The Street Vendor

Jérôme Crainquebille, a vegetable vendor, pushed his cart through the city and called out: “Cabbages, carrots, turnips!” And when he had leeks, he cried: “Fresh asparagus!”—for leeks are the asparagus of the poor. One day, October 20, at one in the afternoon, as he was coming down the Rue Montmartre, Madame Bayard, the cobbler’s wife, came out of her shop and approached the vegetable cart. Disdainfully picking up a bunch of leeks, she said:

“Your leeks aren’t very good. How much for a bunch?”

“Fifteen sous, ma’am. You won’t find better.”

“Fifteen sous for such poor leeks?”

And she threw the bunch back into the cart with disgust.

At that moment a policeman, badge number 64, came up and said to Crainquebille:

“Move along!”

Crainquebille had been pushing his cart from morning to evening for a full fifty years. The policeman’s order seemed to him lawful and entirely in the order of things. Ready to obey, he asked the woman to quickly take what she wanted.

“I still have to choose my goods first,” the cobbler’s wife remarked angrily.

And she began again to handle all the bunches of leeks, chose the one that seemed best to her, and pressed it tightly to her chest.

“I’ll give you fourteen sous. That’s quite enough. I’ll bring them to you from the shop; I don’t have any on me.”

And taking her leeks, she returned to the shop, into which a customer with a child in her arms had just entered.

At this moment the policeman, number 64, said to Crainquebille a second time:

“Move along!”

“I’m waiting for my money,” answered Crainquebille.

“I’m not telling you not to wait for your money; I’m only ordering you to move along,” said the policeman sternly.

Meanwhile, in her shop the cobbler’s wife was fitting blue shoes on a child of a year and a half. The customer was in a great hurry, and the green heads of the leeks lay peacefully on the counter.

Crainquebille, who for fifty years had pushed his cart through the city streets, knew how to obey the representatives of authority. But this time he found himself in an exceptional position between his right and his duty. He understood little of the law and did not grasp that the exercise of a personal right did not exempt him from fulfilling a public duty. He concentrated too much on his right to receive fourteen sous and did not take seriously enough his duty to push his cart and move along, keep moving along. He did not stir.

A third time, policeman number 64 calmly and without any irritation gave him the order to move:

“Don’t you hear me ordering you to move along?”

Crainquebille had what seemed to him too important a reason to stay where he was. And again he simply and artlessly explained it:

“Good Lord! I’m telling you I’m waiting for my money.”

The policeman replied:

“Perhaps you would like me to bring charges against you for violating police regulations? If that’s what you want, you only have to say so.”

To these words Crainquebille only slowly shrugged his shoulders, looked despondently at the policeman, and raised his eyes to heaven. And this look said:

“God sees what a law-breaker I am!”

Perhaps because he did not understand the expression of this look or found in it insufficient justification for disobedience, the policeman again asked the vendor in a sharp and severe tone whether he had understood him.

Just at that moment there was an extraordinary congestion of vehicles in the Rue Montmartre. Cabs, carriages, furniture vans, omnibuses, and carts, pressed one against the other, seemed to be inextricably linked together. From all sides came cries and curses.

The coachmen lazily exchanged hearty insults from a distance with the shop clerks, and the omnibus conductors, considering Crainquebille the cause of the confusion, called him a “nasty leek.”

Meanwhile curious onlookers had gathered on the sidewalk and were listening to the argument. And the policeman, seeing that he was being observed, now thought only of displaying his authority.

“Very well,” he said and pulled from his pocket a dirty little notebook and a very short pencil.

Crainquebille persisted, obeying some inner force. Besides, it was now impossible for him to move either forward or backward. The wheel of his cart had, unfortunately, caught in the wheel of a milk wagon.

And tearing at his hair in desperation, he cried:

“I’m telling you I’m waiting for my money! What bad luck! Troubles never come alone! Good Lord!”

Policeman number 64 considered himself insulted by these words, which expressed, however, more despair than protest. And since every insult took for him a traditional, correct, time-honored, and one might even say almost ritual form of expression—“Death to the cows!”—it was in this form that he perceived and processed in his brain the words of the offender.

“Ah! You said ‘Death to the cows!’ Very well, follow me.”

The vendor stared with extreme bewilderment and despair, his eyes wide open, at policeman number 64, and crossing his arms over his blue smock, cried:

“I said ‘Death to the cows’? Me?.. Oh!..”

