which dead birds were stowed in deep layers.  On the other side of the way were other drays from which porters were removing freshly killed calves, wrapped in canvas, and laid at full length in baskets, whence only the four bleeding stumps of their legs protruded.  There were also whole sheep, and sides and quarters of beef.  Butchers in long white aprons marked the meat with a stamp, carried it off, weighted it, and hung it up on hooks in the auction room.  Florent, with his face close to the grating, stood gazing at the rows of hanging carcasses, at the ruddy sheep and oxen and paler calves, all streaked with yellow fat and sinews, and with bellies yawning open.  Then he passed along the sidewalk where the tripe market was held, amidst the pallid calves’ feet and heads, the rolled tripe neatly packed in boxes, the brains delicately set out in flat baskets, the sanguineous livers, and purplish kidneys.  He checked his steps in front of some long two-wheeled carts, covered with round awnings, and containing sides of pork hung on each side of the vehicle over a bed of straw.  Seen from the back end, the interiors of the carts looked like recesses of some tabernacle, like some taper-lighted chapel, such was the glow of all the bare flesh they contained.  And on the beds of straw were lines of tin cans, full of the blood that had trickled from the pigs.  Thereupon Florent was attacked by a sort of rage.  The insipid odour of the meat, the pungent smell of the tripe exasperated him.  He made his way out of the covered road, preferring to return once more to the footwalk of the Rue de Pont Neuf.

He was enduring perfect agony.  The shiver of early morning came upon him; his teeth chattered, and he was afraid of falling to the ground and finding himself unable to rise again.  He looked about, but could see no vacant place on any bench.  Had he found one he would have dropped asleep there, even at the risk of being awakened by the police.  Then, as giddiness nearly blinded him, he leaned for support against a tree, with his eyes closed and his ears ringing.  The raw carrot, which he had swallowed almost without chewing, was torturing his stomach, and the glass of punch which he had drunk seemed to have intoxicated him.  He was indeed intoxicated with misery, weariness, and hunger.  Again he felt a burning fire in the pit of the stomach, to which he every now and then carried his hands, as though he were trying to stop up a hole through which all his life was oozing away.  As he stood there he fancied that the foot-pavement rocked beneath him; and thinking that he might perhaps lessen his sufferings by walking, he went straight on through the vegetables again.  He lost himself among them.  He went along a narrow footway, turned down another, was forced to retrace his steps, bungled in doing so, and once more found himself amidst piles of greenery.  Some heaps were so high that people seemed to be walking between walls of bundles and bunches.  Only their heads slightly overtopped these ramparts, and passed along showing whitely or blackly according to the colour of their hats or caps; whilst the huge swinging baskets, carried aloft on a level with the greenery, looked like osier boats floating on a stagnant, mossy lake.