meat

On the opposite pathway other drays were unloading freshly killed calves, wrapped in canvas, lying on their sides like children in big rectangular baskets, from which only the four bleeding stumps of their legs protruded. There were also whole sheep and sides and quarters of beef. Butchers in long white aprons marked the meat with a stamp, carried it off, weighed it, and hung it up on hooks in the auction enclosure. Florent, with his face glued to the bars of the window, stared at the rows of suspended carcasses, at the red of beef and mutton, and the paler meat of the veal, all streaked with yellow fat and tendon, and with their bellies gaping open. Then he arrived at the counters in the tripe market and passed by the pale calves’ feet and heads, the rolled tripe neatly packed in boxes, the brains arranged on flat trays, the bleeding livers and purplish kidneys. He paused to look at the two-wheeled carts, covered with tarpaulins, which brought sides of pork hung on racks on each side over a bed of straw. The open ends of the cart seemed like some candlelit mortuary chapel, suggesting the deep recesses of a tabernacle, such was the glow of all the raw meat. On the straw beds were tin cans full of blood from the pigs. Florent was in the grip of a dull fever… He was in agony.

Emile Zola - The Belly of Paris