didn't want anything, he had said so.

“The charcuterie was worth fifteen thousand three hundred and ten francs,” Lisa calmly repeated. “You see, my dear Florent, there's no point in calling in a lawyer. It's up to us to share since you've come back. I started thinking about it the moment you showed up, and the whole time you were upstairs in a fever, I've been working on an inventory as best I could. You see, it's all set out in every detail. I looked through all our old papers and tried to remember as best I could. Read it out loud, and I will explain anything you'd like to know about.”

Florent started to smile. He was amused by this honesty, which seemed to come so easily and naturally. He lay the sheet of figures on the young woman's lap. Then he took her hand.

“My dear Lisa,” he said. “I'm very glad to see that you're doing so well. But I don't want your money. This inheritance is for my brother and you, who looked after this uncle to the last. I don't need anything, and I don't want to interfere in your business.”

She insisted and even got a little angry, whereas Quenu sat in silence, biting his fingernails.

“Besides,” said Florent, bursting into laughter, “if Uncle Gradelle could hear you, he'd find a way to come back and take the money away … He wasn't very fond of me, Uncle Gradelle.”

“That's true, he didn't like you very much,” Quenu, at the end of his patience, muttered.

But Lisa was still arguing. She said that she didn't want to have money that was not hers in her secretary, that it would always bother her, that she couldn't be at peace knowing it was there. But Florent continued to joke, offering to buy shares in the charcuterie. Besides, it wasn't that he was refusing their help, since there was little chance of his finding work right away, and then too he would need some clothes since he was not presentable.

“There you are!” exclaimed Quenu. “You'll sleep with us, eat with us, and we're going to buy you everything you need. That goes without saying. My God, you didn't think we would throw you out in the street, did you?”

Quenu felt emotional and even a little ashamed for having been alarmed at the idea of having to hand over so much money at once. He managed to joke, telling his brother that he was going to fatten him up. Florent nodded, and Lisa folded the sheet of figures and stored it in the secretary.

“You're wrong,” she said to conclude the discussion. “I've done what I should have. Now it will be the way you want it. But as for me, I could not have lived in peace without making the offer, my conscience would have plagued me.”

Then they talked about other things. Florent's presence had to be explained without attracting the attention of the police. He told them how he had managed to return to France, thanks to the papers of a poor devil who had died of yellow fever in Suriname. By an odd coincidence, this fellow had also had the first name Florent. Florent Laquerrière had only a female cousin left behind in Paris, and he had learned of her death while he was in America. Nothing could be easier than to pass himself off as the other Florent. Lisa offered to play the part of the cousin. They agreed to tell a story of cousin Florent returning from America, where he had failed to find his fortune, and they, the Quenu-Gradelles, as they were known in the neighborhood, were putting him up until he could find work. Once everything was settled, Quenu insisted on his brother taking a tour of the house down to every last stool. In the empty room, where there was nothing but chairs, Lisa pushed open a door, showed him a small dressing room, and said that the girl in the shop could sleep there and he could keep his room on the fifth floor.

That evening Florent was suited up in new clothes. Against the advice of Quenu, who found them depressing, he insisted on having another black coat and black pants. They no longer tried to conceal Florent in the house, and Lisa told the story they had worked out to everyone who asked. He spent almost all of his time in the charcuterie, daydreaming on a chair in the kitchen or leaning against the marble in the shop. When they dined, Quenu tried to stuff him with food and became irritated at what a light eater his brother was, leaving half his food on the plate.

Lisa had returned to her easy, kind ways, tolerating Florent's presence even in the morning when he was in the way. She was apt to forget about him, and then, when the figure dressed in black would suddenly appear, it would startle her. But she would somehow produce her beautiful smile so that his feelings would not be hurt. She was struck by this thin man's indifference, and she felt a combination of respect and fear. As for Florent, he felt surrounded by warmth and affection.

At bedtime, he climbed the stairs, a little weary from his empty day, along with the two boys who worked in the charcuterie, who stayed in the attic eaves next to him. One of them, Léon, was barely fifteen years old, a thin boy with a sweetness about him, who stole the first cuts from hams and the forgotten ends of sausages. He hid them under his pillow and ate them at night without bread. A number of times Florent had the impression that Léon was hosting a banquet at about one in the morning. First came the sound of hushed whispering voices and then chewing and the crackling of paper, and then ripples of laughter, girlish laughter, would break into the still of the sleeping house.

The other boy Auguste Landois, was from Troyes. Bulging with unhealthy fat and with an oversize head that was already balding, he was twenty-eight years old. The first night he went up the stairs with Florent, he told him his life story in a rambling, confused narration. He had come to Paris only to perfect his skills so he could open a shop back in Troyes, where his cousin Augustine Landois was waiting for him. They had the same godfather and he and she had been given the same first name. But he had grown ambitious in Paris and now hoped to set up shop in Paris, with the help of the money his mother had left him, which he had entrusted to a lawyer before leaving Champagne. At this point in the story they had reached the fifth floor, but Auguste delayed Florent on the landing to tell him how wonderful he thought Madame Quenu was. She had agreed to send for Augustine to replace a girl who had not worked out. Though he now knew the trade thoroughly, she was just beginning to learn. In a year or eighteen months, they would get married and set up a charcuterie in Plaisance or some busy Parisian neighborhood. There was no hurry to get married because pork fat products were not getting a good price that year. He went on to say that they had been photographed at a fair in Saint-Ouen. Then he went into the attic to have another look at the picture, which he had left on the mantel so the room for Madame Quenu's cousin would look nice.

For a moment, he was lost standing there in the pale yellow glow of a candle, studying the room in which that young woman still had a presence. Then he walked up to the bed and asked Florent if it was comfortable. She, Augustine, now slept downstairs and would be better off there. The attic was very cold in the wintertime. Finally he departed, leaving Florent alone with the bed and the photograph in which Auguste appeared as a pale Quenu and Augustine as an unripened Lisa.

Florent, befriended by the boys, spoiled by his brother, and accepted by Lisa, ended up completely bored. He had looked for classes to teach but had not been successful. He had avoided the Quartier des Ecoles, where he was afraid of being recognized. Lisa had very gently suggested that he approach some of the commercial houses, where he might take care of the correspondence and keep the books. She kept coming back to this idea and finally offered to find him a spot herself. It was slowly getting on her nerves, seeing him not working and idly wondering what to do with himself. At first it was only a normal dislike of seeing someone dividing his time between eating and folding his arms. She wouldn't have dreamed of asking him to eat elsewhere, but she would say to him, “Personally, I couldn't bear spending all my time daydreaming. I can't imagine how you can feel hungry in the evening … you know, you need something to tire you out.”

Gavard, for his part, looked for a job for Florent. But he looked in strange and suspicious ways. He wanted to find some employment that was dramatic, had bitter irony, or was in someway suitable for “an outlaw.” Gavard had a contrary nature. He was just over fifty and prided himself in having already witnessed the fall of four governments. Charles X, the clerics, the aristocrats, the rabble shoved out the door, all that simply made him shrug his shoulders. Louis-Philippe had been an imbecile with his myth of the citizen king who concealed big money in his wool stocking. As for the republic of ‘48, it was a farce. The workers had sold out, but he no longer even admitted to having supported the coup d’état because he now regarded Napoleon III as his personal enemy, a reprobate who locked himself up with de Morny¹³ and the others to indulge in orgies. He never tired of this theme. Slightly lowering his voice, he would declare that every evening women were taken to the Tuileries in closed carriages and that he himself had one night heard the sounds of the revelries as he was crossing the place du Carrousel.

To be as much in opposition as possible to any government in power was Gavard's religion. He committed the greatest outrages he could imagine against the political system, only to laugh about them later. To begin with, he always voted for the legislative candidate who would make the most trouble for the government at the Corps Législatif.¹⁴ Then, if he could steal public money, cause the police to stumble, or start some kind of trouble, Gavard would try to give the affair as much of an air of insurrection as possible. Also, he lied a lot to make himself appear tremendously dangerous and talked as though “the crowd up in the Tuileries”¹⁵ knew him well and trembled at the thought of him. He maintained that the next time things blew up, half of that bunch would have to be guillotined and the other half sent into exile. His violent political stance was fed by braggadocio, in far-fetched stories that demonstrated the same cynicism that leads a Parisian shopkeeper to take down his shutters on the day of a riot so he can count the corpses in the street. So when Florent got back from Cayenne, Gavard immediately sensed an opportunity and looked for some way, spiritually, to play some trick on the emperor, the ministers, the people in power, all the way down to the lowly sergents de ville.

