Paris · 1873 · quotedThe Belly of Paris
Émile Zola
The whole novel is packed into Les Halles, the great iron-and-glass food market that fed Paris for eight hundred years, and the tangle of old streets around it under the church of Saint-Eustache. Zola makes the market a character, "some colossal belly, bolted and riveted, built up of wood and glass and iron": the fish and vegetable and butter pavilions at dawn, the Quenu-Gradelle pork shop on the Rue Rambuteau, the crooked Rue Pirouette. The escaped political prisoner Florent, gaunt and half-starved, washes up in this world of plenty. The pavilions were demolished in 1971; that absence is what the historical layer is for.
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