The Belly of Paris (24 page)

“My boy you must come to Nanterre,” she said, “and see my
garden with borders of thyme everywhere. My God, Paris has an evil smell.”

Then she was off, dripping wet. Florent always felt rejuvenated when he left her. He resolved to try to use work to fight off his depression. He was a very methodical man, and once he had devised a plan for the allotment of his time, it became an obsession. He locked himself away two nights a week to work on an exhaustive study of Cayenne. He found his little room to be an excellent place to work. He lit his fire, checked that the pomegranate at the end of the bed was doing well, then sat down at the little table and worked there until midnight. He had pushed the prayer book and the book on dreams back in the drawer and little by little filled the drawer with his notes, memos, and manuscript pages.

The work on Guiana barely made progress because he was constantly distracted by other projects, plans for grand, ambitious projects that he sketched out in a few lines. He drafted a plan to reform the administrative system of the markets, a scheme for transforming the fees the city charged for produce as it entered Paris into a tax on sales at the market. He also devised an improved system for provisioning the poorest neighborhoods and a humanitarian law— the idea was still not fully formed—for managing the food that arrived each day in a way that would guarantee a minimum of nutrition to every Paris household. Sitting there bent over the table, immersed in these weighty issues, his figure cast a dark shadow on the gentle little garret. And sometimes a finch Florent had rescued one snowy day in the market would mistake the lamplight for daybreak and interrupt the silence with its chirp, the only interruption in the scratching noise of Florent's pen on paper.

As was his destiny, Florent returned to politics. He had been through too much not to make it his life's preoccupation. If things had gone differently, he might have been a very good provincial schoolmaster, content in the peace of a small town. But having been treated like a savage animal, he felt marked by exile to engage in some great struggle. His depression was a result of his years of yearning in Cayenne, the bitterness he felt due to having suffered so deeply for no reason, and the vows he had secretly made to
avenge people who had been beaten and justice that had been trampled underfoot. The giant market with its mountains of food had hastened the crisis. To Florent it was a metaphor for some satiated, gluttonous beast, a bloated Paris wallowing in fat and propping up the empire. He felt surrounded by oversize bosoms and bloated faces, which continually attacked him for his thinness and his unhappy face. It was the belly of shopkeepers, the belly of ordinary people puffing themselves up, celebrating in the sunshine, declaring that everything was for the best, since passive people had never been so well fattened.

As Florent had these thoughts he clenched his fist, ready for the struggle, angrier about his years of exile than he had been since his return to France. He was overtaken by hatred. He often put down his pen and began to dream. The dying fire cast a hot light on his face, the lamp smoked, and the finch fell back asleep on one foot with his head tucked under a wing.

Sometimes, at eleven o'clock, Auguste, seeing the light under the door, knocked on his way to bed. Impatiently Florent would open the door. The charcuterie apprentice would sit down in front of the fire, barely speaking and never explaining why he had come. All the while, his eyes would remain fixed on the picture of Augustine and himself all dressed up. Florent decided that he liked to come to the room because it used to be occupied by his girlfriend. One day Florent asked him if he was right.

“Well, maybe,” answered Auguste, surprised by discovering this about himself. “I never thought of that before. I came to see you without really knowing why … Well, if I tell Augustine, she'll laugh … when you're going to get married, you don't think about such things.”

When he was feeling talkative, his singular theme was the charcuterie he was going to set up with Augustine in Plaisance. He seemed so perfectly certain that everything would work out exactly the way he planned it that Florent couldn't help but feel a certain respect for him, albeit mixed with irritation. The young man was resolved. Though every bit as stupid as he looked, he went straight for his goal and would probably attain it without problems.

Once Florent had had one of these visits from the young apprentice, he could not settle back to work again until he admitted the thought “What a dummy this Auguste is.”

