and frequently
even took her to Monsieur Lebigre's, where they had some hot wine
together. While she with her peaceful face beamed on him in all
friendliness, he felt quite delighted with the healthy odour of the
fields which she brought into the midst of the foul market atmosphere.
She exhaled a scent of earth, hay, fresh air, and open skies.

"You must come to Nanterre, my lad," she said to him, "and look at my
kitchen garden. I have put borders of thyme everywhere. How bad your
villainous Paris does smell!"

Then she went off, dripping. Florent, on his side, felt quite
re-invigorated when he parted from her. He tried, too the effect of work
upon the nervous depression from which he suffered. He was a man of a
very methodical temperament, and sometimes carried out his plans for the
allotment of his time with a strictness that bordered on mania. He shut
himself up two evenings a week in order to write an exhaustive work on
Cayenne. His modest bedroom was excellently adapted, he thought, to
calm his mind and incline him to work. He lighted his fire, saw that
the pomegranate at the foot of the bed was looking all right, and then
seated himself at the little table, and remained working till midnight.
He had pushed the missal and Dream-book back in the drawer, which was
now filling with notes, memoranda, manuscripts of all kinds. The work
on Cayenne made but slow progress, however, as it was constantly being
interrupted by other projects, plans for enormous undertakings which
he sketched out in a few words. He successively drafted an outline of
a complete reform of the administrative system of the markets, a scheme
for transforming the city dues, levied on produce as it entered Paris,
into taxes levied upon the sales, a new system of victualling the poorer
neighbourhoods, and, lastly, a somewhat vague socialist enactment for
the storing in common warehouses of all the provisions brought to the
markets, and the ensuring of a minimum daily supply to each household in
Paris. As he sat there, with his head bent over his table, and his mind
absorbed in thoughts of all these weighty matters, his gloomy figure
cast a great black shadow on the soft peacefulness of the garret.
Sometimes a chaffinch which he had picked up one snowy day in the market
would mistake the lamplight for the day, and break the silence, which
only the scratching of Florent's pen on his paper disturbed, by a cry.

Florent was fated to revert to politics.