The Mehudins came from Rouen.  Louise’s mother still related how she had first arrived in Paris with a basket of eels.  She had ever afterwards remained in the fish trade.  She had married a man employed in the Octroi service, who had died leaving her with two little girls.  It was she who by her full figure and glowing freshness had won for herself in earlier days the nickname of “the beautiful Norman,” which her eldest daughter had inherited.  Now five and sixty years of age, Madame Mehudin had become flabby and shapeless, and the damp air of the fish market had rendered her voice rough and hoarse, and given a bluish tinge to her skin.  Sedentary life had made her extremely bulky, and her head was thrown backwards by the exuberance of her bosom.  She had never been willing to renounce the fashions of her younger days, but still wore the flowered gown, the yellow kerchief, and turban-like head-gear of the classic fish-wife, besides retaining the latter’s loud voice and rapidity of gesture as she stood with her hands on her hips, shouting out the whole abusive vocabulary of her calling.

She looked back regretfully to the old Marche des Innocents, which the new central markets had supplanted.  She would talk of the ancient rights of the market “ladies,” and mingle stories of fisticuffs exchanged with the police with reminiscences of the visits she had paid the Court in the time of Charles X and Louis Philippe, dressed in silk, and carrying a bouquet of flowers in her hand.  Old Mother Mehudin, as she was now generally called, had for a long time been the banner-bearer of the Sisterhood of the Virgin at St. Leu.  She would relate that in the processions in the church there she had worn a dress and cap of tulle trimmed with satin ribbons, whilst holding aloft in her puffy fingers the gilded staff of the richly-fringed silk standard on which the figure of the Holy Mother was embroidered.

According to the gossip of the neighbourhood, the old woman had made a fairly substantial fortune, though the only signs of it were the massive gold ornaments with which she loaded her neck and arms and bosom on important occasions.  Her two daughters got on badly together as they grew up.  The younger one, Claire, an idle, fair-complexioned girl, complained of the ill-treatment which she received from her sister Louise, protesting, in her languid voice, that she could never submit to be the other’s servant.  As they would certainly have ended by coming to blows, their mother separated them.  She gave her stall in the fish market to Louise, while Claire, whom the smell of the skate and the herrings affected in the lungs, installed herself among the fresh water fish.  And from that time the old mother, although she pretended to have retired from business altogether, would flit from one stall to the other, still interfering in the selling of the fish, and causing her daughters continual annoyance by the foul insolence with which she would at times speak to customers.