Description

Section of Emile Zola’s multi-generational Rougon-Macquart tale, The Belly of Paris may be the tale of Florent Quenu, a wrongly accused man who escapes incarceration on Devil’s Area. Returning to his native Paris, Florent discovers a town he hardly acknowledges, using its operating courses displaced to create method for bourgeois apartments and wide boulevards. Coping with his brother’s household within the recently reconstructed Les Halles marketplace, Florent is quickly swept up in a maelstrom of politics and food. Amid interest one of the market’s sellers–the fishmonger, the charcutière, the berry woman, and the cheese vendor–and the wonderful culinary bounty of the labors, we begin to see the remarkable difference between “fat and thin” (the wealthy and poor people) and the way the increasing gulf between them traces a town for the bursting point.