The Belly of Paris (10 page)

“Oh, poor fellow,” he said. “That place didn't agree with you. Look at me, you see how I've fattened up.”

He was fat, too, quite fat for a man of only thirty. He was bursting out of his shirt and apron, all wrapped up in white linen like a big stuffed doll. His clean-shaven face was sticking out, slightly resembling the snout of one of the pigs he was with all day. Florent had barely recognized him. Seated, Quenu cast a glance at the lovely Lisa and little Pauline. They looked brimming with good health, solidly built, fit, and trim. The two in their turn looked at Florent with that uneasiness that fleshy people always feel in the presence of someone who is extremely skinny. Even their cat was puffed up with fat and stared at Florent suspiciously with dilated yellow eyes.

“You can wait until we have breakfast, can't you?” asked Quenu. “We eat early, about ten o'clock.”

The shop was filled with the smells of cooking. Florent thought back on the horrible night he had just passed, how he had arrived with the vegetables, his agony in the heart of Les Halles, drowning in the endless sea of food that he had just escaped. Then, in a low voice with a sweet smile, he said:

“No, I can't wait. You see, I'm really hungry.”

Florent had just begun studying law in Paris when his mother died. She lived in Le Vigan in the Gard.
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She had taken a second husband, someone named Quenu from Yvetot in Normandy. Some subprefect had sent Quenu to the Midi and then forgotten him. He continued working at the subprefect's office, finding the region charming, the wine good, the women pleasant. Indigestion took him away three years after his marriage. All he left his wife was a hefty boy who looked like him. The mother was already struggling to pay for the education of Florent, her first son from a previous marriage. He was her great joy sweet-natured and hardworking and always winning the school prizes. It was on him that she lavished her affections and pinned all her hopes. It might be that her favoritism for the pale, skinny boy came from her fondness for her first husband, a Provençal with warm country charm who had been devoted to her. Perhaps Quenu, whose good humor had at first touched her, had shown himself to be too self-satisfied and confident. She decided that her younger son—and in southern families the younger son is often sacrificed—would never amount to much. So she sent him to a school run by a neighbor, an old spinster,
where the boy learned nothing but how to be footloose on the neighborhood streets. The two brothers grew up far apart from each other, like strangers.

By the time Florent got to Le Vigan, his mother had already been buried. She had insisted on concealing her illness from him until the last moment because she did not want to disturb his studies. He found the little Quenu, then twelve years old, sitting at a table, crying. A furniture dealer, a neighbor, had told him of his poor mother's suffering. She had run out of money and had worked herself to death so that her older son could finish studying law. To her little ribbon business, which never brought in very much money, she'd had to add other activities that kept her working late into the night. An obsession with this singular idea to see Florent become a lawyer, a man of substance in the town, had turned her hard and miserly and pitiless to herself and everyone else. Little Quenu ran around with holes in his pants and shirts with frayed sleeves. He never served himself at the table but waited for his mother to cut him his share of bread. And she cut thin slices. This was the way of life that had destroyed her, along with the great despair of having failed to accomplish her goal.

This story had a terrible impact on Florent's gentle character. He choked with tears. Taking his brother in his arms, he held him to his chest and kissed him as though trying to give him back the love of which he had deprived him. Then he looked at the boy's worn-out shoes, his torn sleeves and dirty hands, all the wretchedness of an abandoned child. Over and over again, he told him that he would take him away and they would be happy together.

The next day, when he reviewed the situation, he was afraid that he would not even have enough money to pay the fare back to Paris. At any cost, he did not want to stay in Le Vigan. Fortunately he was able to sell the ribbon business, which raised enough money to pay his mother's debts. Despite her frugality she had run up bills. Since there was nothing left for him, the neighbor, the furniture merchant, offered him five hundred francs for the furniture and linens of the deceased. It was a bargain for the dealer, but the young
man nonetheless thanked him with tears in his eyes. He bought his brother new clothes and took him away that same evening.