Every month Florent went to Clamart to see Monsieur Verlaque. These visits were almost a pleasure for Florent. The poor man still hung on, to the amazement of Gavard, who had predicted six months at most. Every time Florent went, the sick man told him that he was feeling much better and was hoping to go back to his job. But the days slipped by, and Verlaque had serious relapses. Florent would sit by his bed, chat about the fish market, and try to cheer him up. He would place the fifty francs he paid him every month on the pedestal table, and though it was prearranged, the former inspector would invariably protest and seem not to want to take the money. Then they would change the subject and the coins would remain on the table.

When Florent left, Madame Verlaque would accompany him to the front door. She was a small, kindly woman with a tearful manner. Her only conversational subject was the expenses incurred from looking after her husband: the high price of chicken broth, red meat, Bordeaux, medicine, and the doctor. Florent was embarrassed by this sad conversation, and for the first few visits, he failed to grasp its meaning. But finally, since the poor woman was always crying and carrying on about how happy they had been when her husband had brought home his full salary of eighteen hundred francs a year, he meekly offered to give her a regular sum, which her husband was not to know about. But she turned down the offer, paradoxically insisting that the fifty francs was enough. Yet during the month, she would regularly write to Florent, calling him their “savior.” In her small, fine handwriting, she would manage to fill three pages with meek pleas for the loan of ten francs, and she did this often enough that most of Florent's hundred and fifty francs made its way to Verlaque. Her husband doubtless knew nothing of this, though the wife kissed Florent's hands. But this charity gave Florent great pleasure, and he concealed it as though it were a prohibited act of self-indulgence.

“That Verlaque is making a fool of you,” Gavard sometimes said. “He's living easy now that you are paying all the bills.”

Finally one day Florent said, “We've worked it out. I'm only giving him twenty-five francs from now on.”

After all, Florent didn't have any needs. He got his room and board free from the Quenus. He needed only a few francs so that he could go to Monsieur Lebigre's some evenings. Little by little his life became set like a clock. He worked in his room, continued his lessons with Muche twice a week between eight and nine o'clock, left one night free for Beautiful Lisa so as not to anger her, and passed the rest of his time in the glass-paneled room with Gavard and his friends.

When he went to the Méhudins', he kept a professorial distance. He liked the old house on rue Pirouette. On the ground floor he passed the bland odors of the cooked-vegetable seller. Large pans of spinach and sorrel were cooling in the little backyard. Then he climbed a dark, greasy staircase with worn, warped steps twisted at frightening angles. The Méhudins occupied the entire second floor. Even after they could afford it, the mother always refused to move, despite the pleas of her daughters, who dreamed of life in a new house on a wide, handsome street. The old woman could not be moved on this issue. She said that she had lived there and intended to die there. Besides, she was perfectly happy in her dark closet, leaving the more spacious bedrooms for Claire and the Beautiful Norman. The Norman, by right of being the older, had taken the room with a street view, the largest and best. Claire, annoyed by this, refused to take the adjoining room overlooking the yard and instead insisted on staying across the landing in little more than a garret, which she did not even have whitewashed. She maintained her independence by having a separate key, and whenever she was displeased she could lock herself in her room.

Florent generally arrived just as the Méhudins were finishing dinner. Muche would leap on him, and Florent would take a seat while the boy was still clinging to him and chattering away. Once the oilcloth table covering had been cleaned, they began the lesson
at a corner of the table. The Beautiful Norman welcomed him. She would knit or mend linen, seated at the table working by the same light as the lesson, and she would often stop working to listen to it, as she found it intriguing. She soon began to feel a warm appreciation for this clever man, who could speak to her child with the gentleness of a woman and showed the patience of an angel in repeating the same material over and over again. She no longer considered him unattractive and even felt a little jealous of Beautiful Lisa. She would pull her chair even closer and study Florent with an embarrassing smile.

“Mama, you're bumping my elbow and I can't write,” Muche would say irritably. “There's the blot you made me do. Can't you move back?”