Gavard took a hidden pleasure in Florent. He winked at him and spoke to him in a lowered voice when talking of the most banal things and clasped his hands with all sorts of Masonic secrecy. At last he had found his adventure. He knew someone who really was in danger, who could speak, without exaggeration, of the perils he had faced. He could feel the unstated fear of this young man who had come back from the penal colony, whose thinness testified to his long hardship, but this same delicious fear made Gavard think even more of himself, convinced that he was doing something truly shocking in treating this dangerous man as his friend. Florent became sacred. Gavard swore by him. Florent's name would be invoked if his argument needed support. He was attempting to crush the government once and for all.

Gavard had lost his wife on rue Saint-Jacques some months after the coup d'état. He had kept his rotisserie until 1856. At that time, it was rumored that he had made a considerable amount of money in association with a neighboring grocery store owner from a contract to furnish the Army of the East with dried vegetables. The truth was that after having sold the rotisserie, he had had enough capital to live on for a year. But he didn't like to speak of the source of this revenue. That was awkward for him and kept him from speaking candidly about the Crimean War, which he characterized as dangerous adventurism “undertaken merely to consolidate the throne and fill certain pockets with money.”

After a year, he was nearly dead from boredom in his bachelor quarters. Since he dropped by at the Quenu-Gradelles almost every day, he moved nearer to them on rue de la Cossonnerie. It was there that he fell in love with Les Halles, its roar of noise and constant exchange of gossip. He decided to rent a stall in the poultry market just to keep himself amused, to fill his days with idle market gossip. Now he could live a life of endless chitchat, stay on top of all the petty scandals of the neighborhood, fill his head until it was dizzy with gossip. He tasted a thousand rarified pleasures, at last in his element, diving into it with the sensual pleasure of a carp swimming through sunlight.

Florent would sometimes visit him in his stall. The afternoons were still warm, and women sat plucking fowl along the narrow alleyways. Rays of sunlight fell between the awnings, and in the warmth, feathers slipped from fingers and looked like snowflakes dancing in the golden powder of sunbeams. Merchants shouted a long stream of sales pitches, offers, and seductions: “A beautiful duck, Monsieur? … Want to have a look … I have some really fine-looking fat chickens … Monsieur, Monsieur, don't you want to buy this pair of pigeons?”

Florent managed to slip past, both embarrassed and deafened. The women continued plucking as they vied for his attention, and he was nearly suffocated by a cloud of down, thick as a puff of smoke with the stench of poultry.

At last, in mid-alleyway by the water faucets, he found Gavard babbling away in shirtsleeves, his arms crossed over a blue apron. There Gavard ruled over a group of ten or twelve women like a benevolent prince. He was the only man in that section of the market. He had already been through five or six women to run the stall, all of whom had become angered by his long wagging tongue, so that he had decided he would run it himself, naively insisting that the problem was that the silly creatures wanted to pass the whole day gossiping and he could not control them. But since he did need to have someone to keep his place when he wasn't there, he had brought in Marjolin, who was drifting through the market trying out all the lesser positions Les Halles had to offer.

Florent sometimes spent as much as an hour with Gavard, marveling at his endless babble and how confident he was surrounded by petticoats. Interrupting one woman, then picking an argument with another ten stalls away, and grabbing a customer from a third, he made more noise by himself than the hundred or so talkative neighbors who raised such a clamor that the steel girders thumped like tom-toms.

The poultry seller's only relatives were a sister-in-law and a niece. When his wife had died, her older sister, Madame Lecœur, who had been widowed for a year, had mourned her in an exaggerated fashion, going every evening to console the bereaved husband. At the time she was entertaining the idea that she might somehow take the still-warm place of her dead sister. But Gavard could not bear thin women: he said it pained him to feel their bones under the skin. He didn't even pet cats and dogs unless they were very fat. He derived a personal satisfaction from the feel of round, well-fed backs.

Madame Lecœur, her pride wounded, but worse, furious to watch all those hundred-sou coins the rotisserie brought in slipping from her grasp, nurtured a deep grudge. Her brother-in-law became her enemy, and this animosity preoccupied her days. When she saw him set himself up in the market only two steps from where she sold her butter, cheese, and eggs, she accused him of having done it just to annoy her and bring her bad luck. From then on she was always complaining and turned so yellow and melancholy that she really did start losing customers and her business turned sour.

For a long time she had been raising the daughter of one of her sisters; a peasant woman had sent her the child and never given her another thought. The child grew up in Les Halles. Since she was named Sarriet, which was her family name, she soon became known as La Sarriette. At the age of sixteen, La Sarriette was such an alluring young street wench that men would come and buy cheese just to see her. With her pastel face, dark brown hair, and eyes that burned like embers, she was not interested in gentlemen but preferred people from humbler classes. Finally she chose a fort from Ménilmontant who worked for her aunt. When she was twenty, she established a fruit-selling business with some funds from an unknown source, and from then on Monsieur Jules, as her lover was named, was seen with spotless hands, a clean shirt, and a velvet cap; and he came down to the market only in the afternoons, wearing slippers. They lived together on rue Vauvilliers on the third floor of a large house with a sleazy café on the ground floor. La Sarriette's ingratitude capped Madame Lecœur's growing bitterness, and she hurled barrages of scatological abuse at the girl whenever she spoke to her.

The girl conspired with Monsieur Jules to invent stories that they spread throughout the butter pavilion. Gavard thought La Sarriette was funny and indulged her, stroking her cheeks whenever he ran into her. She was plump and succulent.

One afternoon, while Florent was sitting in the charcuterie, weary from the useless trek he had made all morning in search of work, Marjolin entered. This chunky youth, with his Flemish blend of heft and sweetness, was Lisa's protégé. She would say that he had a complete absence of malice and was a little stupid, but was as strong as a horse and a bit interesting in that no one seemed to know anything about his mother or father. It was she who had gotten Gavard to give him a job.

Lisa was at the counter, annoyed by the sight of Florent's dirty shoes, which were tracking mud onto the floor's pink and white tiles. She had already gotten up twice to toss handfuls of sawdust on the floor. She smiled at Marjolin.

“Monsieur Gavard,” said the young man, “has sent me to ask …” He stopped, looked around, and lowered his voice. “He told me to wait until you were alone and then repeat these words, which he made me learn by heart: ‘Ask them if there is any danger or if I can come talk to them about the matter they know about.’”

“Tell Monsieur Gavard that we're expecting him,” said Lisa, who was used to the mysterious ways of the poultry vendor.

But Marjolin did not turn to leave. Instead, he remained in his tracks in a state of ecstacy before the beautiful charcuterie mistress.

As though moved by silent adulation, she asked, “You are happy at Monsieur Gavard's? He's not a bad man, and you should try to please him.”

“Yes, Madame Lisa.”

“But you're not being sensible. Only yesterday I saw you on the roofs of Les Halles. And you were with a bunch of lowlifes. You're a man now, and you should be thinking of your future.”

“Yes, Madame Lisa.”

But then she had to tend to a customer, a woman wanting a pound of pork chops and cornichons. She got up from the counter and went to the chopping block at the far end of the shop. There, with a slender knife, she separated three chops from a side of pork. Lifting a cleaver with her bare, strong hand, she gave three sharp blows. At each blow her black merino dress rose slightly behind her and the stays of her corset showed under her tightly stretched bodice. With great seriousness, her lips tight, her eyes wide, she slowly gathered up the chops and weighed them.

When the lady had left, Lisa saw Marjolin, enraptured at the sight of her delivering those three blows of the cleaver, so clean and powerful. “What, you're still here!” she shouted at him.

He started to leave, but she held him up for a second. “If I see you again with that little tramp Cadine … don't deny it. This morning again you were together at the triperie, watching them splitting sheeps' heads. I don't understand how a handsome man like you can be interested in a slut like Cadine, the little grasshopper. Okay get going and tell Gavard that he should come now, while there's no one in the shop.”

Marjolin walked off in confusion and despair, without saying anything.

Beautiful Lisa stood at her counter, her head turned slightly toward Les Halles, while Florent studied her in silence, surprised to find her so beautiful. Until that moment, he had never really seen her. He didn't know how to look at women. She appeared to him over the meats displayed on the counter. In front of her, laid out on white plates, were dried sausages from Arles and Lyon, tongues and pieces of petit salé boiled in water, pigs' heads covered in jelly an uncovered crock of pork rillettes, a can of sardines whose torn-back lid showed a lack of oil inside, and then to the right and the left, set up on boards, were Italian pains de fromage and fromage de cochon,¹⁶ an ordinary pale pink ham, a York ham with deep red meat sealed in a layer of fat. There were round and oval dishes with stuffed tongues, a truffled galantine, and boar's head with pistachios, while closer to her, within her reach, stood yellow earthenware crocks with larded veal, pâté de foie gras, a hare pâté.