His arrest was greeted with laughter by the shop clerks and street urchins. It answered to the passion of every human crowd for low and cruel spectacles. But at that moment an old man, dressed all in black and wearing a tall hat, pushed through the crowd of bystanders. He approached the policeman and said to him in a quiet, gentle, but very firm voice:

“You are mistaken. This man did not insult you.”

“Mind your own business,” the policeman replied, not accompanying his words with threats this time, since he was addressing a well-dressed man.

With great calm and restraint the old man continued to insist. Then the policeman informed him that he must explain himself to the police commissioner.

Meanwhile Crainquebille cried again:

“And I said ‘Death to the cows’! Oh!..”

When he uttered these strange words, Madame Bayard, the cobbler’s wife, came out of the shop with money in her hand. But the policeman was already holding him by the collar, and Madame Bayard, considering that it was not worth paying her debt to a man being led to the police station, put her fourteen sous back in her apron pocket.

Suddenly realizing that his cart was confiscated, his personal freedom lost, that a pit had opened beneath his feet, and the sun had dimmed, Crainquebille muttered:

“All the same!”

At the commissioner’s the unknown old man explained that, having been detained in the street by an extraordinary congestion of vehicles, he had witnessed the incident. He maintained that the policeman had by no means been insulted, that he had simply made a mistake. The old man gave his name and title: David Mathieu, chief physician of Ambroise-Paré Hospital, Knight of the Legion of Honor.

Crainquebille, whose arrest continued, spent the night in the police station, and in the morning was transferred in a prison van to jail.

The prison did not seem to him either humiliating or hard. It seemed to him rather necessary. What especially struck him about it was the cleanliness of the walls and floor.

He said:

“For such a place it’s very clean here. You could eat off the floor, and that’s the truth.”

Left alone, he wanted to move his stool, but saw that it was chained to the wall. The old man expressed his surprise aloud:

“Well, I never! I’d never have thought of anything like it, never!”

He sat down and, amazed, touched everything around him with his hands. The silence and solitude depressed him. He was bored and thought anxiously about his cart, full of cabbages, carrots, celery, and lettuce. He asked himself with anguish: “Where have they put my cart?”

On the third day his lawyer came to see him, Monsieur Lemerle, one of the youngest members of the bar.

Crainquebille tried to tell him his story, which was far from easy for him since he was not accustomed to speaking. Perhaps with a little help he might have managed; but his lawyer only shook his head distrustfully at everything the old man said and, leafing through the papers, muttered to himself: “Hmm! hmm!.. I don’t see any of this in the file…”

Then, with a tired look, twirling his blond mustache, he said to him:

“It might perhaps be in your interest to confess to everything; for my part, I consider your system of complete denial very unfortunate.”

Perhaps Crainquebille would indeed have confessed now, if only he had known what he was supposed to confess to.

---

Monsieur President Bourriche devoted a full six minutes to questioning Crainquebille. This questioning might have shed somewhat more light if the accused had answered the questions put to him. But Crainquebille was not accustomed to conducting arguments, and besides, in such company fear and respect kept his mouth shut. So he remained silent, and the president himself gave the answers; they confirmed the charges.

The president finished:

“Finally, you admit that you said ‘Death to the cows!’”

Only now did sounds emerge from the throat of the accused Crainquebille, resembling the noise of old iron or the clinking of broken glass.

“I said ‘Death to the cows!’ because the policeman said ‘Death to the cows!’ Only then did I say ‘Death to the cows!’” He wanted to explain that, astonished by so unexpected an accusation, he had, in his confusion, repeated the terrible words that could be attributed to him and which, of course, he had not uttered.

President Bourriche understood him differently.

“You claim,” he said, “that the policeman was the first to utter these words?”

Crainquebille refused to explain. It was too difficult for him.

“You do not insist. And you are quite right not to,” said the president.

And he called for the witnesses.

Policeman number 64, whose name was Bastien Matro, swore to speak the truth and nothing but the truth. Then he stated the following:

“While performing my duty on October 20 at one in the afternoon, I noticed in the Rue Montmartre a man who appeared to me to be a street vendor. His cart was illegally standing in front of house number 328, which caused a congestion of vehicles there. Three times I gave him the order to move along, but he refused to comply. When I warned him that I would draw up a report, he shouted at me: ‘Death to the cows!’—which I found very insulting.”

This simple and concise statement was heard with visible favor by the tribunal. The defense presented Madame Bayard, the cobbler’s wife, and Monsieur David Mathieu, chief physician of Ambroise-Paré Hospital, Knight of the Legion of Honor. Madame Bayard had seen nothing and heard nothing. Doctor Mathieu had been in the crowd gathered around the policeman who was making the vendor move along. His testimony caused a curious incident.

