Free The Belly of Paris by Émile Zola

composition. But the goddamn cabbage soup smelled impressive.
    Florent turned his head, unable to watch the customers emptying their soup cups in silence like a cluster of distrustful animals feeding. Claude himself was overwhelmed by pungent steam rising from someone's spoon that struck him in the face.
    He tightened his belt, smiling as though he was annoyed. Then, as they continued their stroll, he alluded to the punch Alexandre had bought them, saying in a low voice: “It's a funny thing, but have you ever noticed that you can always find someone to buy you a drink but there is never anyone who will pay for something to eat?”
    It was daybreak. The houses at the end of rue de la Cossonnerie along boulevard Sébastopol were still black, but above the clean line of their slate roofs, a patch of blue sky framed in the arches of the covered street shone like a half-moon. Claude, who had been bending down to look through some ground-level gratings, peering down into the glimmering gaslight of deep cellars, glanced up at the opening between the pillars, as though studying the dark roofs on the edge of the clear sky. Then he stopped again, this time to inspect an iron ladder, one of those that connected the two levels of roofing. Florent asked him what he was looking at up there.
    “It's that bastard Marjolin,” said the painter, not in answer to Florent's question. “You can bet he's lying in some gutter, unless hespent the night with the animals in the poultry cellar. I need him to do a study.”
    And he told the story of how his friend Marjolin had been found by the market women one morning on a pile of cabbages and how he had grown up wild on the neighborhood streets. When they wanted to send him to school, he would suddenly become ill and they had to take him back to the markets. He knew the most hidden nooks and loved them as if they were his family moving with squirrellike agility through his ironwork forest. What a pretty couple they made—he and the slutty Cadine, whom Mère Chantemesse had picked up one night at the old Marché des Innocents. He was beautiful, this big oaf, golden as a Rubens with a reddish down that caught the light; she was a little thing, lithe and slender, with an odd face beneath a tangle of frizzy black hair.
    Claude, engrossed in his talk, walked quickly, bringing his companion to the pointe Saint-Eustache. But Florent, whose legs were starting to buckle again, finally collapsed on a bench near the horse trolley station. There was a cool breeze. At the bottom of the rue Rambuteau, a bright pink light was streaking the milky sky, which higher up was cut by broad gray patches. With the dawn came such a sweet balsamic scent that for a minute Florent thought he was sitting on a hillside in the country. But Claude pointed out to him that on the other side of the bench was the herb market. All along the walkway, around the
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9 there were, in a manner of speaking, fields of thyme, lavender, garlic, and shallot. The merchants had adorned the young plane trees all along the walkway with long branches heavy with bay leaves as thick and green as a victor's wreath. The strong perfume of bay leaf dominated.
    The luminous face of the clock on Saint Eustache turned pale, a night-light surprised by the dawn. One by one, the gaslights in the wine shops in the neighborhood were extinguished, like stars faded away by a bright sky. And Florent looked at the huge market emerging from the shadows, coming out of a dreamland in which they had been held, the palaces sprawling along the streets. They seemed to solidify into a greenish gray color with their columnsholding up an endless expanse of roof. They rose in a geometrical mass, and once all the lights had been extinguished and the matching square buildings were bathed in dawn light, they seemed like some kind of oversize modern machine, a kind of steam engine with a cauldron designed to serve all mankind, a huge riveted and bolted metal belly built of