Since Gavard had not shown up, she arranged some lard de poitrine¹⁷ on a little marble shelf at the end of the counter and straightened out the crock of saindoux¹⁸ and the crock of fat drippings from the roasts, wiped down the platters on each side of the balance scales, and poked around the waning fire in the food warmer. The perfume of meat rose and overtook her in a heavy truffle-scented calm. That particular day there was a wondrous freshness to Lisa. The crisp whiteness of her apron and sleeves reflected in the whiteness of the plates around her, and above, her plump neck and rosy cheeks showed, echoing the pastel of the hams and the paleness of the transparent fats.

Florent began to feel intimidated by the sight of her, made uneasy by her primness. He stole looks at her from the mirrors around the shop. He could see her from behind, in front and in side view, and even from the ceiling, which showed the tightly rolled chignon and the bangs along her temples. The shop was packed with a crowd of Lisas, showing their broad shoulders, the strength of their arms, their round breasts so stiff and inexpressive that they aroused him no more than the sight of a belly would. He stopped himself, settling on one of the side views at the mirror next to him, between two sides of pork. Along the line of marble and mirrors ran hooks from which hung sides of pork and rolls of larding fat, and Lisa, with her strong neck, her round hips, and her swelling bosom, in side views, looked like a trussed-up queen in the midst of lard and raw flesh. Then the beautiful charcutière leaned forward and smiled warmly at the two goldfish forever swimming circles in the aquarium in the window.

Gavard came in. With an air of urgency he looked in the kitchen for Quenu. As soon as he had installed himself sidesaddle at a marble table, with Florent still in his chair, Lisa still at her counter, and Quenu leaning against a side of pork, Gavard announced that at last he had found a job for Florent. And that they would laugh when they heard about it and the government would be stung.

Suddenly he stopped, seeing Mademoiselle Saget push open the shop door only because she had seen from the street such a well-attended meeting at the Quenu-Gradelles'. The little old woman in the faded dress with her ever-present black bag on her arm, in a ribbonless black straw hat that cast a furtive shadow over her pale face, nodded to the men and gave Lisa a caustic smile.

She was an acquaintance who still lived in the house on rue Pirouette as she had for the past forty years, doubtless on some meager income, though she never discussed it. She had once mentioned Cherbourg, saying that she had been born there, but nothing more than that was ever learned about her. She spoke only of other people, of every aspect of their lives, down to how many shirts they had laundered per month, taking her need to peer into her neighbors' existence to the point of listening at doors and opening letters. Her tongue was feared from rue Saint-Denis to rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau and from rue Saint-Honoré to rue Mauconseil. All day long she drifted through the streets with her empty basket, as though she were shopping but buying nothing just trading news, keeping up to date on the most trivial of facts, thereby managing to store in her head the complete history of every house, every floor, every person in the neighborhood. Quenu had always accused her of being the one who had spread the story of Gradelle dropping dead on the chopping block, and he had borne her a grudge ever since.

As it happened, she was extremely well informed on the subject of Uncle Gradelle and about Quenu as well. She had collected all the details, examined them from every possible angle, and committed them to memory. But for the last fifteen days, the appearance of Florent had been confusing her and a raging curiosity was consuming her. It made her physically ill when she hit a blank spot in her intelligence. Yet she could have sworn that she had seen this tall loafer before somewhere.

She stood in front of the counter, looking at the dishes one by one and murmuring in her wispy voice, “I never know what to eat anymore. When it gets to be afternoon, I'm like a tortured soul thinking about my dinner. And then, later, I don't feel like anything. Madame Quenu, do you have any of those breaded chops left?”

Without waiting for an answer, she lifted one of the lids on the food warmer. It was the section used for andouille, fresh sausages, and boudin. But the dish had gone cold, and only one stray forgotten sausage was left on the grill.

“Have a look on the other side, Mademoiselle Saget,” said the charcutière. “I think there's one chop left.”

“No, that doesn't do anything for me,” muttered the little old lady, who nevertheless stuck her nose under the second lid. “It was just a whim—but breaded chops tonight would be too heavy. I'd rather have something that I wouldn't need to heat up.”

She had turned toward Florent and was staring at him. She looked at Gavard, who was drumming his fingertips on the marble tabletop. With a smile, she invited them to resume their conversation.

“Why don't you take a piece of petit salé?” Lisa suggested.

Mademoiselle Saget picked up the fork resting on a plate by its metal handle and poked around with it, prodding each piece of petit salé. Lightly tapping each bone to estimate its thickness, she then turned them over to examine the pink meat, again saying, “No, you know I'd really like a breaded chop. But the one that's left is too fatty. I'll have to try another time.”

Lisa bent over to watch her through the sausage skins hanging in the front and saw her cross the road and go into the fruit market.

“The old nanny goat,” snarled Gavard. And since they were now alone, he told them about the position he had found for Florent. It was quite a tale. One of his friends, Monsieur Verlaque, a fish inspector, was so ill that he needed to take some time off. Just that morning the poor man had told him that it would be a great favor if he could recommend someone to take over and keep the position open for him in case he wanted to return.

“You have to understand,” Gavard added, “Verlaque isn't going to last another six months. Florent is going to be able to keep his position. It's a beautiful situation. It will completely dupe the police. The prefecture is responsible for the position. It's going to be a big laugh when Florent starts getting paid by the police.”

He broke into a huge belly laugh, finding it all perversely comic.

“I don't want the job,” said Florent emphatically. “I've sworn to accept nothing from the empire. I would rather die of starvation than work for the prefecture. It's out of the question. Do you understand, Gavard!”

Gavard understood and was slightly embarrassed. Quenu lowered his head. But Lisa turned to glare at Florent, her neck puffed up, her bosom nearly popping its bodice. She was just about to open her mouth when La Sarriette came in and the shop again fell silent.

“Well!” exclaimed La Sarriette with her soft laugh, “I almost forgot to get lard. Madame Quenu, could you cut me a dozen strips, nice and thin? You know, for larks.¹⁹ Jules wants to eat larks. Oh, and how are you, Uncle?”

She filled the shop with her swirling skirts and smiled at everyone with the freshness of milk and her hair on one side falling down from the wind. Gavard took her hands, and she brashly went on, “I'll bet you were all talking about me when I came in. What were you saying, Uncle?”

Lisa called to her, “Tell me if these are thin enough.” On the edge of a board she was delicately cutting the lard. As she wrapped it up, she asked, “Can I get you anything else?”

“Oh my God, I must be losing my mind,” said La Sarriette. “Give me a pound of saindoux. I just love fried potatoes. I can make a lunch of nothing but two sous of fried potatoes and a bunch of radishes. Yes, one pound of saindoux, Madame Quenu.”

Lisa took a thick piece of paper on the scale and, taking the crock of saindoux from under the shelf, scooped out globs with a wooden spatula and built a mound on the paper with gentle taps. When the scale plate dropped, she took the paper and quickly twisted the ends closed with her fingers.

“That's twenty-four sous,” Lisa said, “and six sous for the larding strips, that makes thirty sous. Did you need anything else?”

La Sarriette said, “No.” Still laughing, showing her teeth, she paid. Staring at the men, her gray skirt a little off kilter and her carelessly tied red scarf revealing just a little bit of the white of her bosom. Just before leaving, she challenged Gavard again: “So you're not going to tell me what you were talking about as I came in. I could see you laughing from the middle of the street. Oh, you sly one, I won't love you anymore.”

She walked out and crossed the street. Lisa dryly observed, “Mademoiselle Saget sent her.”

Then it was back to silence. Gavard was taken aback by Florent's response to his proposition. Lisa spoke first.

“It's wrong of you to turn down the position of fish inspector, Florent. You know how hard it is to find a job, and you're hardly in a position to be choosy.”

“I have my reasons,” answered Florent.

Lisa shrugged. “Come on, you can't be serious. I understand how much you dislike the government, but it would be stupid to let that stop you from earning a living. Besides, dear, the emperor isn't a bad man. You don't believe, do you, that he knew of your suffering? How could he know if you were eating moldy bread and tainted meat? He can't be held responsible for everything that happens. You can see for yourself that he hasn't interfered with the rest of us. You're not being fair, not at all.”

Gavard was feeling more and more uncomfortable. He could not stand hearing these tributes to the emperor.

“Wait a minute, Madame Quenu,” he murmured. “You're going a bit too far. He really is trash.”

