Matters then became uproarious.  Boiling over with rage and brandishing their fists, both mother and daughter fairly exploded; while the poor little servant, quite bewildered by their voices, the one hoarse and the other shrill, which belaboured her with insults as though they were battledores and she a shuttlecock, sobbed on more bitterly than ever.

“Be off with you!  Your Madame Taboureau would like to be half as fresh as that fish is!  She’d like us to sew it up for her, no doubt!”

“A whole fish for ten francs!  What’ll she want next!”

Then came coarse words and foul accusations.  Had the servant been the most worthless of her sex she could not have been more bitterly upbraided.

Florent, whom the market keeper had gone to fetch, made his appearance when the quarrel was at its hottest.  The whole pavilion seemed to be in a state of insurrection.  The fish-wives, who manifest the keenest jealousy of each other when the sale of a penny herring is in question, display a united front when a quarrel arises with a buyer.  They sang the popular old ditty, “The baker’s wife has heaps of crowns, which cost her precious little”; they stamped their feet, and goaded the Mehudins as though the latter were dogs which they were urging on to bite and devour.  And there were even some, having stalls at the other end of the alley, who rushed up wildly, as though they meant to spring at the chignon of the poor little woman, she meantime being quite submerged by the flood of insulting abuse poured upon her.

“Return mademoiselle her ten francs,” said Florent sternly, when he had learned what had taken place.

But old Madame Mehudin had her blood up.  “As for you, my little man,” quoth she, “go to blazes!  Here, that’s how I’ll return the ten francs!”

As she spoke, she flung the brill with all her force at the head of Madame Taboureau’s servant, who received it full in the face.  The blood spurted from her nose, and the brill, after adhering for a moment to her cheeks, fell to the ground and burst with a flop like that of a wet clout.  This brutal act threw Florent into a fury.  The beautiful Norman felt frightened and recoiled, as he cried out:  “I suspend you for a week, and I will have your licence withdrawn.  You hear me?”

Then, as the other fish-wives were still jeering behind him, he turned round with such a threatening air that they quailed like wild beasts mastered by the tamer, and tried to assume an expression of innocence.  When the Mehudins had returned the ten francs, Florent peremptorily ordered them to cease selling at once.  The old woman was choking with rage, while the daughter kept silent, but turned very white.  She, the beautiful Norman, to be driven out of her stall!