Toujours Provence(50)

The contrast between the quiet, dull emptiness of the place and the interior of Les Halles was sudden and total. On one side of the door was a town still asleep; on the other, bright lights and bright colors, pandemonium and shouting and laughter, a working day in full and noisy swing.

I had to jump aside to avoid collision with a trolley piled to head height with crates of peaches, pushed by a man chanting “Klaxon! Klaxon!” as he careered round the corner. Other trolleys were behind him, their loads swaying. I looked for somewhere to escape from high-velocity fruit and vegetables, and made a dash for a sign that read buvette. If I was going to be run over, I would rather the tragedy occurred at a bar.

Jacky and Isabelle, so the sign said, were the owners, and they were in a state of siege. The bar was so crowded that three men were reading the same newspaper, and all the tables nearby were taken up with the first sitting for breakfast, or possibly lunch. It was difficult to tell by looking at the food which meal was being eaten. Croissants were being dipped into thick, steaming cups of café crème next to tumblers of red wine and sausage sandwiches as long as a forearm, or beer and crusty squares of warm pizza. I felt a twinge of longing for the breakfast of champions, the half-pint of red wine and the sausage sandwich, but drinking at dawn is the reward for working all night. I ordered coffee, and tried to see some semblance of order in the surrounding chaos.

Les Halles takes up an area perhaps seventy yards square, and very few inches are wasted. Three main passageways separate the étaux, stalls of varying sizes, and at that time in the morning it was hard to imagine customers being able to reach them. Crates, mangled cardboard boxes, and wispy clumps of paper straw were stacked high in front of many of the counters, and the floor was garnished with casualties—lettuce leaves, squashed tomatoes, errant haricots—that had been unable to cling on during the last breakneck stage of delivery.

The stallholders, too busy writing up the day’s prices and arranging their produce to spare five minutes for a visit to the bar, bellowed for coffee, which was served to them by Isabelle’s waitress, an acrobatic girl over the crates and a steady hand with her tray. She even managed to keep her footing in the high-risk zone of the fishsellers, where the floor was slick with the ice that men with raw, nicked hands and rubber aprons were shovelling onto the steel display shelves.

It made a noise like gravel on glass, and there was another, more painful sound that cut through the hubbub as the butchers sawed at bones and severed tendons with decisive, dangerously fast chops of their cleavers. I hoped for their fingers’ sake that they hadn’t had wine for breakfast.

After half an hour it was safe to leave the bar. The piles of crates had been removed, the trolleys parked; the traffic was on legs now instead of wheels. An army of brooms had whisked away the scraps of fallen vegetables, prices had been marked on spiked plastic labels, tills unlocked, coffee drunk. Les Halles was open for business.

I have never seen so much fresh food and so much variety in such a confined space. I counted fifty stalls, many of them entirely devoted to a single speciality. There were two stalls selling olives—just olives—in every conceivable style of preparation: olives à la grecque, olives in herb-flavored oil, olives mixed with scarlet shards of pimento, olives from Nyons, olives from Les Baux, olives that looked like small black plums or elongated green grapes. They were lined up in squat wooden tubs, gleaming as though each one had been individually polished. At the end of the line were the only nonolives to be seen, a barrel of anchovies from Collioure, packed in tighter than any sardines, sharp and salty when I leaned down to smell them. Madame behind the counter told me to try one, with a plump black olive. Did I know how to make tapenade, the olive and anchovy paste? A pot of that every day and I’d live to be a hundred.

Another stall, another specialist: anything with feathers. Pigeons, plucked and trussed, capons, breasts of duck and thighs of duckling, three different members of the chicken aristocracy, with the supreme chickens, the poulets de Bresse, wearing their red, white, and blue labels like medals. Légalement contrôlée, said the labels, by the Comité Interprofessionnel de la Volaille de Bresse. I could imagine the chosen chickens receiving their decorations from a dignified committee member, almost certainly with the traditional kiss on each side of the beak.

And then there were fish, laid out gill to gill on a row of stalls that extended along the length of one wall, 40 yards or more of glistening scales and still-bright eyes. Banks of crushed ice, smelling of the sea, separated the squid from the blood-darkened tuna, the rascasses from the loups de mer, the cod from the skate. Pyramids of clams, of the molluscs called seiches, of winkles, tiny grey shrimp, and monster gambas, fish for friture, fish for soupe, lobsters the color of dark steel, jolts of yellow coming from the dishes of fresh lemons on the counter, deft hands with long thin knives cutting and gutting, the squelch of rubber boots on the wet stone floor.