THE COMPLETE ROUGON-MACQUART SERIES (All 20 Books in One Edition). Эмиль Золя

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      “You’ll clean it nicely for me, won’t you?” added the woman, pausing in her chatter.

      With a jerk of her finger La Normande had removed the fish’s entrails and tossed them into a pail. Then she slipped a corner of her apron under its gills to wipe away a few grains of sand. “There, my dear,” she said, putting the fish into the servant’s basket, “you’ll come back to thank me.”

      Certainly the servant did come back a quarter of an hour afterwards, but it was with a flushed, red face. She had been crying, and her little body was trembling all over with anger. Tossing the brill on to the marble slab, she pointed to a broad gash in its belly that reached the bone. Then a flood of broken words burst from her throat, which was still contracted by sobbing: “Madame Taboureau won’t have it. She says she couldn’t put it on her table. She told me, too, that I was an idiot, and let myself be cheated by anyone. You can see for yourself that the fish is spoilt. I never thought of turning it round; I quite trusted you. Give me my ten francs back.”

      “You should look at what you buy,” the handsome Norman calmly observed.

      And then, as the servant was just raising her voice again, old Madame Mehudin got up. “Just you shut up!” she cried. “We’re not going to take back a fish that’s been knocking about in other people’s houses. How do we know that you didn’t let it fall and damage it yourself?”

      “I! I damage it!” The little servant was choking with indignation. “Ah! you’re a couple of thieves!” she cried, sobbing bitterly. “Yes, a couple of thieves! Madame Taboureau herself told me so!”

      Matters then became uproarious. Boiling over with rage and brandishing their fists, both mother and daughter fairly exploded; while the poor little servant, quite bewildered by their voices, the one hoarse and the other shrill, which belaboured her with insults as though they were battledores and she a shuttlecock, sobbed on more bitterly than ever.

      “Be off with you! Your Madame Taboureau would like to be half as fresh as that fish is! She’d like us to sew it up for her, no doubt!”

      “A whole fish for ten francs! What’ll she want next!”

      Then came coarse words and foul accusations. Had the servant been the most worthless of her sex she could not have been more bitterly upbraided.

      Florent, whom the market keeper had gone to fetch, made his appearance when the quarrel was at its hottest. The whole pavilion seemed to be in a state of insurrection. The fishwives, who manifest the keenest jealousy of each other when the sale of a penny herring is in question, display a united front when a quarrel arises with a buyer. They sang the popular old ditty, “The baker’s wife has heaps of crowns, which cost her precious little”; they stamped their feet, and goaded the Mehudins as though the latter were dogs which they were urging on to bite and devour. And there were even some, having stalls at the other end of the alley, who rushed up wildly, as though they meant to spring at the chignon of the poor little woman, she meantime being quite submerged by the flood of insulting abuse poured upon her.

      “Return mademoiselle her ten francs,” said Florent sternly, when he had learned what had taken place.

      But old Madame Mehudin had her blood up. “As for you, my little man,” quoth she, “go to blazes! Here, that’s how I’ll return the ten francs!”

      As she spoke, she flung the brill with all her force at the head of Madame Taboureau’s servant, who received it full in the face. The blood spurted from her nose, and the brill, after adhering for a moment to her cheeks, fell to the ground and burst with a flop like that of a wet clout. This brutal act threw Florent into a fury. The beautiful Norman felt frightened and recoiled, as he cried out: “I suspend you for a week, and I will have your licence withdrawn. You hear me?”

      Then, as the other fishwives were still jeering behind him, he turned round with such a threatening air that they quailed like wild beasts mastered by the tamer, and tried to assume an expression of innocence. When the Mehudins had returned the ten francs, Florent peremptorily ordered them to cease selling at once. The old woman was choking with rage, while the daughter kept silent, but turned very white. She, the beautiful Norman, to be driven out of her stall!

      Claire said in her quiet voice that it served her mother and sister right, a remark which nearly resulted in the two girls tearing each other’s hair out that evening when they returned home to the Rue Pirouette. However, when the Mehudins came back to the market at the week’s end, they remained very quiet, reserved, and curt of speech, though full of a cold-blooded wrath. Moreover, they found the pavilion quite calm and restored to order again. From that day forward the beautiful Norman must have harboured the thought of some terrible vengeance. She felt that she really had Lisa to thank for what had happened. She had met her, the day after the battle, carrying her head so high, that she had sworn she would make her pay dearly for her glance of triumph. She held interminable confabulations with Madame Saget, Madame Lecoeur, and La Sarriette, in quiet corners of the market; however, all their chatter about the shameless conduct which they slanderously ascribed to Lisa and her cousin, and about the hairs which they declared were found in Quenu’s chitterlings, brought La Normande little consolation. She was trying to think of some very malicious plan of vengeance, which would strike her rival to the heart.

      Her child was growing up in the fish market in all freedom and neglect. When but three years old the youngster had been brought there, and day by day remained squatting on some rag amidst the fish. He would fall asleep beside the big tunnies as though he were one of them, and awake among the mackerel and whiting. The little rascal smelt of fish as strongly as though he were some big fish’s offspring. For a long time his favourite pastime, whenever his mother’s back was turned, was to build walls and houses of herrings; and he would also play at soldiers on the marble slab, arranging the red gurnets in confronting lines, pushing them against each other, and battering their heads, while imitating the sound of drum and trumpet with his lips; after which he would throw them all into a heap again, and exclaim that they were dead. When he grew older he would prowl about his aunt Claire’s stall to get hold of the bladders of the carp and pike which she gutted. He placed them on the ground and made them burst, an amusement which afforded him vast delight. When he was seven he rushed about the alleys, crawled under the stalls, ferreted amongst the zinc bound fish boxes, and became the spoiled pet of all the women. Whenever they showed him something fresh which pleased him, he would clasp his hands and exclaim in ecstasy, “Oh, isn’t it stunning!” Muche was the exact word which he used; muche being the equivalent of “stunning” in the lingo of the markets; and he used the expression so often that it clung to him as a nickname. He became known all over the place as “Muche.” It was Muche here, there and everywhere; no one called him anything else. He was to be met with in every nook; in out-of-the-way corners of the offices in the auction pavilion; among the piles of oyster baskets, and betwixt the buckets where the refuse was thrown. With a pinky fairness of skin, he was like a young barbel frisking and gliding about in deep water. He was as fond of running, streaming water as any young fry. He was ever dabbling in the pools in the alleys. He wetted himself with the drippings from the tables, and when no one was looking often slyly turned on the taps, rejoicing in the bursting gush of water. But it was especially beside the fountains near the cellar steps that his mother went to seek him in the evening, and she would bring him thence with his hands quite blue, and his shoes, and even his pockets, full of water.

      At seven years old Muche was as pretty as an angel, and as coarse in his manners as any carter. He had curly chestnut hair, beautiful eyes, and an innocent-looking mouth which gave vent to language that even a gendarme would have hesitated to use. Brought up amidst all the ribaldry and profanity of the markets, he had the whole vocabulary of the place on the tip of his tongue. With his hands on his hips he often mimicked Grandmother Mehudin in her СКАЧАТЬ