In this chap­ter titled The Fruit Shop, Jeanne Tour­mont steps into a nar­row street alive with dust and echoes of change, her muslin gown trail­ing the ground and bon­net shad­ing her deter­mined eyes. Her errand is simple—to buy fruit—but the world she enters is lay­ered with his­to­ry and hard­ship. The shop­keep­er, Mon­sieur Popain, greets her from with­in a canopy of ivy and vines, his face weath­ered like the fruit he tends. Though his dis­play of pears, oranges, and pome­gran­ates shim­mers with sun and col­or, a clos­er look reveals bruis­es, thin­ning skins, and signs of jour­neys too long. Each piece of fruit holds not just ripeness, but stories—of mer­chant ships dodg­ing block­ades, of bruis­ing hands from dis­tant plan­ta­tions, and of mar­kets squeezed by war. Jeanne fin­gers a clus­ter of grapes, their sweet­ness promis­ing lux­u­ry her francs may not afford, and lis­tens qui­et­ly as Popain describes how even fruit now comes with a cost mea­sured in more than coin.

Mon­sieur Popain doesn’t sim­ply sell pro­duce; he speaks it into rel­e­vance. A fig, he explains, was once des­tined for a noble’s table before rev­o­lu­tion swept the nobil­i­ty away. The pome­gran­ate, once revered by aris­to­crats in silken salons, now waits for hands that val­ue calo­ries over sym­bol­ism. He ges­tures to a box of oranges, chipped and tired from sea air, remind­ing Jeanne that these fruits had braved British patrols and the chaos of naval uncer­tain­ty to arrive in his store. In every descrip­tion, he folds in hints of bat­tle, hard­ship, and distance—elevating even blem­ished fruit into arti­facts of endurance. Jeanne nods, caught between amuse­ment and sym­pa­thy. She knows the fruit is not just overpriced—it is bur­dened with the jour­ney of a bro­ken world. Her hand­ful of francs feels thin­ner with each word he speaks, not from guilt, but from the sober­ing knowl­edge that even sweet­ness must now trav­el through con­flict to reach her.

Jeanne eyes the cor­ner where the soft­est, least desir­able fruit is sold—the wind­fall offer­ings. Mon­sieur Popain fol­lows her gaze and soft­ens, offer­ing a dis­count and a sto­ry: these apples, he claims, grew behind a bro­ken gate in a marquis’s gar­den, now over­run with weeds and war mem­o­ries. That gar­den, once man­i­cured by roy­al hands, still yields per­fec­tion, though the hands that tend it now are gnarled by grief and age. An old woman, he whis­pers, is said to guard the grounds alone, her pres­ence respect­ed by locals, her fruit untouched by theft or pest. Jeanne lis­tens, charmed by the mys­tery, but won­ders if the tale is spun more for effect than fact. Yet when she bites into a wind­fall pear, its soft­ness blooms with unex­pect­ed sweet­ness. Whether grown in nobil­i­ty or rumor, its taste lingers longer than most.

Popain con­tin­ues, ani­mat­ed by the qui­et con­nec­tion they’ve formed. He explains that trade has become a gam­ble: cap­tains bribed to dock, sailors bribed to load, and cus­toms men bribed to look away. The fruits, he says, car­ry not just fla­vor but the bruis­es of diplo­ma­cy. Each grape clus­ter is a record of hands passed through—workers in vine­yards, sol­diers at ports, and mer­chants watch­ing their prof­its shrink. Jeanne shifts her gaze from the fruit to the man, real­iz­ing that he too car­ries the fatigue of a city that sur­vives on rumor, rationing, and rec­ol­lec­tion. She makes her mod­est pur­chase, fill­ing her bag with more weight in nar­ra­tive than food, and thanks him not just for the fruit but for remind­ing her that every sweet­ness has a bit­ter root some­where. She walks away slow­ly, her coins lighter, her mind fuller.

The Fruit Shop becomes more than a place of exchange—it is a cap­sule of sur­vival in a world reassem­bling itself after rev­o­lu­tion. It reveals how even a piece of fruit is thread­ed with his­to­ry, geog­ra­phy, and the scars of dis­tant bat­tles. Through Popain’s sto­ry­telling and Jeanne’s qui­et wit­ness, the chap­ter shows how life con­tin­ues, impro­vised and imper­fect, through small acts of beau­ty and com­merce. The fruit may be chipped, the streets uncer­tain, and the francs few, but the act of buy­ing and sell­ing remains one of resilience. Each trans­ac­tion is not just about nutrition—it’s about pre­serv­ing sto­ries, assert­ing dig­ni­ty, and tast­ing, how­ev­er briefly, some­thing that was once abun­dant and now must be earned with care.