The War of Fat against Thin ("The Belly of Paris" concludes)

Emile Zola, The Belly of Paris: Reading Notes, part 3

Observing how the church of Saint Eustache can be seemed framed through the massive arches of Les Halles, the painter Claude Lantier observes to Florent: “Since the beginning of the century, only one original building has been erected, only one that is not a copy from somewhere else but has sprung naturally out of the soil of our times, and that is Les Halles. Do you see it Florent? A brilliant work that is a shy foretaste of the twentieth century. That is why it frames Saint Eustache. There stands the church with its roseate window, empty of the faithful, while Les Halles spreads out around it, buzzing with life.”

Lantier and Florent go on an excursion into the countryside, where they smell thyme in the air and see produce growing in rich soil. Florent finds himself “deeply contented in the wholesome and peaceful earth. For about a year now, the only vegetables he had seen were bruised from bouncing in wagons, yanked from the earth the night before and still bleeding. . . . The Les Halles they had left that morning seemed to him a sprawling mortuary, a place for the dead scattered with the corpses of the once living, a charnel house with the stench of decomposition.”

Lantier tells Florent of a series of subversive prints entitled “The Battle of the Fat and the Thin” that depicts several episodes in the conflict throughout the history of mankind of “two opposing groups, one devouring the other to grow fat and jolly.” [Very strong resonance to Eugene Sue’s “History of the People” here]. “The Fat, bursting from their enormity, prepare for the evening glut, while the Thin, doubled over from hunger, look in from the street, stick figures filled with envy.”

Lantier classes both himself and Florent as clearly among the Thin and notes that Florent is surrounded by the Fat where he lives at the charcuterie and where he works among the fishmongers. The “large bosoms”of the Fat, he warns, have it in for Florent as naturally as a cat chases a mouse.”

The radical group of which Florent has become the leader draws the attention of the master gossip of Les Halles, the aged and thin Mademoiselle Saget, who goes rom stall to stall in Les Halles, trading gossip for morsels of food. From one of her observation points of a park bench she “seemed to stretch taller and glide along each story, right up to the round flaring eyes of the attic windows. She gawked at the curtains. She could develop an entire drama from a head that appeared between two curtains.” When she extracts the secret of Florent’s past, “her little feet barely touched the ground. She was carried by her delight as though caressed by a breeze. . . . Now the whole Les Halles neighborhood belonged to her. There was no longer a missing piece.”

Claude Lantier perceives the impractical nature of Florent’s detailed plans for the uprising. He tells his friend: “you approach politics exactly the way I approach painting. . . . You’re an artist in your own field. You dream politics. I imagine you spend entire evenings here, gazing at the stars, interpreting them as infinity’s ballots. Then you tickle yourself with your ideas of justice and truth. It’s also true that your ideas, like my paintings, strike terrible fear into the hearts of the bourgeoisie.”

Florent’s dreaming of revolution extends to his designing banners for each nonexistent cadre. When Lisa discovers the red armbands and flags in his room, she resolves to denounce him to the police. When she does so, she discovers that Florent has already been denounced, anonymously, by nearly everyone she knows. The police have been aware of the movements of the “dangerous” revolutionary since he landed back in France.

When Florent witnesses Marjolin beheading fattened pigeons for market, he nearly faints – revealing his ill-suitedness to the role of revolutionary leader. He is arrested at a politically useful time and led off like a lamb. As the novel ends, he is sentenced to return to Devil’s Island.

The thin idealist expelled, The Beautiful Lisa stands in the doorway of the once again thriving charcuterie, “taking up its entire width. Her linens had never been so white. Her rosy cheeks had never been so refreshed or so perfectly framed in smooth waves of hair. . . .This was total tranquility, complete happiness, lifeless and unshakable, as she bathed in the warm air. Her tightly stretched bodice seemed to be still digesting yesterday’s happiness. Her chubby hands, lost in the folds of her apron, were not even outstretched to catch today’s happiness, for it was certain to fall into her hands.”