“Oh, you!” the energized Beautiful Lisa interrupted him. “With all your stories, you won't be satisfied until someday you get robbed and massacred. Don't talk politics to me, because it will make me mad. We're talking about Florent now and saying he should take the inspector job. Isn't that right, Quenu?”

Quenu, who until then had not breathed a word, was caught off guard by the abruptness of his wife's question. “It's a good position,” he said without committing himself.

Once again an awkward silence fell on the room, and Florent said, “Please, just forget it. My mind is made up. I'll wait.”

“You'll wait!” shouted Lisa, at the end of her patience.

Two reddish flames were burning on her cheeks. Planted firmly there in her white apron, her hips wide, she struggled to resist unleashing unkind words. Then another customer came into the shop, deflecting her anger. It was Madame Lecœur.

“Could you please give me a half-pound assorted plate at fifty sous a pound?” she asked. At first she pretended to have not seen her brother-in-law; then she greeted him with a nod. She studied the three men from the tops of their heads down to the tips of their toes, no doubt hoping to find their secret somewhere in the manner in which they were waiting for her to leave. She could sense that she had somehow disturbed them, and that made her look even sharper and more sour than usual in her drooping skirts, with her long spidery arms with their gnarled hands held under her apron. Gavard, ill at ease in the silence, detected a slight cough and asked, “Have you caught a cold?”

“No,” she said curtly. In the places where the bones neared the surface of her face, the skin was stretched brick red and the dark flame that touched her eyelids pointed to a liver ailment fed by the bitterness of her jealousies. She turned back to the counter and followed Lisa's every gesture with the untrusting eye of a customer convinced she is going to be cheated.

“Don't give me any cervelas,” she said. “I don't like them.”

Lisa cut the thin slices with a small knife. She moved to the smoked ham, then the ordinary ham, curling off fine slivers that curled in her hand as she leaned slightly forward to keep her eye on the knife. Her plump, ruddy hands, which worked around the meats with a light, dextrous touch, seemed to have acquired the suppleness of fat. She held out a terrine and asked, “You'd like some larded veal, wouldn't you?”

Madame Lecœur seemed to think about this for a long time; then she agreed. Lisa then sliced from the terrine. She took some slices of larded veal and a slab of hare pâté on the end of her knife blade. Each slice was placed in the middle of a sheet of paper on the scale.

“Aren't you going to give me any boar's head with pistachios?” asked Madame Lecœur in an unpleasant voice.

So she had to give her the boar's head. This butter vendor was becoming difficult. She wanted two slices of galantine, she liked that. Lisa, already irritated, fidgeted with the knife handle and pointed out that the galantine had truffles and could be included only in an assortment at three francs a pound. The customer continued to sniff around the plates to look for more things to ask for. When the assortment was weighed out, she insisted on Lisa adding some aspic and cornichons. The block of aspic, in the shape of a gâteau de Savoie in the middle of a porcelain platter, jiggled in the grasp of Lisa's angry hands, and vinegar squirted from the jar as she grabbed two cornichons with her fingers from behind the dish warmer.

“That's twenty-five sous, isn't it?” Madame Lecœur asked in a casual tone. She could clearly see and tremendously enjoyed Lisa's repressed irritation, slowly taking out her money, as though the coins had gotten lost in her pocketbook. Then she glanced disdainfully at Gavard, reveling in the strained silence that her presence prolonged, vowing that she would not leave as long as they were concealing some “chicanery” from her. But Lisa finally placed the package in her hand and she had to leave. She exited without saying a word, casting one last stare around the shop.

Once she was gone Lisa exploded, “La Saget sent her too! Is that old battle-ax going to march everyone in Les Halles in here to find out what we were talking about? And what vicious people they are! Whoever heard of breaded chops and assorted plates being sold at five in the afternoon? They'd rather make themselves sick with indigestion than miss out on what we were saying. If La Saget sends anyone else, wait and see the reception she gets. I'll show her the door, even if it's my own sister.”

The three men were silenced by Lisa's anger. Gavard had leaned over the brass railing, where, lost in his thoughts, he absentmindedly fiddled with a little glass railing that had come loose. Then he raised his head. “Personally,” he said, “I look at the whole thing as a big farce.”

“What's that?” asked Lisa.

“The fish inspector job.”

She raised her hands, shot one last look at Florent, and then sat on the cushioned bench behind the counter with her mouth sealed. But Gavard began to expound on his theory, the idea being that the government would get fleeced because Florent would get their money. He repeated with satisfaction, “My dear friend, weren't those the bastards that nearly starved you to death? Well, now's your chance to make them feed you. It's a beautiful thing. It struck me immediately.”

Florent smiled but still said no. Quenu, to please his wife, tried to come up with a good argument. But Lisa seemed to no longer be listening. She was staring at the market. Suddenly she sprang to her feet, shouting, “Aha, now they're sending the Norman to spy on us. She's going to pay for the others.”

A tall brunette pushed open the shop door. It was Louise Méhudin, the beautiful fish woman whom everyone called the Norman. She had a brazen kind of good looks and delicate white skin. She was almost as assertive as Lisa, the look in her eyes was even bolder, and her breasts were more alluring. She came in with a prancing gait, a gold chain jingling against her apron, her uncovered hair combed up in the latest style, and a bow at her throat, a lace bow that made her the queen coquette of Les Halles. She had about her a slight scent of the sea, and on one of her hands, near the little finger, a herring scale shone like a small patch of mother-of-pearl. The two women had lived in the same house on rue Pirouette, where they had been close friends, linked by a rivalry that kept each thinking about the other. In the neighborhood people said “the Beautiful Norman,” just as they said “Beautiful Lisa.” This made them competitors, always compared, forcing them both to live up to their reputation for beauty.

If Lisa leaned over a little at her counter, she could see the fish woman working in the pavilion across the way amid salmons and turbots. Each kept an eye on the other. Beautiful Lisa tightened the laces on her corset and the Beautiful Norman responded by adding more rings to her fingers and bows to her shoulders. Whenever they saw each other, they were very sweet, very flattering, while their eyes darted from under lowered lids, searching for defects. They were always very attentive to each other and professed the greatest affection.

“Tell me, is it tomorrow that you make the boudin?” asked the Norman in a merry voice.

Lisa remained icy. She did not often get angry, but when she did, her anger stubbornly remained. She responded, “Yes,” in a cold voice, barely moving her lips.

“It's just that, you know, I love boudin hot out of the pot. I'll come back.”

She was aware of the icy reception by her rival. She looked at Florent, who seemed to interest her, and then, not wanting to leave without having the last word, she unwisely added, “I bought some of your boudins the day before yesterday. They weren't very fresh.”

“Not fresh!” Lisa repeated, her face turned white and lips trembling.

Up until that point Lisa might have kept her composure lest the Norman get the idea that it was the lace bow to which she was reacting But now not only was she being spied on but she was also being insulted, and that was going too far. Arching her back and planting her fists on the counter, she let loose in a harsh voice, “You don't say. Remember last week when you sold that pair of soles, did I go saying in front of everyone that they were spoiled?”

“Spoiled? My soles spoiled?” shouted the fish woman, her face turning purple.

For a moment they stood breathless, mute and infuriated beneath the meat rack. All the loveliness of their friendship had evaporated. It had taken only one word to reveal the sharp teeth hidden behind the smile.

“You are a crude and vulgar woman,” said the Beautiful Norman. “See if I ever set foot in here again.”

“Get out then, get out!” said Beautiful Lisa. “Everyone knows about you.”

The fish woman parted with a vulgar word that left the charcuterie woman's entire body shaking. The scene had unfolded so quickly that the three astonished men had not had time to intervene. Lisa quickly regained her composure. As Augustine, the shopgirl, was returning from her errands, Lisa took up the conversation where it had left off without making the slightest reference to what had just taken place. Pulling Gavard to the side, she told him not to give Verlaque a final answer. She would make it her mission to make up her brother-in-law's mind, for which she would need, at most, two days.

Quenu came back to the kitchen just as Gavard was taking Florent for a vermouth at Monsieur Lebigre's. He pointed out three women in the covered street between the fish and the poultry pavilions.

“They're gossping away,” Gavard muttered in a voice that was full of envy.

Les Halles was slowly clearing out, and there stood Mademoiselle Saget, Madame Lecœur, and La Sarriette at the edge of the walk. The old woman was spouting, “Just like I told you, Madame Lecœur, they always have your brother-in-law in the shop. You saw him there yourself, didn't you?”

“With my own two eyes! He was seated at a table and looked completely at home.”

