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only hunger. But his hunger was reawakened and becoming unbearable. His limbs had fallen asleep, and he could feel only his stomach, cramped and twisted as though by a red-hot iron. The ripe smell of vegetables that surrounded him, the piercing freshness of the carrots, made him almost faint.
    With all his might he pushed his chest into this deep bed of food, trying to pull in his stomach as tightly as he could to suppress its loud rumblings. Behind him, the nine other wagons piled high with cabbages, mountains of peas, heaps of artichokes, lettuce, celery, and leeks, seemed to be slowly gaining on him as though to overtake him as he was racked with starvation and bury him in an avalanche of food.
    They came to a stop, and deep voices could be heard. It was customs inspectors examining the wagons. And so Florent, his teeth clenched, at last entered Paris, passed out on a pile of carrots.
    “Hey, you up there!” Madame François abruptly shouted. As he didn't move, she climbed up and shook him. Florent propped himself up. As he had slept, the hunger pains had stopped, but he was disoriented.
    The woman made him get down, saying, “Can you help me unload?”
    He helped her.
    A heavyset man with a walking stick and a felt hat, with a badge on the left lapel of his coat, was growing angry and tapping the tip of his stick on the sidewalk. “Come on, come on, faster than that. How many meters do you have there? Four, isn't it?”
    He gave Madame François a ticket, and she took a large coin out of her canvas bag. He moved on to vent his anger and tap the tip of his stick farther down the line. The market woman took Balthazar by the bridle and backed him up until the wagon wheels were against the curb. Then she opened the back of the wagon, marked off her four meters of curb with pieces of straw, and asked Florent to start passing the vegetables down. She arranged them in her alotted space with an artistic flair, so that the tops formed a green wreath around the bunches. She arranged the display with dazzlingspeed in the dank morning light that made it resemble a tapestry with geometric splashes of color.
    After Florent handed her a huge bouquet of parsley that he had found on the wagon floor, she asked him one more favor: “I would really appreciate it if you could keep an eye on my goods while I park the wagon. It's very close, at the Compas d'Or on rue Montorgueil.” 3
    He told her not to worry. In truth, he was happy to sit there because moving around had started to revive his hunger. He sat down, leaning against a mound of cabbages by Madame François's stand. He told himself that he would be just fine sitting there, waiting and not moving. His mind was a void, and he could not even say exactly where he was. In the beginning of September the early morning was already remaining dark. The lanterns around him flickered in the dusky shadows. He was sitting by the side of a major street, which he did not recognize. It vanished into the night's blackness. He could see hardly anything except the produce he had been entrusted to watch. Down the market lanes he could make out only the outline of other heaps like a flock of sheep. In the middle of the route, blocking the street, he could see the outline of carts. From one end to the other, he could smell what he could not exactly see, a line of horses breathing in the dark. Shouts, a piece of wood or an iron chain hitting the pavement, the thumping of vegetables unloaded from wagons, and wheels scraping as carts were backed against the curb—these sounds loaded the still air with the exciting promise of dawn awakening.
    Turning his head, Florent noticed, on the other side of the cabbage, a snoring man wrapped like a package in his overcoat, his head resting on a basket of plums. A little closer on the left side, he could see a ten-year-old child with an angel's smile fast asleep between two stacks of endive. Looking down the pavement, he could see nothing that seemed awake except