“I was a witness to the incident,” he said. “I noticed that the policeman was mistaken: no one had insulted him. I approached and pointed this out to him. But the policeman arrested the vendor anyway and invited me to follow him to the police commissioner, which I did. I have already given my testimony before the commissioner.”

“You may sit down,” said the president. “Usher, call witness Matro again.”

“Matro, when you arrested the accused, did Doctor Mathieu not point out to you that you were mistaken?”

“That is, he insulted me, Mr. President.”

“What did he say to you?”

“He said ‘Death to the cows!’”

A murmur and laughter ran through the hall.

“You may leave,” the president hastily said, and he warned the public that if these indecent manifestations were repeated, he would clear the courtroom. Meanwhile the defense was triumphant, and everyone at that moment thought that Crainquebille would be acquitted.

When silence was restored in the hall, Monsieur Lemerle rose. He began his defense speech with praise of the police officers, “those modest servants of society who for a pittance endure fatigue, expose themselves to constant dangers, and daily perform heroic deeds. They are all former soldiers, and they remain soldiers. Soldiers!.. That word alone says everything…” And Monsieur Lemerle proceeded to advance the highest considerations about military virtues. According to him, he was himself one of “those who would not allow anyone to touch the army, that national army to which he had the honor to belong.”

The president nodded his head.

Monsieur Lemerle was indeed a militia lieutenant. He was also a nationalist candidate in the Vieilles-Haudriettes district.

The lawyer continued:

“No, of course, I know well those modest and precious services that these guardians of public order render daily to the valiant population of Paris. And I would never have agreed, gentlemen, to undertake the defense of Crainquebille if I had seen in him one who insulted a former soldier. My client is accused of saying ‘Death to the cows!’ The meaning of this phrase is known to all. If you look in a well-known dictionary, you will read: ‘Cow, idler, parasite. Lolls about lazily like a cow instead of working. Cow, one who sells out to the police: police spy.’ ‘Death to the cows!’ is said in a certain circle of people. But the whole question is how Crainquebille said it? And did he even say it? Allow me, gentlemen, to doubt it. I do not suspect policeman Matro of any bad intention. But, as we have already noted, he performs a difficult service. He is sometimes exhausted by it, worn out. Under such conditions he could easily have been the victim of a kind of hallucination. And if he tells you, gentlemen, that Doctor David Mathieu, Knight of the Legion of Honor, chief physician of Ambroise-Paré Hospital, a representative of science and a man of society, also cried ‘Death to the cows!’ at him—we are forced to recognize that Matro is the victim of a psychosis, and if the expression does not seem too strong to you, the victim of persecution mania.

“And even if Crainquebille did really cry ‘Death to the cows!’—we must still determine whether these words have the character of a crime when uttered by him. Crainquebille is the illegitimate son of a street vendor who died of drunkenness and dissipation; he was born an alcoholic. You see him here, stupefied by sixty years of poverty, and you will say, gentlemen, that he is not responsible.”

Monsieur Lemerle sat down, and President Bourriche read through his teeth a verdict condemning Jérôme Crainquebille to two weeks in prison and a fifty-franc fine. The tribunal based its decision on the testimony of policeman Matro.

As Crainquebille was being led through the long, dark corridors of the courthouse, the old man felt a terrible need for sympathy. He turned to the guard accompanying him and called to him three times:

“Guard!.. Guard!.. Hey, guard!” The old man sighed. “If someone had told me two weeks ago that what happened to me would happen!..”

Then he expressed the following thought:

“They talk too fast, these gentlemen. They talk well, but too fast. You can’t come to an understanding with them… Guard, don’t you think they talk too fast?”

But the soldier walked on without saying a word or turning his head. Crainquebille asked him:

“Why don’t you answer me?”

The soldier continued to remain silent. The old man remarked bitterly:

“One talks to a dog. Why won’t you say anything to me? Maybe you never open your mouth; probably you’re afraid to air it out sometimes.”

