black eyes and muddy, bluish skins, so slimy that they still seemed to be gliding along,
yet alive. There were broad flat skate with pale undersides edged with a soft red, and
superb backs bumpy with vertebrae, and marbled down to the tautly stretched ribs of
their fins with splotches of cinnabar, intersected by streaks of the tint of Florentine
bronze—a dark medley of colour suggestive of the hues of a toad or some poisonous
flower. Then, too, there were hideous dog-fish, with round heads, widely-gaping mouths
like those of Chinese idols, and short fins like bats' wings; fit monsters to keep yelping
guard over the treasures of the ocean grottoes. And next came the finer fish, displayed
singly on the osier trays; salmon that gleamed like chased silver, every scale seemingly
outlined by a graving-tool on a polished metal surface; mullet with larger scales and
coarser markings; large turbot and huge brill with firm flesh white like curdled milk;
tunny-fish, smooth and glossy, like bags of blackish leather; and rounded bass, with
widely gaping mouths which a soul too large for the body seemed to have rent asunder
as it forced its way out amidst the stupefaction of death. And on all sides there were
sole, brown and grey, in pairs; sand-eels, slim and stiff, like shavings of pewter;
herrings, slightly twisted, with bleeding gills showing on their silver-worked skins; fat
dories tinged with just a suspicion of carmine; burnished mackerel with green-streaked
backs, and sides gleaming with ever-changing iridescence; and rosy gurnets with white
bellies, their head towards the centre of the baskets and their tails radiating all around,
so that they simulated some strange florescence splotched with pearly white and
brilliant vermilion. There were rock mullet, too, with delicious flesh, flushed with the
pinky tinge peculiar to the Cyprinus family; boxes of whiting with opaline reflections; and
baskets of smelts—neat little baskets, pretty as those used for strawberries, and
exhaling a strong scent of violets. And meantime the tiny black eyes of the shrimps
dotted as with beads of jet their soft-toned mass of pink and grey; and spiny crawfish
and lobsters striped with black, all still alive, raised a grating sound as they tried to crawl
along with their broken claws.
Florent gave but indifferent attention to Monsieur Verlaque's explanations. A flood of
sunshine suddenly streamed through the lofty glass roof of the covered way, lighting up
all these precious colours, toned and softened by the waves—the iridescent flesh-tints
of the shell-fish, the opal of the whiting, the pearly nacre of the mackerel, the ruddy gold
of the mullets, the plated skins of the herrings, and massive silver of the salmon. It was
as though the jewel-cases of some sea-nymph had been emptied there—a mass of
fantastical, undreamt-of ornaments, a streaming and heaping of necklaces, monstrous
bracelets, gigantic brooches, barbaric gems and jewels, the use of which could not be
divined. On the backs of the skate and the dog-fish you saw, as it were, big dull green
and purple stones set in dark metal, while the slender forms of the sand-eels and the
tails and fins of the smelts displayed all the delicacy of finely wrought silver-work.