“Personally,” La Sarriette interrupted, “I didn't hear anything bad. I don't know why you're making such a fuss about it.”

Mademoiselle Saget shrugged. “Oh well, you're still an innocent, my dear. Can't you see why the Quenus are always enticing Monsieur Gavard to their shop? What do you want to bet he'll leave everything he has to little Pauline?”

“Do you think so!” exclaimed Madame Lecœur, pale with anger. Then, in a mournful voice as though she had just received some terrible news, she said, “I'm all alone, completely defenseless. He's completely free to do as he pleases. You just heard how his niece sides with him too. She has forgotten what she cost me and wouldn't lift a finger to help me.”

“Not so, Aunt,” said La Sarriette. “It is you who never has a kind word for me.”

Right there and then they reconciled their differences and kissed. The niece promised that she would stop her teasing, and the aunt swore on all she held sacred that she would treat La Sarriette as though she were her own daughter. Mademoiselle Saget offered them advice on how to keep Gavard from squandering his money. And they all agreed that the Quenu-Gradelles were unsavory and needed to be watched.

“I don't know what kind of shenanigans they're up to,” said the old spinster, “but there's something fishy going on. And that Florent, Madame Quenu's cousin, what do you two make of him?”

The three women huddled close together and lowered their voices. “Remember how we saw him one morning,” said Madame Lecœur, “with his boots falling apart and his clothes covered with dust, sneaking around like a thief who had just gotten away with something … That man frightens me.”

“No,” said La Sarriette, “he's very skinny, but he's not a bad man.”

Mademoiselle Saget was thinking out loud. “I've been working on this for the past two weeks, trying to find out something about him. Clearly Monsieur Gavard knows him. I must have met him somewhere, I just can't remember where.”

She was still combing her memory when the Norman, straight from the charcuterie, blew in like a storm. “She's certainly polite, the big Quenu ogre!” she announced, relieved at getting it off her chest. “Imagine her telling me that I sold rotten fish. But I took care of her in her pretty little lair where she keeps tainted pork that makes everyone sick.”

“What did you say to her?” asked the old woman, all excited, thrilled to hear that the two had argued.

“Me, I didn't say a thing. Not a thing. I just dropped in to tell her very politely that I would be stopping by for boudin tomorrow evening. And then she turned on me. Filthy little hypocrite with her sanctimonious airs! But this is going to cost her a lot more than she knows.”

The three could sense that the Norman had not spoken the entire truth. But that didn't stop them from rushing to her defense with a volley of curses. They turned toward rue Rambuteau, inventing insults and making up tales about the filthiness of the kitchen and other meaty accusations. If the Quenus had been dealers in human flesh, the women's outrage would not have been more violent. The Norman felt the need to retell the story three more times.

“And the cousin?” Mademoiselle Saget asked in a mischievous tone. “What did he say?”

“Cousin?” the Norman replied in a sharp voice. “You believe this cousin story? He's someone's lover, the big goon.”

The other three protested. Lisa's virtue was an act of faith in the neighborhood.

“Go on, you never know about these slippery holy hypocrites. That husband of hers is a bit too simple not to cheat on.”

Mademoiselle Saget nodded as though she agreed with this point of view. Sweetly she said, “Besides, this cousin has dropped in from nowhere and the story offered by the Quenus doesn't smell quite right.”

“Oh, yes, he's that fatso's lover,” the fish woman again asserted. “Some tramp or bum she found in the streets. That's clear.”

“Skinny men are backward men,” declared La Sarriette with a knowing air.

“She bought him an entire new outfit,” Madame Lecœur added. “He has cost her a lot.”

“Well, yes, yes, you could be right,” said the old maid. “I'm going to have to learn more …”

The three agreed to keep one another informed about anything that happened at the Quenu-Gradelle establishment. The butter vendor claimed that she wanted to open her brother-in-law's eyes to the kind of place he was frequenting. But by then the Norman's anger had subsided, and, being at heart a kind person, she left with a feeling that she had talked too much.

Once she was gone, Madame Lecœur observed cagily “I could swear the Norman said something surly. That's the way she is. She would be wise not to talk about cousins falling from the sky, she who once found a baby in her fish shop.”

The three looked at one another and laughed. Then, once Madame Lecœur left, La Sarriette said, “My aunt is foolish to be so preoccupied with all these stories. That's what's making her so skinny. She used to beat me if a man looked at me. One thing is sure, though, there won't be some little brat turning up under her bolster, not my aunt.”

This gave Mademoiselle Saget another chuckle. And once she was by herself, as she went back to rue Pirouette, she thought how those “three floozies” were not worth the rope to hang them. Besides, someone could easily have seen them, and it would not be good to get on the wrong side of the Quenu-Gradelles, who were, after all, affluent and respected people. She made a detour to rue de Turbigo, to the Taboureau boulangerie, the most beautiful bakery in the neighborhood. Madame Taboureau was a close friend of Lisa and an authority beyond question on all subjects. When you said, “Madame Taboureau said so” or “according to Madame Taboureau,” there was nothing more to be said on the subject. Today, the elderly spinster Saget, on the pretext of wanting to know when the oven would be heated so that she could bring in her dish of pears, sang the praises of Lisa and especially her excellent boudin. Then, content that she had established this moral alibi and pleased that she had fanned the flames of a quarrel that was erupting while positioning herself above the fray she returned home with peace of mind, except that she still could not quite place where she had seen Madame Quenu's cousin.

That same day, in the evening after dinner, Florent decided to go for a walk along some of the covered streets of Les Halles. A fine mist was rising, and the empty pavilions were a mournful gray, studded with the yellow teardrops of gas flames. For the first time Florent felt out of place. He recognized the inept way in which he, a thin and artless man, had fallen into a world of fat people. He realized that his presence was disturbing the entire neighborhood and that he was a problem for Quenu, as a counterfeit cousin with a dubious look. He was saddened by these thoughts, not that he had noticed the slightest coldness on the part of his brother and Lisa. It was their kindness that upset him, and he found himself guilty of insensitivity and putting himself up in their home. Self-doubt started to overtake him. Recalling the conversation in the shop that afternoon gave him a vague feeling of uneasiness. As his mind was invaded by a memory of the scent of meat at Lisa's counter, he felt himself sliding into a spineless lack of resolve. Maybe he had been wrong to refuse the position of inspector that had been offered. This thought provoked an internal struggle, and he had to shake himself to rediscover the resolve of his conscience. A damp breeze was coming up, and it blew through the covered passages. By the time he was forced to button up his coat, he had regained his calm and his conviction. It was as though the smell of fat from the charcuterie, which had weakened him, was now blown away by the wind.

He was going back home when he ran into Claude Lantier. The painter, concealed in the folds of his green coat, had an angry, muffled voice. He was in a fury against painting, declaring it a dog's trade, and swore that he would never again in his life pick up a brush. That afternoon he had kicked his foot through a study he had been working on, of the head of that tramp Cadine.

Claude was prone to such fits caused by his inability to produce the kind of durable, living work of which he dreamed. At such times nothing existed for him any longer, and he would wander the streets seeing only darkness and waiting for the next day's resurrection. Usually he said that he felt bright and cheerful in the morning and horribly depressed in the evening. Each of his days was a long, disillusioning struggle. Florent barely recognized the night wanderer of Les Halles. They had already met a second time before this, one time in the charcuterie. Claude, who knew the real story of the fugitive, had taken his hand and declared that he regarded Florent as a good man.

But Claude rarely went to the charcuterie.

“Are you still at my aunt's?” he asked. “I don't know how you can stand being around that kitchen. It stinks in there. If I spend an hour in there, I feel like I've eaten enough for the next three days. It was a mistake to have gone there this morning. That's what ruined my study.”

Then, after he and Florent had walked a few steps in silence, he continued, “Oh, what fine people. They're so healthy, it makes me ill. I'd like to paint their portraits, but I don't know how to do such round faces that don't have any bones. You wouldn't see my aunt Lisa kicking her foot through her pots. I was a fool to have wrecked Cadine's head. Now that I think about it, it wasn't that bad.”

Then they began chatting about Aunt Lisa. Claude said that his mother had not seen anything of her in a long time. He had the impression that Lisa was ashamed that her sister had married a worker. And besides, she did not like to be around the less fortunate. As for himself, he told Florent how a generous man had sent him to college because he had been taken with the donkeys and old women that he had drawn when he was only eight years old. But the good man had died, leaving him an income of a thousand francs a year, just enough to keep from starving.

“I would rather have been a worker. Take a carpenter, for example. Carpenters are happy men. Say they have to make a table. They make it, then they go to bed happy to have made their table, completely satisfied. Me? I hardly sleep at all at night. All those damn studies that I can't finish dance in my head. I never finish anything, never, never!”

