As the old fish-wife, who was squatting, all of a heap, on her chair, spoke these words, she felt such a delicious thrill of satisfied vengeance that her huge body fairly quivered.  Florent, still doubtful, glanced at the beautiful Norman; but the young woman, now completely reconciled with her mother, turned on her tap and slapped her fish, pretending not to hear what was being said.

“You are quite sure?” said Florent to Mother Mehudin.

“Oh, yes, indeed.  Isn’t that so, Louise?” said the old woman in a shriller voice.

Florent concluded that it must be some one who wanted to see him about the great business, and he resolved to go up to his room.  He was just about to leave the pavilion, when, happening to turn round, he observed the beautiful Norman watching him with a grave expression on her face.  Then he passed in front of the three gossips.

“Do you notice that there’s no one in the pork shop?” remarked Mademoiselle Saget.  “Beautiful Lisa’s not the woman to compromise herself.”

The shop was, indeed, quite empty.  The front of the house was still bright with sunshine; the building looked like some honest, prosperous pile guilelessly warming itself in the morning rays.  Up above, the pomegranate on the balcony was in full bloom.  As Florent crossed the roadway he gave a friendly nod to Logre and Monsieur Lebigre, who appeared to be enjoying the fresh air on the doorstep of the latter’s establishment.  They returned his greeting with a smile.  Florent was then about to enter the side-passage, when he fancied he saw Auguste’s pale face hastily vanishing from its dark and narrow depths.  Thereupon he turned back and glanced into the shop to make sure that the middle-aged gentleman was not waiting for him there.  But he saw no one but Mouton, who sat on a block displaying his double chin and bristling whiskers, and gazed at him defiantly with his great yellow eyes.  And when he had at last made up his mind to enter the passage, Lisa’s face appeared behind the little curtain of a glazed door at the back of the shop.

A hush had fallen over the fish market.  All the huge paunches and bosoms held their breath, waiting till Florent should disappear from sight.  Then there was an uproarious outbreak; and the bosoms heaved wildly and the paunches nearly burst with malicious delight.  The joke had succeeded.  Nothing could be more comical.  As old Mother Mehudin vented her merriment she shook and quivered like a wine-skin that is being emptied.  Her story of the middle-aged gentleman went the round of the market, and the fish-wives found it extremely amusing.  At last the long spindle-shanks was collared, and they would no longer always have his miserable face and gaol-bird’s expression before their eyes.  They all wished him a pleasant journey, and trusted that they might get a handsome fellow for their next inspector.  And in their delight they rushed about from one stall to another, and felt inclined to dance round their marble slabs like a lot of holiday-making schoolgirls.  The beautiful Norman, however, watched this outbreak of joy in a rigid attitude, not daring to move for fear she should burst into tears; and she kept her hands pressed upon a big skate to cool her feverish excitement.