“There’s Cinderella coming back without her slippers,” remarked Claude with a smile.

They began chatting together as they went back towards the markets.  Claude whistled as he strolled along with his hands in his pockets, and expatiated on his love for this mountain of food which rises every morning in the very centre of Paris.  He prowled about the footways night after night, dreaming of colossal still-life subjects, paintings of an extraordinary character.  He had even started on one, having his friend Marjolin and that jade Cadine to pose for him; but it was hard work to paint those confounded vegetables and fruit and fish and meat—­they were all so beautiful!  Florent listened to the artist’s enthusiastic talk with a void and hunger-aching stomach.  It did not seem to occur to Claude that all those things were intended to be eaten.  Their charm for him lay in their colour.  Suddenly, however, he ceased speaking and, with a gesture that was habitual to him, tightened the long red sash which he wore under his green-stained coat.

And then with a sly expression he resumed: 

“Besides, I breakfast here, through my eyes, at any rate, and that’s better than getting nothing at all.  Sometimes, when I’ve forgotten to dine on the previous day, I treat myself to a perfect fit of indigestion in the morning by watching the carts arrive here laden with all sorts of good things.  On such mornings as those I love my vegetables more than ever.  Ah! the exasperating part, the rank injustice of it all, is that those rascally Philistines really eat these things!”

Then he went on to tell Florent of a supper to which a friend had treated him at Baratte’s on a day of affluence.  They had partaken of oysters, fish, and game.  But Baratte’s had sadly fallen, and all the carnival life of the old Marche des Innocents was now buried.  In place thereof they had those huge central markets, that colossus of ironwork, that new and wonderful town.  Fools might say what they liked; it was the embodiment of the spirit of the times.  Florent, however, could not at first make out whether he was condemning the picturesqueness of Baratte’s or its good cheer.

But Claude next began to inveigh against romanticism.  He preferred his piles of vegetables, he said, to the rags of the middle ages; and he ended by reproaching himself with guilty weakness in making an etching of the Rue Pirouette.  All those grimy old places ought to be levelled to the ground, he declared, and modern houses ought to be built in their stead.

“There!” he exclaimed, coming to a halt, “look at the corner of the footway yonder!  Isn’t that a picture readymade, ever so much more human and natural than all their confounded consumptive daubs?”