“Come now, Marcel,” said she, “you’ll take a hundred sous, won’t you?”

The man to whom she was speaking was closely wrapped in his cloak and made no reply; however, after a silence of five minutes or more, the young woman returned to the charge.

“Come now, Marcel; a hundred sous for that basket there, and four francs for the other one; that’ll make nine francs altogether.”

Then came another interval.

“Well, tell me what you will take.”

“Ten francs.  You know that well enough already; I told you so before.  But what have you done with your Jules this morning, La Sarriette?”

The young woman began to laugh as she took a handful of small change out of her pocket.

“Oh,” she replied, “Jules is still in bed.  He says that men were not intended to work.”

She paid for the two baskets, and carried them into the fruit pavilion, which had just been opened.  The market buildings still retained their gloom-wrapped aspect of airy fragility, streaked with the thousand lines of light that gleamed from the venetian shutters.  People were beginning to pass along the broad covered streets intersecting the pavilions, but the more distant buildings still remained deserted amidst the increasing buzz of life on the footways.  By Saint Eustache the bakers and wine sellers were taking down their shutters, and the ruddy shops, with their gas lights flaring, showed like gaps of fire in the gloom in which the grey house-fronts were yet steeped.  Florent noticed a baker’s shop on the left-hand side of the Rue Montorgueil, replete and golden with its last baking, and fancied he could scent the pleasant smell of the hot bread.  It was now half past four.

Madame Francois by this time had disposed of nearly all her stock.  She had only a few bunches of carrots left when Lacaille once more made his appearance with his sack.

“Well,” said he, “will you take a sou now?”

“I knew I should see you again,” the good woman quietly answered.  “You’d better take all I have left.  There are seventeen bunches.”

“That makes seventeen sous.”

“No; thirty-four.”

At last they agreed to fix the price at twenty-five sous.  Madame Francois was anxious to be off.

“He’d been keeping his eye upon me all the time,” she said to Florent, when Lacaille had gone off with the carrots in his sack.  “That old rogue runs things down all over the markets, and he often waits till the last peal of the bell before spending four sous in purchase.  Oh, these Paris folk!  They’ll wrangle and argue for an hour to save half a sou, and then go off and empty their purses at the wine shop.”

Whenever Madame Francois talked of Paris she always spoke in a tone of disdain, and referred to the city as though it were some ridiculous, contemptible, far-away place, in which she only condescended to set foot at nighttime.

“There!” she continued, sitting down again, beside Florent, on some vegetables belonging to a neighbour, “I can get away now.”