Returned again to prison, Crainquebille in bewildered amazement sat down on his stool, which was chained to the wall. He did not properly understand that the judges had made a mistake. Under the majesty of the forms, the tribunal had hidden its weaknesses from him. He found it hard to believe that he was right and not those important officials whose reasonings he did not understand. It never occurred to him that something could be wrong in such a solemn ceremony. Having never been to church or to the Champs-Élysées, in all his life he had seen nothing more magnificent than the correctional police court. He knew well that he had not said “Death to the cows!” But if he had been sentenced for these words to two weeks in prison, the whole matter appeared in his mind as some kind of majestic mystery, one of those dogmas of faith with which devout people agree without understanding them—some kind of mysterious revelation, magnificent and terrible at the same time.

This poor old man acknowledged himself guilty of having somehow mystically insulted policeman number 64, just as a little boy starting to study his catechism considers himself guilty of Eve’s sin. By putting him in prison they had told him that he had cried “Death to the cows!” Therefore he had indeed cried it in some mysterious way unknown even to himself. He had been transported into a supernatural world, and his trial appeared to him as some kind of apocalypse.

If he could not form a clear idea of his crime, no clearer was his idea of his punishment. His condemnation seemed to him a solemn and majestic rite, a dazzling event that could not be understood or disputed and that should neither gladden nor grieve.

---

When he got out of prison Crainquebille pushed his cart through the Rue Montmartre as before and cried: “Cabbages, turnips, carrots!” He was neither proud of his adventure nor ashamed of it. He did not even have a painful memory of it. In his mind it had the form of a theatrical performance, a journey, a dream. One little old woman, coming up to his cart and choosing celery, asked him:

“What happened to you, Father Crainquebille? We haven’t seen you for three whole weeks. Haven’t you been sick? You’ve grown a bit pale.”

“I was living like a gentleman, Madame Mailloche,” said the old man.

Nothing had changed in his life except that on this day he went to the tavern more often than usual, because he kept feeling that it was now a holiday and that he would meet very kind people. A little tipsy, he returned to his corner. Stretching out on his mattress and covering himself instead of a blanket with sacks that the chestnut vendor on the corner had lent him, the old man thought: “One can’t complain about prison; you have everything you need there. Still, it’s better at home.”

His prosperity did not last long. He soon noticed that his customers looked at him sourly.

“Fine celery, Madame Cointreau!”

“I don’t need anything.”

“What do you mean you don’t need anything? You don’t live on air, do you?”

But without a word in reply, Madame Cointreau proudly returned to her big bakery. The shopkeepers and doorkeepers, who so recently had impatiently awaited his cart strewn with greens and flowers, now turned away from him.

Pulling up to the cobbler’s shop where all his adventures had begun, he cried:

“Madame Bayard, Madame Bayard, you still owe me fifteen sous.”

But Madame Bayard, sitting at her counter, did not deign even to turn her head.

All of the Rue Montmartre knew that Crainquebille had got out of prison, and no one wanted to know him anymore. Word of his imprisonment had reached even the outskirts and the busy corner of the Rue Richer. There around noon he noticed Madame Laure, his good and faithful customer. She was bending over little Martin’s cart, fingering a large head of cabbage.

At this sight Crainquebille’s heart sank. He pushed his cart against little Martin’s and said in a plaintive tone to Madame Laure:

“It’s not nice of you to leave me for another.”

Madame Laure did not say a word to Crainquebille, acting offended.

And the old street vendor, feeling hurt, shouted at the top of his voice:

“You slut!”

Madame Laure dropped her cabbage and cried:

“Go away, you old scoundrel! This is what they do, get out of prison and still insult people!”

In a calm state Crainquebille would never have reproached Madame Laure for her behavior. But this time the old man lost his temper. Three times he called Madame Laure a slut, a good-for-nothing, and a bitch. And this scene finally lowered Crainquebille in the eyes of the whole Montmartre district and the Rue Richer.

The old man went off, muttering to himself:

“What a slut! You’ll never find another slut like that.”

The worst of it was that she was not the only one who treated him like some kind of outcast. No one wanted to know him anymore.

And his character began to deteriorate. Having quarreled with Madame Laure, he now began to quarrel with everyone. For any trifle he said rude things to his regular customers, and if they took too long choosing their goods, he called them right out chatterboxes and lazybones; in the tavern too he constantly quarreled with his comrades. His friend the chestnut vendor simply did not recognize him and declared that Father Crainquebille had become a real porcupine. This could not be denied: he had become quarrelsome, cantankerous, rough and insolent in speech. Being in uneducated society, it was of course harder for him than for some university professor of social sciences to express his thoughts on the imperfection of the modern system and on the necessary changes in it, and even his thoughts arranged themselves badly and chaotically in his head.

