The Belly of Paris (29 page)

By this time Cadine could not bear to be without Marjolin and Marjolin cried if he was apart from Cadine. If they became separated, they looked for each other behind every vendor's skirt, behind every box, under every cabbage. It was most especially under the cabbage that they grew up and where they came to love each other.

When Marjolin was nearly eight and Cadine six, Mère Chantemesse started scolding them for their laziness. She told them that she would take them into her vegetable business and pay them a sou a day if they would trim the vegetables. At first the children were very enthusiastic. They set up on either side of the big basket, with slender knives and eagerly worked away. Mère Chantemesse specialized in peeled and trimmed vegetables. On a table spread with a damp black wool cloth, she lined up potatoes, turnips, carrots, and white onions, arranged in pyramids, three at the base and one on top, all ready to be tossed into the pot of a busy household. She also had bundles tied with string for pot-au-feu
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— four leeks, three carrots, one parsnip, two turnips, two ribs of celery. There were also thinly chopped vegetables laid out on sheets of paper, and quartered cabbages, piles of tomatoes, and slices of pumpkin looking like red stars and gold crescents next to all the other pale vegetables washed in running water.

Cadine proved to be much more skillful than Marjolin, even though she was younger. She could cut such a thin peel from a potato that you could see daylight through it. She tied the pot-au-feu bundles so prettily that they looked like bouquets of flowers. And she knew how to make a pile of vegetables look large even though it contained only three carrots and three turnips. Passersby would stop and laugh when she called out in her little waif's voice, “Madame, Madame, come over here. Only two sous a pile.”

She had her regulars, and her little piles were well known. Mère Chantemesse, seated between the two children, laughed a private laugh that made her bosom rise almost to her chin, to see them
working away with such earnestness. She religiously paid them their daily sou. But in the end they grew bored with making the little pyramids. They were growing up and looking for more lucrative work. Marjolin remained a child for a long time, which tried Cadine's patience. “He has the brains of a cabbage,” she would say. And, if truth be told, it was pointless for her to come up with a money-earning plan for him, as he never earned any. He could not even do a simple errand. But she was extremely shrewd. When she was eight, she was hired by one of the women who sat on a bench in the Les Halles neighborhood with a basket of lemons and enlisted street children to work the area, hawking them. She held the lemons in her hands, selling them two for a sou, running after passersby shoving the merchandise under women's noses. When her hands were empty, she hurried back for more. She earned two sous for every dozen lemons she sold, and in good weather she could earn five or six sous a day.

The following year she sold bonnets for nine sous, which was an even better business except that she had to be on her guard because that kind of street vending was illegal without a license. But she could smell the police a hundred steps away, and the bonnets vanished under her skirts while she nonchalantly munched on an apple.

Then she started selling cakes, cookies, cherry tarts, almond croquets, little corn cakes, thick and yellow, on wicker trays. But Marjolin ate most of her inventory.

Finally, at the age of eleven, she carried out the big idea that she had long contemplated. She saved up four francs in two months' time and with it bought a basket to carry on her back, and she started selling chickweed.
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This was a lucrative business. She got up early in the morning and bought chickweed from the wholesalers—birdseed on stalks and seed cakes. Then she set out, crossing the river, touring the Latin Quarter from rue Saint-Jacques to rue Dauphine up to the Luxembourg Gardens. Marjolin went with her. She did not want him even to carry the basket. She said he was fit only to call out, so he shouted in his thick drawl, “Chickweed for the li'l birdies!”

Then Cadine, her voice melodious as a flute, would take up the call in a strange musical passage ending on a clear deep note, “Chickweed for the li'l birdies.”

They took to opposite sides of the street, both looking up in the air. At the time Marjolin had an oversize red jacket that went down to his knees. It had belonged to the late Monsieur Chantemesse, a cabdriver. Cadine wore a blue-and-white plaid dress, made from an old skirt belonging to Mère Chantemesse.

They were known to every canary in every garret of the Latin Quarter. As they passed by, repeating their call, all the cages started singing.

