She paid for the two baskets, and carried them into the fruit pavilion, which had just been opened. The market buildings still retained their gloom-wrapped aspect of airy fragility, streaked with the thousand lines of light that gleamed from the venetian shutters. People were beginning to pass along the broad covered streets intersecting the pavilions, but the more distant buildings still remained deserted amidst the increasing buzz of life on the footways. By Saint Eustache the bakers and wine sellers were taking down their shutters, and the ruddy shops, with their gas lights flaring, showed like gaps of fire in the gloom in which the grey house-fronts were yet steeped. Florent noticed a baker’s shop on the left-hand side of the Rue Montorgueil, replete and golden with its last baking, and fancied he could scent the pleasant smell of the hot bread. It was now half past four. Madame Francois by this time had disposed of nearly all her stock. She had only a few bunches of carrots left when Lacaille once more made his appearance with his sack. “Well,” said he, “will you take a sou now?” “I knew I should see you again,” the good woman quietly answered. “You’d better take all I have left. There are seventeen bunches.” “That makes seventeen sous.” “No; thirty-four.” At last they agreed to fix the price at twenty-five sous. Madame Francois was anxious to be off. “He’d been keeping his eye upon me all the time,” she said to Florent, when Lacaille had gone off with the carrots in his sack. “That old rogue runs things down all over the markets, and he often waits till the last peal of the bell before spending four sous in purchase. Oh, these Paris folk! They’ll wrangle and argue for an hour to save half a sou, and then go off and empty their purses at the wine shop.” Whenever Madame Francois talked of Paris she always spoke in a tone of disdain, and referred to the city as though it were some ridiculous, contemptible, far-away place, in which she only condescended to set foot at nighttime. “There!” she continued, sitting down again, beside Florent, on some vegetables belonging to a neighbour, “I can get away now.” Florent bent his head. He had just committed a theft. When Lacaille went off he had caught sight of a carrot lying on the ground, and having picked it up he was holding it tightly in his right hand. Behind him were some bundles of celery and bunches of parsley were diffusing pungent odours which painfully affected him. “Well, I’m off now!” said Madame Francois.