whiff of hot air. Even when he shut
himself up in his office his discomfort continued, for the abominable
odour forced its way through the chinks in the woodwork of the window
and door. When the sky was grey and leaden, the little room remained
quite dark; and then the day was like a long twilight in the depths of
some fetid march. He was often attacked by fits of nervous excitement,
and felt a craving desire to walk; and he would then descend into the
cellars by the broad staircase opening in the middle of the pavilion. In
the pent-up air down below, in the dim light of the occasional gas jets,
he once more found the refreshing coolness diffused by pure cold water.
He would stand in front of the big tank where the reserve stock of live
fish was kept, and listen to the ceaseless murmur of the four streamlets
of water falling from the four corners of the central urn, and then
spreading into a broad stream and gliding beneath the locked gratings of
the basins with a gentle and continuous flow. This subterranean spring,
this stream murmuring in the gloom, had a tranquillising effect upon
him. Of an evening, too, he delighted in the fine sunsets which threw
the delicate lacework of the market buildings blackly against the red
glow of the heavens. The dancing dust of the last sun rays streamed
through every opening, through every chink of the Venetian shutters,
and the whole was like some luminous transparency on which the slender
shafts of the columns, the elegant curves of the girders, and the
geometrical tracery of the roofs were minutely outlined. Florent
feasted his eyes on this mighty diagram washed in with Indian ink on
phosphorescent vellum, and his mind reverted to his old fancy of a
colossal machine with wheels and levers and beams espied in the crimson
glow of the fires blazing beneath its boilers. At each consecutive hour
of the day the changing play of the light--from the bluish haze of early
morning and the black shadows of noon to the flaring of the sinking sun
and the paling of its fires in the ashy grey of the twilight--revealed
the markets under a new aspect; but on the flaming evenings, when the
foul smells arose and forced their way across the broad yellow beams
like hot puffs of steam, Florent again experienced discomfort, and
his dream changed, and he imagined himself in some gigantic knacker's
boiling-house where the fat of a whole people was being melted down.

The coarseness of the market people, who