ey 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?"

Along the covered way women were now selling hot soup and coffee. At one
corner of the foot-pavement a large circle of customers clustered round
a vendor of cabbage soup. The bright tin caldron, full of broth, was
steaming over a little low stove, through the holes of which came the
pale glow of the embers. From a napkin-lined basket the woman took some
thin slices of bread and dropped