Abstemious Radicals

Emile Zola, The Belly of Paris: Reading Notes, Part 2

At the fishmarket, Florent befriends Muche, the wild son of The Beautiful Norman. “The Beautiful Norman’s son was growing up wild in the fishmarket. He had been brought there when he was only three and spent his days squatting on a rag surrounded by fish. He slept as though he were a brother of the great tunas, and he woke up among mackerel and whiting. The ragamuffin smelled so fishy that people almost wondered if he hadn’t emerged from the belly of some giant fish. For a long time, his favorite game when his mother wasn’t looking was to build walls and houses of herring.”

The job at the market almost seduces Florent, making him forget Devil’s Island: “after seven years of suffering, he had fallen into such a state of calm, in a life so perfectly ordered, that he barely felt alive. He simply drifted mindlessly, each morning caught by surprise to find himself in the same armchair in his cramped office . . . in the ceaseless racket of the market that made him dream of a swelling sea surrounding him. ”

But “little by little, an uneasiness began to eat at him. He became dissatisfied, accusing himself of all sorts of indefinable faults, and began to rebel against both a physical and mental emptiness.”

“Florent was upset by the magnitude of food that he lived with. The sense of disgust he had felt at the charcuterie returned even more forcefully. . . . His own stomach, the small stomach of a thin man, was turned when he passed the heaps of wet fish.”

“As was his destiny, Florent returned to politics.” Florent falls in with a group of “radicals” who meet in a side room of a wine shop and debate revolution. All of them are thin and near-abstemious: having just one glass of wine or beer, or liquor each which they stretch-out over the course of hours of political posturing. “Florent took a sensual pleasure in these meetings.”

Florent tried to recruit the malleable Querau to the radical cell, but The Beautiful Lisa gets wind of it and tells her husband where their real interest, as prosperous business owners, lies: “To please those who have nothing we are supposed to give up earning a living? Of course I take advantage of every opportunity and I support a government that is good for business. If they commit acts of evil, I don’t want to know. As for me, I know I don’t commit them.”

Lisa is increasingly impatient of Florent, whose very thinness is a sign of his bad character. “He . . . . never skips a bite for all the good it does him. His bad instincts feed on him so that he can’t even gain a few pounds.” Troubled that Florent’s thin presence seems to be souring their once prosperous business and household, Lisa visits the Abbe Roustan at the nearly deserted Cathedral of Saint Eustace to ask his advice for whether she should denounce her radical brother-in-law.

In a perverse twist on the romantic tale of Paul et Virginie, Zola tells the story of the two foundlings -- the chubby boy Marjolin and the waif Cadine -- who grow-up together at the market, living lives of sylvan sensuousness amid the plenty and the rot of Les Halles. Taken in by an old vegetable seller, the two small children share a bed into which they smuggle stolen turnips and carrots as well as ”stones, leaves, apple cores, and dolls made of rags.”

Cadine is industrious from an early age; Marjolin lazy. Cadine is also sexually precocious, and when she and Marjolin are forbidden to share the same bed at home, they find numerous hiding places in the market to continue their intimacy. “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 slaughterhouse table and the big baskets of feathers, they could stretch out.”

“They lived like happy young animals, ruled by their instincts, satisfying their appetites in the midst of mountains of food, where they had grown like plants made of flesh and blood. . . . Neither of them ever left Les Halles for for more than a few moments. It was their perch, their stable, the colossal manger where they slept, loved, and lived on a huge bed of meat, butter, and vegetables.”