water of a dead and accursed sea, that filled him with gloom and grief;
and then ever the same dreadful visions haunted his brain.

The markets were always there. He could never open the window and rest
his elbows on the balustrade without having them before him, filling
the horizon. He left the pavilions in the evening only to behold their
endless roofs as he went to bed. They shut him off from the rest of
Paris, ceaselessly intruded their huge bulk upon him, entered into every
hour of his life. That night again horrible fancies came to him, fancies
aggravated by the vague forebodings of evil which distressed him. The
rain of the afternoon had filled the markets with malodorous dampness,
and as they wallowed there in the centre of the city, like some drunken
man lying, after his last bottle, under the table, they cast all their
foul breath into his face. He seemed to see a thick vapour rising up
from each pavilion. In the distance the meat and tripe markets reeked
with the sickening steam of blood; nearer in, the vegetable and fruit
pavilions diffused the odour of pungent cabbages, rotten apples, and
decaying leaves; the butter and cheese exhaled a poisonous stench; from
the fish market came a sharp, fresh gust; while from the ventilator in
the tower of the poultry pavilion just below him, he could see a warm
steam issuing, a fetid current rising in coils like the sooty smoke from
a factory chimney. And all these exhalations coalesced above the roofs,
drifted towards the neighbouring houses, and spread themselves out in
a heavy cloud which stretched over the whole of Paris. It was as though
the markets were bursting within their tight belt of iron, were beating
the slumber of the gorged city with the stertorous fumes of their
midnight indigestion.

However, on the footway down below Florent presently heard a sound of
voices, the laughter of happy folks. Then the door of the passage was
closed noisily. It was Quenu and Lisa coming home from the theatre.
Stupefied and intoxicated, as it were, by the atmosphere he was
breathing, Florent thereupon left the balcony, his nerves still
painfully excited by the thought of the tempest which he could feel
gathering round his head. The source of his misery was yonder, in
those markets, heated by the day's excesses. He closed the window with
violence, and left them wallowing in the darkness, naked and perspiring
beneath the stars.

CHAPTER VI

A week later, Florent though