Back in Paris there was no question of his continuing law school. Florent deferred all his ambitions. He took on a few pupils and set himself up with little Quenu on rue Royer-Collard at the corner of rue Saint-Jacques in a large bedroom that he furnished with two iron frame beds, a wardrobe, and a table with four chairs. From now on he would raise a child, and he was pleased by this sudden paternity. At first he tried to give Quenu lessons when he came home in the evening, but the thickheaded child barely listened and refused to learn anything. Instead he would start sobbing and recall with nostalgia the days when his mother had let him run in the streets. In despair, Florent stopped the lessons and promised the boy an indefinite vacation. He excused his own weakness by repeatedly arguing that he had not brought the boy to Paris to harass him. His singular code of conduct became making sure that the boy's childhood was a happy one. He adored him, was enthralled by his laughter, took endless delight in being surrounded by the child's well-being and carefree life.

Florent remained skinny in his threadbare black coat, his face yellowing with the grinding burden of teaching, while Quenu became a cheerful, plump man, a bit slow, barely able to read, but with a pleasant good spirit that nothing could shake. He gave brightness to the large, somber room on the rue Royer-Collard.

The years went by. Florent, with a devotion like that of his mother, kept Quenu at home as though he were his grown-up, shiftless daughter. He did not even bother Quenu about household tasks, doing the shopping and cooking the food himself. This, Florent reasoned, helped him to escape his own dark thoughts. He had a sad nature and thought he had evil tendencies. In the evening, when he returned home, splattered with mud, his head bowed by his irritation with other people's children, he would be revived by the big, chunky boy whom he found spinning a top on the tile floor. Quenu laughed at his brother's ineptitude at making omelettes and the seriousness with which he prepared a pot-au-feu.
When the lamp was put out, Florent sometimes grew sad again as he lay in his bed. He dreamed of returning to his law studies and plotted how to divide his time in order to take courses at the law school. Once he had figured this out, he felt content. But then a slight bout of fever that kept him home for eight days created such a hole in his budget and worried him so much that he dropped all thoughts of returning to his studies.

His child grew. Florent found a position as instructor at a school on rue de l'Estrapade at a salary of eighteen hundred francs a year. This was a fortune. With some frugality he could even save some money for Quenu. When Quenu was already eighteen years old, Florent was still treating him like a daughter whose dowry must be set aside.

While his brother was having his brief illness, Quenu too had spent time reflecting. One morning he announced that he wanted to work, that he was now old enough to earn his living. Florent was deeply moved. Just across the street from them lived a watchmaker whom Quenu could see through the curtainless window, leaning over his little table all day, adjusting delicate things and patiently studying them through a magnifying glass. Seduced by this sight, the boy declared a taste for watchmaking. But after fifteen days, he became restless and started crying like a ten-year-old that the work was too complicated and that he would never know “all the dumb little things that go into a watch.”

Then he decided he would like to be a locksmith but found the work tedious. In the next two years he tried more than ten trades. Florent thought that Quenu was right, that he shouldn't take up a trade if his heart was not in it. Meanwhile, Quenu's noble ambition to earn his own living was putting a serious strain on the budget of the two young men. Since he had started hopping from craft to craft, there had been constant new expenses, the cost of clothing, outside meals, entertaining new colleagues. Florent's eighteen hundred francs were no longer enough. He had to take on two night students. For eight years now he had been wearing the same worn-out coat.

But the two brothers had made a friend. The building they lived
in had a side on rue Saint-Jacques, where there was a shop that roasted chickens run by a respectable man named Gavard whose wife was dying of lung disease caused by the constant smell of chicken grease. On evenings when Florent came home too late to cook a bit of meat, he got into the habit of spending a dozen sous at the rotisserie for a piece of turkey or goose. Such an evening was like a feast day. Gavard became interested in the skinny young man and learned his story. He invited Quenu into the shop and soon the youth spent all his time there. As soon as his brother went to work, Quenu went downstairs and installed himself in the back of the shop, infatuated with the four giant skewers that turned with a soft noise in front of the high bright flames.

