![]() When Florent beholds Quenu’s shop, the narrative digresses into more sumptuous descriptions of foodstuffs (as it does again and again). Gavard directs Florent to Quenu’s new delicatessen, across the street from the marketplace. Florent has a half-brother, Quenu, whom he raised after their mother died. After stumbling past many more mountains of food (painstakingly described in lavish detail), Florent, famished and nearly fainting, encounters an old friend, Gavard, who sells poultry. ![]() Cadine now sells flowers, and Marjolin works in a poultry shop.Ĭlaude suddenly vanishes, chasing Marjolin. When they reached a certain age, the market women no longer allowed them to sleep together, but they still slip off to secret places to be with one another. The two children grew up together in Les Halles, spending their days running wild and carefree through the complex. Both were orphans living on the street when they were rescued, separately, by marketplace women. Indeed, Claude confesses, “the thing that exasperates me is that those good-for-nothing bourgeois actually eat all this.” Then Claude sees Marjolin, a young boy he wishes to paint, and tells Florent the story of Marjolin and his lover, Cadine. Bewildered by the reconstruction of the city and unable to orient himself, Florent agrees to Claude’s suggestion of “a little tour through the market.” In a half-starved, dream-state, Florent follows Claude, dodging an incoming wave of wagons and carts piled high with seafood and “eggs and baskets of cheeses and butter.” While Claude relishes the “great mountain of food” that rises every morning in Les Halles, Florent, gnawed by hunger, realizes the skinny artist feasts more on the painterly beauty of the foods than on their taste. She quickly sells her produce, but before leaving, introduces Florent to a young painter, Claude Lantier. Mme Francois tells Florent, “If you haven’t been in Paris in a long time, you probably don’t know the new markets,” and she points out the various pavilions for fruit and flowers, fish and poultry, butter and cheese, and vegetables. Under Napoleon’s urban renewal program, the city’s narrow streets have been expanded into grand boulevards and the medieval food market has been transformed into “Les Halles,” a complex of twelve glass and steel pavilions. ![]() When they arrive in Paris, Florent, depleted and malnourished from his arduous years in political exile, nevertheless marvels at the changes Paris has undergone during his absence. She throws Florent on her wagon-load of vegetables and resumes her excursion to Paris’ central food market. It’s a man – Florent, in fact – who has collapsed from exhaustion and hunger. When the widowed farmer Mme Francois spies a dark mound stretched along the road, she stops her wagon to investigate. Zola’s novel opens at night, as a caravan of wagons carrying produce from outlying farms approaches Paris. Seven years later, Florent escapes and makes his way back to Paris. Florent joined the 1851 street riots protesting Napoleon’s power-grab but was swept up in the government crack-down and deported to a penal colony in French Guyana on trumped-up charges of murder. Florent, an ineffectual radical, is stirred to oppose the injustices of the Empire, but he is no match for the fattened bellies of bourgeois Paris. ![]() Although Napoleon was duly elected President of France in 1848, three years later he seized power in a coup d’etat, declared himself Emperor, and named his government the Second Empire. Emile Zola’s 1873 novel, The Belly of Paris, presents the story of Florent Quenu, a hapless political insurgent living in Paris during Louis Napoleon III’s reign as Emperor of France.
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