The Fat and the Thin | Page 8

return. Then he felt very faint, and his legs almost gave way beneath
him as he descended the hill. As he crossed the Neuilly bridge he
sustained himself by clinging to the parapet, and bent over and looked

at the Seine rolling inky waves between its dense, massy banks. A red
lamp on the water seemed to be watching him with a sanguineous eye.
And then he had to climb the hill if he would reach Paris on its summit
yonder. The hundreds of leagues which he had already travelled were
as nothing to it. That bit of a road filled him with despair. He would
never be able, he thought, to reach yonder light crowned summit. The
spacious avenue lay before him with its silence and its darkness, its
lines of tall trees and low houses, its broad grey footwalks, speckled
with the shadows of overhanging branches, and parted occasionally by
the gloomy gaps of side streets. The squat yellow flames of the gas
lamps, standing erect at regular intervals, alone imparted a little life to
the lonely wilderness. And Florent seemed to make no progress; the
avenue appeared to grow ever longer and longer, to be carrying Paris
away into the far depths of the night. At last he fancied that the gas
lamps, with their single eyes, were running off on either hand, whisking
the road away with them; and then, overcome by vertigo, he stumbled
and fell on the roadway like a log.
Now he was lying at ease on his couch of greenery, which seemed to
him soft as a feather bed. He had slightly raised his head so as to keep
his eyes on the luminous haze which was spreading above the dark
roofs which he could divine on the horizon. He was nearing his goal,
carried along towards it, with nothing to do but to yield to the leisurely
jolts of the waggon; and, free from all further fatigue, he now only
suffered from hunger. Hunger, indeed, had once more awoke within
him with frightful and wellnigh intolerable pangs. His limbs seemed to
have fallen asleep; he was only conscious of the existence of his
stomach, horribly cramped and twisted as by a red-hot iron. The fresh
odour of the vegetables, amongst which he was lying, affected him so
keenly that he almost fainted away. He strained himself against that
piled-up mass of food with all his remaining strength, in order to
compress his stomach and silence its groans. And the nine other
waggons behind him, with their mountains of cabbages and peas, their
piles of artichokes, lettuces, celery, and leeks, seemed to him to be
slowly overtaking him, as though to bury him whilst he was thus
tortured by hunger beneath an avalanche of food. Presently the
procession halted, and there was a sound of deep voices. They had

reached the barriers, and the municipal customs officers were
examining the waggons. A moment later Florent entered Paris, in a
swoon, lying atop of the carrots, with clenched teeth.
"Hallow! You up there!" Madame Francois called out sharply.
And as the stranger made no attempt to move, she clambered up and
shook him. Florent rose to a sitting posture. He had slept and no longer
felt the pangs of hunger, but was dizzy and confused.
"You'll help me to unload, won't you?" Madame Francois said to him,
as she made him get down.
He helped her. A stout man with a felt hat on his head and a badge in
the top buttonhole of his coat was striking the ground with a stick and
grumbling loudly:
"Come, come, now, make haste! You must get on faster than that!
Bring the waggon a little more forward. How many yards' standing
have you? Four, isn't it?"
Then he gave a ticket to Madame Francois, who took some coppers out
of a little canvas bag and handed them to him; whereupon he went off
to vent his impatience and tap the ground with his stick a little further
away. Madame Francois took hold of Balthazar's bridle and backed him
so as to bring the wheels of the waggon close to the footway. Then,
having marked out her four yards with some wisps of straw, after
removing the back of the cart, she asked Florent to hand her the
vegetables bunch by bunch. She arranged them sort by sort on her
standing, setting them out artistically, the "tops" forming a band of
greenery around each pile; and it was with remarkable rapidity that she
completed her show, which, in the gloom of early morning, looked like
some piece of symmetrically coloured tapestry. When Florent had
handed her a huge bunch of parsley, which he had found at the bottom
of the cart, she asked him for still another service.