His voice almost broke into sobs. Then he tried to laugh. He cursed, searching for foul language, wallowing in muck with the ice-cold rage of a fine and delicate spirit who fantasizes his own degradation. He ended by squatting in front of one of the Les Halles gratings that ventilate the markets below—cellars where the gas burns permanently. Down there in the depths, he pointed out to Florent, Marjolin and Cadine were peacefully eating their supper, seated on a stone block used for slaughtering chickens. The two young waifs had found a way of hiding in the basement and living there after the gratings were closed.

“What an animal, an extraordinary beast!” Claude repeated with both admiration and envy of Marjolin. And to think that animal is happy. If they want their treats, they just hide together in one of those big baskets full of feathers. At least that's a life! My God, you're right to stay at the charcuterie. Maybe that will fatten you up.”

Suddenly he left. Florent climbed up to his garret, troubled by the anxiety of uncertainty. The next morning, he avoided the shop, taking a long walk along the banks of the Seine. But when he returned for lunch he was struck once again by Lisa's kindness. She again mentioned the position of fish inspector, without pushing too hard but as something worth thinking about. As he listened to her, a plate full of food in front of him, he could not help being influenced by the comfort of the dining room. The mat beneath his feet felt soft, the hanging copper lamp glowed, the wallpaper had a yellow tint, and the light oak furniture—all filled him with a sense of well-being that threatened his sense of right and wrong. But he still had the strength to refuse, explaining his reasons once again, though at the same time realizing what bad taste it was to be making such a crude show of his stance in a place such as this.

Lisa did not get angry but instead smiled, that beautiful smile that embarrassed Florent far more than her suppressed irritation the evening before. At dinner they spoke only of winter pickling, which would keep everyone in the charcuterie busy.

The evenings were getting cold. As soon as dinner was over, they all went to the kitchen because it was warm there. It was so spacious that several people could sit there without getting in anyone's way. The gaslit walls were covered in white and blue tiles up to the height of a man. On the left was a huge iron stove with three deep wells in which were set three pots whose bottoms were blackened by coal soot. At the end a small chimney rose over a cooking range used for grilling with a smoker above. Above the stove, higher up the wall than the skimmers, the long-handled cooking spoons, and the grilling forks, was a row of numbered drawers containing bread crumbs, grated crusts—both fine and coarse—and spices—cloves, nutmeg, peppercorns. On the right, the chopping table, a huge oak block, leaned against the wall, all cut and scarred; various pieces of equipment attached to it—an injection pump, a stuffer, a food mill, with their cogs and cranks—gave a sense of mystery and the disturbing impression of a kitchen in Hell. All around the walls, on boards, even under tables, were heaps of pots, terrines, buckets, platters, tin tools, a battery of deep pans, tapered funnels, racks of knives and chopping tools, skewers and larding needles, a whole world of things that lived on fat.

Despite the excessive cleanliness, grease dominated; it oozed from the white and blue tiles, shone on the red floor tiles, gave a gray sheen to the stove, polished the chopping block to the glow of varnished oak. And in the vapor from the three continuously steaming pots of melting pork, the condensation, falling drop by drop, ensured that there was not, from floor to ceiling, so much as a nail that did not drip grease.

The Quenu-Gradelles made everything themselves. The only items they bought from outside were potted meats from celebrated houses, rillettes, conserves in jars, canned sardines, cheeses, and escargots. Starting in September, the cellar, which had been emptied in the summer, had to be refilled. After the shop closed they worked late into the evening. With the help of Auguste and Léon, Quenu stuffed saucisson, prepared hams, melted saindoux, and prepared the poitrine, lard, and strips for larding. It made an impressive clatter of pots and grinders, and the scent of the kitchen rose and filled the entire house. All of this had to be done in addition to the daily preparation of fresh pork, pâté de foie gras, galantines, hare pâté, fresh sausages, and boudin.

By eleven that evening Quenu had two pots of saindoux working and was starting on the boudin. Auguste was helping him. At a corner of the square table Lisa and Augustine were mending linen, while across from them sat Florent, his face turned toward the stove, smiling. Little Pauline had stepped onto his feet and wanted him to send her “jumping in the air.” Behind him Léon was chopping sausage meat with slow and even strokes on the chopping block.

Auguste went to look for two jugs of pig's blood in the courtyard. He had bled them himself at the slaughterhouse. He brought the blood and entrails back to the shop and left the pig carcass for the kitchen boys to dress and cart over in the afternoon. Quenu claimed that no one in all of Paris bled a pig better than Auguste. In truth, Auguste was an expert judge of blood and the boudin was good anytime Auguste said, “The boudin is going to be good.”

“So, are we going to have good boudin?” Lisa asked.

Auguste put the two jugs down and slowly answered, “I think so, Madame Quenu, yes, I think so … The first sign is the way the blood flows. When I pull out the knife, if the blood runs off too slowly, that's not a good sign. It shows that the blood is poor quality.”

“But,” Quenu interrupted, “doesn't that also depend on how far in the knife was pushed?”

Auguste's pale face showed a smile. “No, no,” he answered. “I always stick the knife in exactly four fingers. That's how you measure it. But you see, the best sign is when the blood runs out and I beat it with my hand in the bucket. It has to be a good, warm temperature, smooth but not too thick.”

Augustine had put down her mending needle and raised her eyes to look at Auguste. On her ruddy face, framed by frizzy chestnut brown hair, was a look of absorbed fascination. Lisa and even little Pauline listened with considerable interest. “I beat and beat and beat, you see?” the young man continued, whisking his hand through the air as though it were beating cream. “Then, when I pull the hand out and look at it, it should be completely lubricated by the blood, like a red glove of even color all around. Then you can safely say, ‘The boudin will be good.’”

He kept his hand in the air for another instant, looking pleased. Against the white cuff of his shirt his hand, which frequented buckets of blood, was deep rose, the nails at the ends of the fingers bright red. Quenu nodded his approval.

Now there was silence. Léon was still chopping. Pauline, looking dreamy, climbed back on her cousin's feet and shouted, “Tell me, cousin, tell me that story of the man who was eaten by wild animals.” In the child's mind, the idea of pig's blood stirred up the story of “the man eaten by wild animals.” Not understanding, Florent asked which man that was. Lisa laughed.

“She wants that story of that poor man, you know, the one you were telling Gavard the other night. She must have been listening.”

Florent became morose. The little girl took the fat yellow cat in her arms and carried it to her cousin, placing it in his lap and explaining that Mouton would also like to hear the story. But Mouton jumped onto the table and remained seated there with his back arched, contemplating the tall, scrawny man who over the past fifteen days had been a continual object of fascination. But Pauline tapped her feet angrily. She wanted the story.

Since the little girl was becoming unbearable, Lisa said, “Oh, Florent, tell her the story she wants so we can have some peace and quiet.”

Florent remained silent another few seconds, staring at the floor. Then, slowly raising his head, he fixed his gaze first on the two women with their mending needles, then on Quenu and Auguste, preparing a pot for boudin. The gaslight was burning, the heat from the stove was comforting, and all the kitchen's fat produced the kind of peaceful feeling that accompanies good digestion. Then he placed Pauline on his lap and, smiling a sad smile, addressed the child:

“Once upon a time there was a poor man. He was sent far, far away to the other side of the ocean. The boat that carried him held four hundred convicts, and he was thrown among them. He was forced to live for five weeks among those thieves, dressed like them in rough sailcloth and eating from their trough. Big fat lice preyed on him, and fever took all his strength from him. The kitchen and bakery and ship engines so heated the bottom deck that ten convicts died from it. During the day they were sent topside, fifty at a time, to catch a breath of sea air. The crew of the ship feared them and trained the cannons on them. The poor man was very happy when his turn to go up came. But although his terrible sweating let up, he still felt too sick to eat. At night, when he was again shackled in irons and the rolling of the ship on the rough sea made him bump into the two men next to him, he broke down and began to cry, relieved to be crying where he could not be seen …”

Pauline listened with big eyes and her two little hands crossed dutifully in front of her. “But,” she interrupted, “but this isn't the story of the man who was eaten by the animals. This is a different story, isn't it, cousin?”

“Wait and see,” Florent answered gently. “We'll get to the story of that gentleman. I'm telling you the whole story.”

“All right,” said the child happily. But she looked pensive, apparently struggling to resolve some problem. Finally she asked, “But what had the poor man done that he was sent away and put on the boat?”