Cadine also sold watercress. “Two sous a bunch! Two sous a bunch!” Marjolin would run into the shops and offer “beautiful watercress, good for your health.”

The central market had just been built, and the two would stand and stare awestruck at the lane of flower vendors that ran through the fruit pavilion. There on both sides along the market stalls, like the edges of a garden, blossoms burst in huge bouquets. It was a perfumed harvest, a double hedge of roses, through which the neighborhood girls loved to pass, smiling, faint from the overpowering fragrance, with shelves of artificial flowers above, paper flowers with drops of glue that looked like dew, funeral wreaths with black and white pearly beads that gave off a bluish glow. Cadine widened her rosy nostrils with the sensuousness of a cat, stopping in the sweet air and soaking up all she could from the perfume. When Marjolin caught a scent of her hair, he would say that it smelled of carnations. She claimed that she no longer needed to use anything for her hair, she had only to pass down that alley.

She managed to land a job working for a flower vendor. Once she started the new job, Marjolin found that she had the most wonderful smell from head to toe. She lived among the roses, the lilacs, the lilies of the valley. He would playfully sniff at her skirts, pretending to reflect deeply, and finally pronounce, “Ah, yes, lily of the valley.”

Then he would rise to her waist, sniff even harder, and declare, “This smells of wallflowers.”

Then, at her sleeves and her wrists, “And this smells of lilacs.”

At the back of her neck and at her throat, her cheeks, her lips— “That smells of roses.”

Cadine laughed and called him a dodo, and cried out for him to stop because the tip of his nose tickled her. Her breath smelled of jasmine. She was a warm, living bouquet.

Now the young girl got up at four in the morning to help her employer with the purchases. Every morning they went to suburban gardens to buy armfuls of flowers, packages of moss, and bunches of ferns and periwinkle branches with which to surround bouquets. Cadine was enthralled by the daughters of the wholesale gardeners of Montreuil, with their jewels and lace, surrounded by bouquets.

On the most popular saints' days—Mary, Peter, and Joseph— sales started at two o'clock. More than a hundred thousand francs in cut flowers were sold on the street, and a vendor could make two hundred francs in a few hours. On those days all that could be seen of Cadine was a frizz of hair above the bouquets of pansies, mignonettes, and daisies. She was drowned, lost under the flowers. All day long she was hanging flower arrangements on bamboo sticks.

In only a few weeks she had mastered a skill with her own graceful style. Her bouquets did not suit everyone's tastes. They could make you smile, or they could upset you with an unintended savageness. Reds dominated, mingled with blues, yellows, and purples, creating a barbarous charm.

On mornings when she pinched Marjolin, teased him to the brink of tears, she made ferocious bouquets, the bouquets of an angry girl, with strong perfumes and garish colors. Other mornings, when she felt sad or joyful, her bouquets showed silvery gray, subtle with a soft perfume. Other times she used roses, bloody as a heart slashed open, swimming in a lake of white carnations with irises sticking out wildly like flames among the greens, like a Smyrna carpet with a complicated pattern created flower by flower, like painting a canvas, spreading out with the delicacy of lace. There would be a bouquet of an engaging purity, then a
plump nosegay, whatever could be dreamed of, for the hand of a fish seller or a marquise, the awkwardness of a virgin and the sensuality of a girl. In other words, her bouquets revealed all the endearing and quaint fantasies of a twelve-year-old girl in whom womanhood was dawning.

There were only two flowers that Cadine respected: white lilacs, which in winter cost fifteen to twenty francs for a bunch of eight or ten branches, and camellias, which were even more expensive and came in boxes of a dozen on a bed of moss covered with cotton wool. She handled them the way you would handle jewels, gingerly, without breathing, afraid of wilting them with a sigh, and with painstaking care attached their short stems to bamboo sticks. She spoke of them with great gravity.

She told Marjolin that a good white camellia, without any rust spots, was a rare and beautiful thing. One day she held one up for him to admire, and he said, “Yes, that's nice, but I would rather have that spot under your chin there, right there. It's prettier and more delicate than your camellia. The blue and pink veins are like the veins in a flower petal.”

