It became fashionable for buildings to have iron-and-glass roofs. It became the leading design for markets around the world.

In 1959, the government, after years of debate about the grubby market clogging traffic with trucks in the center of Paris, built a market in the southern suburbs of Rungis and La Villette. By the late 1960s only the meat market remained. In 1967, Janet Flanner, the celebrated American chronicler of prewar Paris, wrote a sad article in Life magazine, referring to Le Ventre de Paris and bemoaning that “the market smells of gasoline fumes. It used to smell of horses.” In March 1969, by order of President Charles de Gaulle, the market was officially closed over the protests of students, who by then had considerable practice protesting de Gaulle. Life magazine ran another article titled “‘The Belly of Paris,’ Les Halles, Closes Forever.”

By 1973, the market was completely gone and the emperor Napoleon's vision of a central Paris devoid of working-class neighborhoods began to be completed. Les Halles and its market people were replaced by a shopping mall and the surrounding neighborhoods were rebuilt to be expensive and fashionable and stripped of their charm. One of Baltard's pavilions, completed in 1854, was classified as a historic monument and moved up the Seine to Nogent-sur-Marne, where it is now known as the Pavillon Baltard.

This period of the empire, from the 1848 uprising to the 1871 uprising, is the setting of the Rougon-Macquart saga. The Belly of Paris takes place over one year from 1858 to 1859 and, like most of the other books, has a very strong sense of the political issues of the time. So it is not surprising that the lead character is a bagnard, a convict from the newly established penal colony of French Guiana.

France has never known what to do with its possession on the northeast shoulder of South America. There was a widely circulated legend in sixteenth-century Europe that somewhere in the continent of South America was a huge city holding astounding quantities of gold and other mineral riches. The Spanish called this never-seen city El Dorado. In 1595, the British explorer Sir Walter Raleigh published a report on his visit to the South American coast, The Discovery of the Large, Rich and Beautiful Empire of Guiana, in which he claimed to have found El Dorado. This created considerable interest in the area. The French, the British, and the Dutch ended up with slices of the region, and although some gold could be panned in the rivers—and still is—no one has found anything comparable to the legend of El Dorado.

Every attempt to settle French Guiana has failed. A seventeenth-century effort was led by a man who appears to have gone mad and ruled with arbitrary brutality. The original colony of Cayenne, on the coast, was taken over by indigenous warriors, who, according to contemporary reports, ate the settlers. Slaves were imported from Africa for plantations, but they constantly rebelled and ran away to the interior. In the eighteenth century, Louis XV sent 14,000 settlers. Ten thousand of them died of disease so rapidly that their bodies were dumped into the sea because there was no longer manpower available for burial. The remaining settlers fled to three offshore islands, which they called the Iles du Salut, the healthy islands, because they had less malaria and other diseases.

When Louis-Napoléon came to power, he was interested in the problem of settling this territory. Slavery, which had never worked well in Guiana, was abolished in all French territories in 1848. So he sent several boatloads of indentured Chinese laborers to work the land. They were not farmers, and they moved to Cayenne and set up shops. Their descendants still operate shops in Cayenne. Once their labor had fled, many plantation owners, recognizing a good idea, abandoned their land, and they too moved to Cayenne.

Then the emperor had an idea: instead of spending a fortune having the navy maintain prison ships—the ships in which the prisoners provided oar power were outmoded anyway—why not ship convicts to Guiana and force them to develop the land? They would stay there and marry local women—or maybe female convicts could be sent—and they would settle Guiana. To make this plan work, the convicts, after serving their time, were required to spend an equal amount of time as “free men” in the colony. The government even sent prostitutes to marry the first prisoners released, but the women refused to marry any of the convicts and the angry officials shipped them off to labor in a prison camp. Some coupling did take place, but most of the children born of these pairings died in infancy, and many of the female convicts proved to be barren. A fertility expert, Dr.