Lisa and Augustine were smiling, enthralled by the child's vision. And Lisa, without answering the question, used the opportunity to teach the child a lesson, smacking her soundly and asserting, “Bad children are sent on boats like that.”

“So really,” Pauline replied judiciously “it served my cousin's poor man right to be crying all night.”

Lisa picked up her sewing again, slumping her shoulders. Quenu had not been listening. He had just cut and thrown into the pot a few onion slices that began to crackle in the heat, chirping like crickets on a hot day. It smelled good. When Quenu plunged his big wooden spoon into the pot, they sang all the louder, filling the kitchen with the penetrating scent of cooked onions. Auguste was preparing pork fat. Léon's chopper came down faster and faster, occasionally scraping across the block to gather the sausage meat, which was turning into a paste.

Florent continued, “As soon as they arrived, they took the man to an island called Devil's Island. He found that he was there with other men like himself who had all been taken away from their country. They were all very unhappy. They were made to work like convicts. The gendarmes who guarded them counted them every day to make sure that no one was missing. Later they were left to do as they liked. They were locked up at night in a large wooden building where they slept in hammocks hung from two bars. By the end of a year they were all going barefoot. And their clothes were so ragged that their skin showed. They had built some huts with tree trunks for shelter from the sun, which broiled everything. But the huts could not protect them from the mosquitoes, which covered them with welts and inflammations. It killed a number of them. The rest became yellow, so wretched and lost, with their bushy beards, that they were pitiful to look at.”

“Auguste, hand me the fat!” shouted Quenu. Then he slowly let the chunks slide into the skillet and stirred them with his spoon. The fat melted. An even richer steam rose from the stove.

“What did they get for food there?” asked Pauline, engrossed in the story.

“Wormy rice and bad-smelling meat,” Florent answered, his voice lower. “You had to pick the worms out to eat the rice. If the meat was roasted and very cooked, you could manage to eat it. But if it was boiled it stank so badly, just the smell could make you sick.”

“I'd rather live on dry bread,” said Pauline after mulling the matter over.

Léon, having finished chopping, carried the platter of sausage meat to the square table. Mouton, who had remained sitting, his eyes fixed on Florent as though shocked by his story, had to back off a few steps, which he did clumsily. Then he rolled himself into a ball with his nose by the sausage meat and began purring.

But Lisa could not conceal either her shock nor her disgust: wormy rice and foul-smelling meat seemed scarcely believable obscenities and a disgrace for those who had eaten them. And on her handsome calm face, in the swell of her neck, rose a wave of fear, facing this man who had eaten unspeakable things.

“No, it was not a land of delicacies,” Florent continued, forgetting Pauline, his eyes wandering to the steaming stove. “Every day brought its own annoyances, a continual crushing oppression, a violation of all justice, contempt for all human kindness, that exasperated the prisoners and slowly burned them into a fever of bitter rancor. You lived like animals with the whip forever held over your back. They would have liked to have killed the man. You can't forget such things. It's just not possible. Such suffering cries out for vengeance someday.”

He had lowered his voice, and the lardoons, hissing merrily in the skillet, drowned out the bubbling of the boiling pots. But Lisa heard Florent and was frightened by the determined expression that had suddenly come over his face. She judged him to be a pretender who wore a sweet and gentle mask.

The deadened tone of Florent's voice had enchanted Pauline, who bounced on her cousin's lap, excited by the story.

“And the man, what about the man?” she urged.

Looking at little Pauline, Florent seemed to find himself again, and his sad smile returned.

“Well, the man was not at all happy to be on the island. He had but one idea, to get out and cross the sea to the mainland, whose white coastline could be seen on a clear day. But it wasn't easy. He'd have to build a raft. Because several prisoners had already escaped that way, all the trees on the island had been chopped down so there would be no wood available. The island was so stripped and bare, so scorched by the broiling sun, that life on it had become even more dangerous and unbearable than before. That was when the man and two companions got the idea to use the tree trunks from which their huts were built. One night they put to sea on two rotting beams held together by dry branches. The wind carried them toward the coast. But as day was breaking the raft struck a sandbar with such violence that the two tree trunks broke away and were carried off by the waves. The three poor men were nearly swallowed up by the sand. Two were stuck up to their waists, and one up to his chin. The other two had to pull him out. At last they reached a boulder barely big enough for the three to sit on.

“When the sun came up, they could see the coast, a row of gray cliffs reaching to the horizon. Two of them, knowing how to swim, decided to go to the cliffs. It was better to drown quickly than starve to death slowly on a rock. They promised the third they would come back for him, when they reached the shore and could find a boat.”

“Oh, I've got it!” shouted little Pauline, clapping her hands happily. “Now comes the story of the man who was eaten by the wild animals!”

“They managed to reach the coast,” Florent continued. “But it was deserted, and it took them four full days to find a boat. When they got back to the rock, they found their companion lying on his back, his hands and feet eaten away, his face gnawed up, and his stomach full of a swarm of crabs that shook the skin along his sides, making it look as though a death rattle still shuddered the half-eaten corpse.”

A moan of revulsion slipped from Lisa and Augustine. Léon was preparing the casings for the blood sausage. Quenu stopped his work and looked at Augustine, who seemed overtaken by a bout of nausea. Only Pauline was laughing. The image of the belly crawling with crabs seemed to have strangely appeared in the middle of the kitchen, mixing its dubious odors with the perfume of lard and onions.

“Can I have the blood?” shouted Quenu, who was not paying attention to the story. Auguste brought the two jugs and slowly poured the blood into the skillet in thin red streams, while Quenu frantically stirred the thickening liquid in the pan. Once the jugs were emptied, Quenu reached up to one of the drawers above the stove and took some pinches of spice. He seasoned especially abundantly with pepper.

“They left him there, right?” asked Lisa. “And got back safely?”

“As they were going back,” Florent answered, “the wind shifted and they were blown out to sea. A wave carried off one of their oars, and they took on water so rapidly with each gust of wind that they were completely occupied with trying to bail out with their hands. They rolled around, carried off by the squall and then driven back by the tide, without anything to eat, having used up their meager provisions. It continued like that for three days.”

“Three days!” exclaimed the stupified Lisa. “Three days without eating anything!”

“Yes, three days without any food. When the east wind finally washed them to shore, one of them was so weak he remained on the beach all morning. He died that evening. His companion had tried in vain to feed him leaves from trees.”

At that point Augustine let out a little chuckle, but then, embarrassed and not wishing to appear heartless, she stammered, “No, no. I wasn't laughing about that. It was Mouton … Look at Mouton, Madame.”

Lisa too began to smile. Mouton, who had remained with his nose by the sausage meat, had probably decided all that meat was too much and had gotten up and was clawing the table with his paw as though trying to bury the platter, the way cats try to bury their mess. Then he turned away from the platter and lay on his side, stretching himself out, half closing his eyes, and rubbing his head against the table. They all paid compliments to Mouton for not having tried to steal any meat. Pauline related, not exactly in keeping with the conversation, that he licked her fingers and washed her face after dinner without trying to bite her.

But Lisa wanted to get back to the question of whether it was possible to go three days without food. It wasn't possible. “No! I don't believe it! No one can go three days without eating. When someone says, ‘I'm dying of hunger,’ that's just an expression. You always get something to eat, more or less. You would have to be one of the world's most miserable, a completely abandoned wretch, a lost person …”

She was doubtless going to add something like “worthless rabble,” but after looking at Florent she held back. But the scornful pout on her lips and the hard look in her eyes clearly indicated her belief that only lowly, disreputable people fell into such circumstances. To her, any man who was capable of lasting three days without eating was a dangerous person. After all, honest folk would never put themselves in such a situation.

By now Florent was suffocating. He was seated opposite a stove into which Léon had just tossed several shovelfuls of coal and that was snoring like a choirmaster sleeping in the sun. It was becoming quite hot. Auguste, who had taken charge of the pots of saindoux, was sweating as he watched, and Quenu mopped his forehead with his shirtsleeve as he waited for the blood to be ready. The kitchen had an air of indigestion, the sleepiness that follows overeating.

“When the man had buried his companion in the sand,” Florent slowly began again, “he walked off alone straight forward. Dutch Guiana, where he had ended up, is a country of forests carved up by rivers and marshes. The man walked for more than eight days without seeing a dwelling of any kind. All around him he could feel death waiting for him. Though his stomach ached with hunger, he did not dare eat most of the brilliant-colored fruit that hung from the trees. He was afraid even to touch the metallic, glowing berries for fear they were poisonous. For entire days he did not see a glimpse of sky but pushed on under the thick branches of a green cover swarming with living horror. Huge birds flew over his head with roaring flapping sounds and sudden cries that resembled death rattles. Monkeys leaped, and wild animals charged through the brush, bending branches and causing deluges of green leaves to fall, as though a sudden windstorm were blowing through. But more than anything, it was the snakes that turned his blood to ice, when he stepped on a clump of dry leaves and it suddenly moved and he could see little lean heads slithering through monstrous entanglements of roots.