Then he touched her with his fingertip and sniffed her. “Funny. Today you smell of orange blossoms.”

Cadine had a difficult personality. She was not suited for the role of employee. Finally she managed to set up her own business. She was then only thirteen years old and couldn't even dream of having a large-scale enterprise such as her own stall along the flower alley. So she sold bouquets of violets for a sou apiece, which she displayed on a bed of moss in a bamboo tray that hung from her neck. She wandered all day in Les Halles and the neighborhood, carrying her little garden.

That was her joy this perpetual roaming, which exercised her legs after the long hours sitting on a low chair with her knees folded, making bouquets. Now she could bunch her violets as she walked, wrapping them in her fingers with incredible dexterity, counting out six or eight flowers depending on the season, adding a leaf, wrapping a string around it, then cutting the string with her sharp little teeth. She performed this trick so rapidly that the little
bouquets seemed to grow on their own out of the moss on the tray. Along the streets, amid the bustling crowds, her swift fingers sprouted flowers without her even glancing at them. Her face was instead raised defiantly, surveying the shops and the passing people.

Occasionally she rested in the shelter of a doorway. There she would bring to the rushing gutters, greasy with dishwater, a touch of spring and blue-flowered woods. Her bouquets reflected her bad moods and her soft moments, some shaggy and prickly, wrapped angrily in an untidy paper cone, others peaceful and amorous, smiling from a crisp paper collar. Wherever she passed she left behind a sweet scent.

Marjolin followed her, mesmerized. Now she smelled of only one thing from head to foot. When he took hold of her and sniffed from her skirt to her bodice, from her hands to her face, he said that she was nothing but a violet, a huge and most lovely violet. He buried his face in her and repeated, “Remember the day we went to Romainville? It's all like that. Especially in your sleeve. Don't ever change work again. You smell too good.”

And she never did change. It was her final choice. But the two children were growing up. Often she neglected her tray of violets just to run around the neighborhood. The construction of Les Halles was an object of endless adventures. They climbed into the construction site through a crack in the wooden fencing. They climbed down into the excavations of the building foundations. And they scaled the first steel scaffolding to go up.

They left a little bit of themselves and their games in every hole that was dug and every structure that was raised. The market was built under their little hands. From this sprang an enduring affection for Les Halles, and the market returned their affection. They were intimate with the buildings, old friends whose every bolt they had seen driven in. They had no fear of the monster and patted its enormity with their skinny fists, treating it like a well-behaved child or a friend with whom they were comfortable. And Les Halles seemed to be smiling at these two ragamuffins, who were an
ode to footloose freedom, an idyll that sprang from the market's great belly.

Cadine and Marjolin did not sleep together in the vegetable wagon at Mère Chantemesse's anymore. The old woman, who continued to hear them chattering into the night, made up a separate bed for the boy on the floor in front of the wardrobe. But the next morning she would find the boy back under the old covers. So she sent him to sleep with a neighbor. This made the two children extremely unhappy. During the day, when Mère Chantemesse wasn't there, they lay down fully dressed in each other's arms on the floor as though it were a bed, and there they had fun.

Later on they started misbehaving, seeking out the dark corners of the bedroom or, more often, hidden in the back of the shop on rue au Lard behind the apple pile and the orange crates. They were free and without shame, like sparrows mating on a rooftop.

It was in the basement of the poultry pavilion that they were able to sleep together. It was their special tradition, and finding a way to sleep against each other, the old way they had lost, made them feel warm. There by the slaughtering table and the big baskets of feathers, they could stretch out. As soon as night fell, they slipped in and stayed there all evening, warming themselves, happy in the softness of their bed, with down up to their eyes. They dragged their basket away from the gaslight. They were alone with the strong smell of poultry, awakened by the sudden crowing of roosters in the darkness. And they laughed and kissed, filled with an affection that they were not sure how to express.

Marjolin was very stupid. Cadine beat him, overcome with anger toward him but not knowing why. But with her street-savvy instincts, she was awakening him. Slowly, there in the basket of feathers, they came to know everything. It was a game. The hens and roosters lying next to them did not have a sweeter innocence.