re with flaring furnaces, and wild,
bewildering revolutions of wheels.

Claude, however, had enthusiastically sprung on to the bench, and stood
upon it. He compelled his companion to admire the effect of the dawn
rising over the vegetables. There was a perfect sea of these extending
between the two clusters of pavilions from Saint Eustache to the Rue des
Halles. And in the two open spaces at either end the flood of greenery
rose to even greater height, and quite submerged the pavements. The dawn
appeared slowly, softly grey in hue, and spreading a light water-colour
tint over everything. These surging piles akin to hurrying waves, this
river of verdure rushing along the roadway like an autumn torrent,
assumed delicate shadowy tints--tender violet, blush-rose, and greeny
yellow, all the soft, light hues which at sunrise make the sky look like
a canopy of shot silk. And by degrees, as the fires of dawn rose higher
and higher at the far end of the Rue Rambuteau, the mass of vegetation
grew brighter and brighter, emerging more and more distinctly from the
bluey gloom that clung to the ground. Salad herbs, cabbage-lettuce,
endive, and succory, with rich soil still clinging to their roots,
exposed their swelling hearts; bundles of spinach, bundles of sorrel,
clusters of artichokes, piles of peas and beans, mounds of cos-lettuce,
tied round with straws, sounded every note in the whole gamut of
greenery, from the sheeny lacquer-like green of the pods to the
deep-toned green of the foliage; a continuous gamut with ascending and
descending scales which died away in the variegated tones of the heads
of celery and bundles of leeks. But the highest and most sonorous notes
still came from the patches of bright carrots and snowy turnips, strewn
in prodigious quantities all along the markets and lighting them up with
the medley of their two colours.

At the crossway in the Rue des Halles cabbages were piled up in
mountains; there were white ones, hard and compact as metal balls, curly
savoys, whose great leaves made them look like basins of green bronze,
and red cabbages, which the dawn seemed to transform into superb masses
of bloom with the hue of wine-lees, splotched with dark purple and
carmine. At the other side of the markets, at the crossway near Saint
Eustache, the end of the Rue Rambuteau was blocked by a barricade of
orange-hued pumpkins, sprawling with swelling bellies in two superposed
rows. And here and there gleamed the