“In some dark, wet crannies, swarming clusters of reptiles suddenly popped out and scurried away—some black, some yellow, some purple, some striped, some spotted, and some looking like dead grass. Then the man would stop, seeking out a rock on which he could escape the mushy earth into which he kept sinking. He would rest there for hours, dreading a boa suddenly appearing in the next clearing, tail coiled and head erect, perched like a giant gold-spotted tree trunk.

“At night he slept in the trees, frightened by the least rustling, imagining he could hear snakes sliding through the darkness. He was drowning in endless leaves. He was gripped by stifling heat as though from a furnace, a dripping humidity, a pestilent sweat infused with the coarse smells of odiferous wood and rank-smelling flowers. And when at last the man made it out at the end of a very long march and saw the sky, he was in front of a series of wide rivers that barred him from going any further. He went down the banks, keeping an eye on the gray backs of caimans and clumps of drifting greenery, until he found safer-looking water and swam across. On the other side, the forest began again. But there were also stretches of vast grassy plains, places covered with thick vegetation, and sometimes far off he could see the reflecting blue of a little lake. The man then took a giant detour, going forward only after testing the ground, having nearly been killed, swallowed up in one of those pleasant plains that he could hear cracking with every step. The giant grass, fed by the amassed humus, concealed infested marshes with deep pools of liquid mud, and over the huge grassy expanses stretching to the horizon, there were only narrow jetties of firm ground, which had to be found to avoid disappearing forever.

“One evening the man sank up to his waist. With each effort to pull himself out, the mud seemed to rise to his mouth. He remained quietly for almost two hours. Just as the moon rose, he was fortunately able to grab a tree branch over his head.

“When he finally reached a dwelling, his hands and feet were bruised and bleeding and swollen with poisonous bites. He was so piteous and starving a figure that he was frightening to look at. They tossed some food for him fifty steps away from their house, and the owner stood guard at the doorway with a rifle.”

Florent stopped talking his voice cut off, his eyes with a far-off stare. He seemed to no longer be talking to anyone but himself. Little Pauline was falling asleep and had tried to prop her head back while lying in his arms, trying to force her wondering eyes to stay open. Quenu was irritated.

“You dumbbell!” he shouted at Léon. “Don't you know how to hold a sausage casing? What are you looking at me for? Don't look at me. Look at the casing! There! Just like that. Now, don't move!”

Léon was holding up a long ribbon of casing with his right hand. A funnel had been inserted into one end. With his left hand he coiled the boudin on a round metal platter as rapidly as Quenu could stuff the funnel with big spoonfuls of the filling. The filling ran, black and steamy, from the funnel, slowly filling out the casing, which dropped down filled and softly curled. Quenu had removed the pot from the fire, and Léon and Quenu, the thin-featured boy and the broad-featured man, stood in the stark glow of the stove, which heated their pale faces and white clothing to a rosy hue.

The operation attracted the interest of Lisa and Augustine. Lisa in particular criticized Léon for pinching the sausages too tight and, she said, causing knots to form. When the casing was completely filled, Quenu slid it into a pot of boiling water. He seemed relaxed again, with nothing left to do but let it cook.

“And the man, the man,” Pauline was muttering, opening her eyes again and surprised to find that her cousin was no longer speaking.

Florent rocked her on his knee and began again in a murmur, like a nurse singing a baby to sleep.

“The man,” he said, “came to a large town. He was immediately taken for an escaped convict and spent several months in prison. Then he was released and took up a variety of trades. He kept books and taught children to read and even hired out as a laborer digging earthworks. But always the man dreamed of returning to his country. He managed to save the necessary money. Then he got yellow fever. He was thought to be dead, and everyone divided up his possessions so that when he recovered he did not have so much as a shirt. He had to start all over. The man was very weak and was afraid he would have to stay there, but finally he made it back.”

Florent's voice became lower and lower and at last faded into a last quiver of the lips. Little Pauline was asleep, sent off by the end of the story, her head fallen against her cousin's shoulder. He held her with one arm and gently rocked her on one knee. Since no one seemed to pay any more attention to him, he remained there without moving, holding the sleeping child.

Now for the last round, as Quenu liked to put it. He took the boudin from the pot. So that it would not break or tangle, he drew it out by rolling it around a thick wooden stick and then took it into the courtyard, where it was hung on screens to dry rapidly. Léon helped him, lifting up the ends when a piece was too long. The pungent garlands of blood sausage left a trail of strong steam that thickened the air. Auguste shot one last glance at the pots of melted lard and lifted the lids off, each bursting bubble releasing acrid steam. The haze of grease had been rising slowly since the beginning of the evening. Now it was drowning the gaslight, taking over the room, covering the ruddy pale color of Quenu and his two assistants. Lisa and Augustine had stood up, and they were all huffing and puffing as though they had eaten too much.

Augustine carried the sleeping Pauline upstairs in her arms. Quenu, who preferred to close the kitchen himself, sent Léon and Auguste off to bed, saying that he would put the boudin away himself. The apprentice went off very red-faced, having managed to hide in his shirt almost a yard of boudin, which was doubtless scalding him. Then Quenu and Florent were alone, saying nothing. Lisa, standing up, tasted the boudin, but it was very hot and she took little nibbles, careful not to burn her pretty lips, and the piece vanished bit by bit into her rosy mouth.

“Oh, well,” she said, “the Norman was rude and wrong. The boudin is very good today.”

There was a knock at the back door. Gavard, who spent the evenings until about midnight at Monsieur Lebigre's, had come for a final answer about the job of fish inspector.

“You have to understand that Monsieur Verlaque cannot wait any longer, he's really too sick … Florent has to make up his mind. I promised to give my answer first thing in the morning.”

“But Florent accepts,” Lisa calmly answered, taking one more nibble at her boudin.

Florent, who had still not gotten out of his chair as he felt oddly dejected, tried in vain to raise a hand in protest.

“No, no,” insisted Lisa, “it's settled … You see, my dear Florent, you have already suffered enough. What you have just been telling us makes a person shudder. It's time for you to settle down. You come from a respectable family, you've had a good education, and it is really inappropriate for you to be wandering like a vagrant. You're too old for childishness. You've been foolish, but all that is forgotten and forgiven now. You can return to your social class, the class of respectable people, and finally live the way everyone else does.”

Florent listened, astounded, unable to find words to speak. No doubt she was right. She looked so healthy and serene that she could not possibly want anything but what was good. He was the one, the skinny man with the dark and undependable face, who must be in the wrong, indulging in unworthy dreams. He no longer knew why he had been resisting up until now.

But she was not through with her flood of words, speaking to him as though he were a little boy who had been bad and was being threatened by the police. She was very maternal and found very persuasive arguments.

And the final argument:

“Do it for us, Florent,” she said. “We have a certain standing in the neighborhood that requires us to act appropriately. To be honest, just between us, I'm afraid that people will begin to talk. This job fixes everything. You'll be someone. You'll even improve our standing.”

She became tender, and Florent felt surrounded by prosperity. It was as though he were permeated by the smell of the kitchen, the nourishment of all the food that had been loaded into the air. He slid into the happy lethargy that is brought on by eating well and living in fat, as he had for the past fifteen days. He felt a tingling on his skin, the seduction of fat slowly invading his entire being, rendering him soft and easy like a contented shopkeeper. At this late hour of night, in this overheated room, all his bitterness and determination melted away. He felt so indolent in the calm of the night, adrift in the scent of boudin and lard, by the chubby Pauline asleep in his lap, that he found himself wishing for more, for an endless succession of such evenings, slowly fattening him.

But more than anything, the sight of Mouton made up his mind. Mouton was in a deep sleep, belly up, one paw on his nose, his tail wrapped around his side as though it were a quilt, and he slept with that feline sense of well-being. Florent looked at him and said, “No! In the end it's just too stupid … I accept. Tell him I accept the position, Gavard.”

Lisa finished her piece of boudin, slowly wiping her fingertips on the end of her apron. She readied her brother-in-law's candle while Gavard and Quenu praised him for his decision. After all, there had to be an end to all this. Political fanatics get nothing to eat. And as for her, standing with the candle lit, she looked at Florent with satisfaction in her lovely face, as peaceful as the smile of a golden calf.