Read Online The Belly of Paris by Émile Zola - Free Book Online Page B

because when he saw them, he began braying so loudly that his groans echoed in the great vaulted roofs of Les Halles, which seemed to shake from the sound. The horses answered with neighing, then a stamping and scraping of hooves, a distant fracas that swelled, rolled, and then faded.
    In front of Claude and Florent on rue Berger they saw, in the glow of gaslight, bare retail shops, open on one side, with baskets and fruit surrounded by three grimy walls covered with arithmetical calculations scribbled in pencil. As they stood there they saw a well-dressed woman curled up with an air of weary contentment in the corner of a cab that looked misplaced in the procession of carts as it made its way along.
    “There's Cinderella heading home without her slippers,” said Claude with a smile.
    They chatted now as they went back to the market. Claude, his hands in his pockets, whistled and expounded on his love for this great mountain of food that rose up every morning in the heart of Paris. He roamed the streets every night dreaming of colossal stilllifes, extraordinary works. He had even begun one. He had made his friend Marjolin and that slut Cadine pose, but it was hard. Those damn vegetables and the fruit and fish and meat—it was all too beautiful!
    Florent listened to the artist's exuberance with his own belly aching from hunger. It was obvious that it had not occurred to Claude at that moment that all those beautiful objects were there for people to eat. He loved them for their colors. But suddenly he stopped talking and tightened the long red belt that he wore under his greenish coat, an old habit. Then he continued with a sly look.
    “And here, this is where I have my breakfast, at least with my eyes, which is better than nothing at all. Sometimes when I forget dinner the night before, I work myself into indigestion the next morning by watching the carts come in here, filled with all sorts of good things. On such a morning I love my vegetables more than ever. Oh, the thing that exasperates me, the real injustice of it, is that those good-for-nothing bourgeois actually eat all this.”
    He remembered a dinner that a friend had bought him at Baratte's 8 one glorious day. They had had oysters, fish, and game. But Baratte's had gone under and all the carnival life of the old Marché des Innocents was now buried, and everything had been replaced by the huge central market, a steel giant of a new town. “Fools can say what they like, but this was the quintessence of the era.”
    At first Florent could not decide if he was criticizing the picturesqueness of Baratte's or its cheerful atmosphere. But Claude was on a rant against romanticism. He preferred his piles of cabbage to the rags of the Middle Ages. And he wound up by denouncing the weakness of an etching he had done of rue Pirouette. “All those grubby old places ought to be torn down and replaced by modern ones.”
    “Listen,” he said, stopping. “Look over there in the corner. Isn't that a ready-made painting, infinitely more human than all their beloved pretentious paintings?”
    Along the covered street women were selling coffee and hot soup. In a corner a crowd of customers had gathered around a manselling cabbage soup. The galvanized tin bucket full of broth was steaming on the little heater, whose holes emitted the pale glow of embers. The woman, armed with a ladle, took thin slices of bread out of a cloth-lined basket and dipped yellow cups into the soup. She was surrounded by tidy saleswomen, farmers in overalls, forts with coats stained by the foods they had carried and their backs bent by the weight of the loads, poor ragged drifters—the entire hungry early-morning crowd of Les Halles, eating, scalding themselves, sticking their chins forward so that the trickle from their spoons would not stain their clothes.
    And the passionate painter blinked his eyes, thrilled by the scene, looking for the best vantage point, working out the painting's best