Misfortune had made him unjust, and he now took revenge on those who wished him no harm at all or were even sometimes weaker than he. Once he painfully struck Alphonse, the tavern keeper’s little son, because the boy had asked him whether it was nice in prison.

“You nasty little boy!” he shouted at him. “Your father’s the one who should sit in prison, not get rich selling poison.”

Finally he completely lost heart. In such a state a person can no longer rise. All the passersby kick him with their feet.

Poverty came, the blackest poverty. The old street vendor, who once used to carry pockets full of five-franc pieces from the Montmartre district, now did not have a single sou. It was winter. Thrown out of his corner, he now slept in a shed, under carts. After almost a whole month of rain, the gutters overflowed and flooded the shed.

Squatting in his cart above the stinking water, in the company of rats, spiders, and hungry cats, the old man reflected in the darkness. Not having eaten all day and no longer having even sacks to cover himself with, he remembered those days when the government gave him shelter and food. He envied the lot of prisoners who suffered neither from hunger nor from cold, and a thought suddenly came to him:

“I know the trick now; why shouldn’t I use it?” He got up and went out into the street. It was no later than eleven at night. The weather was dark and damp. Some kind of drizzle was falling, colder and more piercing than any rain. The rare passersby hugged the walls.

Crainquebille passed the Church of Saint-Eustache and turned into the Rue Montmartre. It was completely empty. A guardian of order stood on the sidewalk by the church entrance, under a gas lamp; around the flame one could see the fine rain falling. The policeman was covered with a hood and looked completely frozen. But whether because he preferred light to darkness or simply was tired of walking, he stood motionless under his lamp as if beside a close friend. This trembling light was his only companion in the dark, deserted night. His immobility seemed almost inhuman; the reflection of his boots on the wet sidewalk, which had turned into a lake, lengthened his figure downward and gave him from a distance the appearance of a gigantic amphibian, half emerged from the water. Up close the policeman in his hood looked like a monk and a soldier at the same time. The large features of his face, which seemed even larger in the shadow of the hood, were calm and sad. He had short, thick, already graying mustaches. He was an old sergeant, over forty.

Crainquebille quietly approached him and said in a trembling, weak voice:

“Death to the cows!”

Then he waited for the effect of these sacred words. But no effect followed. The policeman stood silent and motionless, his arms crossed under his broad cloak. His wide-open eyes, shining in the darkness, looked attentively, sadly, and with a certain contempt at the old man.

Crainquebille, surprised but still preserving a remnant of resolution, muttered:

“I told you: death to the cows!”

A long silence followed, during which only the rain fell and deep darkness reigned. At last the policeman said:

“You shouldn’t say that… I seriously advise you not to say that. At your age you ought to be a little wiser… Go your way.”

“Why don’t you arrest me?” asked Crainquebille.

The policeman shook his head under his wet hood:

“If we were to grab all the rude people who say what they shouldn’t, there’d be too much work!.. And what good would it do?”

Crainquebille, crushed by this magnanimous contempt, stood for a long time in bewildered silence in the middle of a large puddle. But before leaving, he tried to explain himself.

“I didn’t say ‘Death to the cows!’ for you. And not for anyone else. I said it for a particular purpose.”

The policeman answered him with stern calm:

“For some purpose or for something else, you shouldn’t have said it at all, because when a man is doing his duty and enduring considerable suffering in the process, he shouldn’t be insulted with empty words… I repeat, go your way.”

And Crainquebille, his head lowered and his arms swinging, disappeared into the rain and the darkness of the night.

—Anatole France

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Translator’s Notes:

• This is an abridged translation of Anatole France’s celebrated novella Crainquebille (1901), one of the most famous literary indictments of judicial injustice.
• “Mort aux vaches!” (“Death to the cows!”) was French slang, used by anarchists and criminals, meaning “Death to the police.” The insult derived from vache as contemptuous slang for a stupid, docile person, applied to police officers.
• The story’s power lies in the Kafkaesque absurdity of Crainquebille’s conviction: he did not say the words, but repeating them in bewildered denial is taken as proof of having said them; and a distinguished witness who denies that any insult occurred is himself accused of the same insult.
• The ending presents a devastating reversal: having lost everything because of a false conviction, Crainquebille deliberately tries to commit the crime he was falsely convicted of, hoping to return to prison where at least he would have food and shelter. But the policeman’s unexpected humanity and refusal to arrest him denies even this final refuge.
• Tolstoy included this story for its powerful critique of how legal institutions crush the poor while claiming to serve justice—a theme central to his later social writings.