flowering vegetation of luxuriant metal-work, with spindle-shaped stems
and twining knotted branches, covered the vast expanse as with the
foliage of some ancient forest. Several departments of the markets
still slumbered behind their closed iron gates. The butter and poultry
pavilions displayed rows of little trellised stalls and long alleys,
which lines of gas lights showed to be deserted. The fish market,
however, had just been opened, and women were flitting to and fro
amongst the white slabs littered with shadowy hampers and cloths. Among
the vegetables and fruit and flowers the noise and bustle were gradually
increasing. The whole place was by degree waking up, from the popular
quarter where the cabbages are piled at four o'clock in the morning,
to the lazy and wealthy district which only hangs up its pullets and
pheasants when the hands of the clock point to eight.

The great covered alleys were now teeming with life. All along the
footways on both sides of the road there were still many market
gardeners, with other small growers from the environs of Paris,
who displayed baskets containing their "gatherings" of the previous
evening--bundles of vegetables and clusters of fruit. Whilst the crowd
incessantly paced hither and thither, vehicles barred the road; and
Florent, in order to pass them, had to press against some dingy sacks,
like coal-sacks in appearance, and so numerous and heavy that the
axle-trees of the vans bent beneath them. They were quite damp, and
exhaled a fresh odour of seaweed. From a rent low down in the side of
one of them a black stream of big mussels was trickling.

Florent and Claude had now to pause at every step. The fish was arriving
and one after another the drays of the railway companies drove up laden
with wooden cages full of the hampers and baskets that had come by train
from the sea coast. And to get out of the way of the fish drays, which