More and more, the Beautiful Norman said mean things about Beautiful Lisa. She claimed that she lied about her age, that she laced her corset so tight that she couldn't breathe, that if she appeared in the morning so perfectly put together without a hair out of place, it must be because she looked horrendous before she got dressed. Then the Norman would raise her arms to show that she was not wearing a corset. She would smile as she puffed out her breasts, round and alive, under a thin, badly fastened camisole. Florent would listen and even laugh, thinking what funny creatures women were. How the rivalry between the Beautiful Norman and Beautiful Lisa entertained him.

Muche, meanwhile, had finished his page of writing. Florent, who had good penmanship, wrote large, round letters on pieces of paper. He chose long words that took an entire line, with a notable preference for such words as “tyrannically,” “liberticide,” “unconstitutional,” and “revolutionary.” He sometimes had the boy copy such sentences as “The day of justice will come” or “The suffering of the just man is the condemnation of the oppressor” or “When the hour strikes, the guilty will fall.” In preparing these writing samples, he was simply following the ideas that were swirling in his mind. He forgot about Muche, the Beautiful Norman, everything around him. Muche would have copied
The Social Contract
¹²
had he
been told to copy it. He filled pages, line after line, with “tyrannically” and “unconstitutional,” carefully tracing each letter.

The whole time Florent was there, old Madame Méhudin would circle the table, fidgeting. She continued to nurse a fearsome grudge against him. According to her, it was ridiculous to make a child work at night at an hour when he should be in bed. She almost certainly would have thrown the big beanpole out the door if the Beautiful Norman, after a tempestuous fight, had not threatened to move to another home if she were not allowed to choose her guests. After that, the same fight started up every night.

“Say what you want,” said the old woman, “he has shifty eyes. Besides, you can't trust skinny people. A skinny man will do just about anything. I've never met a good one yet. His stomach looks like it slipped into his butt, that's for sure, because he's flat as a board. And he's ugly. I may be past sixty-five, but I still wouldn't want him by my night table.”

She said all this because she could see what was happening. Then she started praising Monsieur Lebigre, who in fact showed a great interest in the Beautiful Norman. Aside from the huge dowry that he imagined she would bring, he thought the young woman would be fantastic for his business. The old woman never missed a chance to praise him. At least he wasn't skinny as a rail. He was strong as a Turk. She even praised his calves, which, actually, were a bit fat.

But the Norman only shrugged and said sourly, “I don't care about his calves. I don't need anybody's calves. I do as I like.”

If the old woman pushed too hard, her daughter would say, “It's none of your business, and besides, it isn't true. And if it were true, I wouldn't need your permission, so just leave me alone.” With that she would go to her room and slam the door. In the household she had achieved a certain measure of power that she was now abusing. At night, if the old woman imagined she heard an odd noise, she would get up and walk barefoot to her daughter's door and listen, trying to hear if Florent was in there with her.

But Florent had an even more vehement enemy in the Méhudin
household. As soon as he arrived, Claire would get up without saying a word, take a candle, and go to her room on the other side of the landing. She could be heard locking her door in a fit of icy anger. One evening when her sister invited the teacher to dinner, Claire fixed her own food on the landing and ate it in her room. Often she closed herself in so adroitly that she wasn't seen for a week. She usually remained soft and easygoing in appearance, but sometimes she turned to iron, her eyes glaring under her pale, wild locks like the stare of a distrustful animal. Mère Méhudin, thinking she would be free to express her feelings about Florent in Claire's presence, only enraged her when she talked about him. So the exasperated old woman would tell people how she would have liked to have gone off by herself but was afraid that her daughters would devour each other without her supervision.

One evening as he was leaving, Florent passed in front of Claire's door, which was wide open. She was looking at him, which made his face turn bright red. The girl's hostility saddened him, and it was only his shyness in front of women that kept him from demanding an explanation. On this particular evening, however, he would probably have walked into her room if he hadn't noticed Mademoiselle Saget's small white face peeking over the banister of the floor above. So he continued on his way out and had not taken ten steps when Claire's door slammed shut behind him so violently that it rattled the entire staircase. It was then that Mademoiselle Saget reached the conclusion that Madame Quenu's cousin slept with both Méhudin girls.