The large copper pots at the fireplace glistened, the birds smoked, the fat sang as it dripped in the pan. The spits seemed to chat with one another and eventually threw a few kind words toward Quenu, who, with a long-stemmed ladle, lovingly basted the golden breasts of huge turkeys and plump geese. He passed hours this way, his face turning red in the dancing flames, looking a bit stupid as he snickered at the large animals getting cooked. He didn't move until they were taken off the spits. The birds fell on the platters, the skewers slid from their stomachs, the stomachs emptied all steaming, with the juice running from the holes behind and at the throat, drenching the shop in the strong scent of roasted meat. Then the youth, who had stood up to follow the operation with his eyes, started clapping his hands and talking to the birds, telling them how nice they were and how they would be eaten up and there would be only bones left for the cats. And he jumped up if Gavard gave him a piece of crusty bread that he would put in the drip pan, leaving it there to stew for a half hour.

It was no doubt there that Quenu found his love of cooking. Later on, after trying out every other trade, he returned, as though it were his destiny, to the skewered animals whose juice made you lick your fingers. At first he was worried about irritating his brother, a man of little appetite who spoke of tasty things with the disdain of a man who has not tasted. But then, watching Florent listen to him as Quenu explained some very complicated dish, he decared
it to be his true vocation and started working for a large restaurant. From that time on, a new pattern was established for the two brothers. They continued to live in the room on rue Royer-Collard, where they returned every evening—the one with a face lit by the heat of the ovens, the other with the beaten face of a mud-spattered teacher. Florent kept his old black coat, losing himself in his students' homework, while Quenu, to make himself comfortable, tied on his apron, put on his white coat and white chef's hat, and stood over the stove rattling the skillet and entertaining himself by cooking some delicacy.

Sometimes they smiled at the way they looked, the one all in black and the other all in white. The two contrasting outfits, one cheerful and one morose, seemed to make the big room half festive and half somber, in between merry and mournful. Still, never was a household marked by such disparity so harmonious. The elder brother grew ever thinner, consumed by the intensity he had inherited from his Provençal father, while the younger one grew ever fatter, like a true son of Normandy. But they loved each other with a brotherhood that came from their mother, a woman who had been nothing but love.

A relative in Paris, their mother's brother, Gradelle, had a charcuterie in the Les Halles neighborhood, on rue Pirouette. He was a fat, cheap, heartless man, who received his nephews as starving street waifs when they first introduced themselves, and they had rarely returned. On his saint's day, Quenu would take him a bouquet of flowers and Gradelle would hand him a ten-sou coin. Florent, always proud, hated the way Gradelle would peruse his threadbare clothes with the worried, suspicious glance of a miser who feared being asked for a free dinner or a hundred sous. One day, without intending anything in particular, Florent asked his uncle to change a hundred-franc bill, and ever after that the uncle was less apprehensive when he sighted the “youngsters,” as he called them. But still the relationship never progressed.

To Florent, the years passed like a bittersweet dream. He tasted all the bitter joys of parenthood. At home there was nothing but love. But out in the world, with the humiliations of his students and
the shoving and pushing of the streets, he felt himself souring. He was embittered by his crushed ambition. It was a long time before he could accept his fate as a plain, poor, and ordinary man. To escape turning mean, he embraced idealism and took refuge in principles of truth and justice. It was then that he became a republican,
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entering republicanism the way a heartbroken girl enters a convent. If he could not find a republic warm and peaceful enough to numb his troubles, he would invent one. Books no longer pleased him; all the marked-up paper with which he was surrounded reminded him of the stinking classroom, the boys' chewed-up spit-balls, the agony of long, sterile hours. Besides, books spoke only of revolution and pride, and he felt an overwhelming need for peace and withdrawal. To soothe and still himself, to dream that he was serenely happy, that the entire world was reaching this same state, to construct in his imagination the ideal republican city in which he would like to live, became his recreation, the work of his leisure hours. He no longer read except what was necessary for teaching, preferring to wander the rue Saint-Jacques all the way to the outer boulevards, sometimes going even farther, returning by the barrière d'Italie with his eyes toward the Quartier Mouffetard, all the time working out measures of great moral import, humanitarian legal projects, that would transform this suffering city into a city of bliss.