Buffa Market, Nice

Buffa Market, Nice, was a neighborhood market where the narrator’s mother turned the practical work of buying provisions into a daily contest of judgment, wit, and public performance. It remained more than a backdrop to family life: years later, the narrator returned to it to recover, through its familiar routines, a vanished part of the past.

Setting and Daily Life

The market was considerably smaller than the Old Town market, which supplied the large hotels, and chiefly served the pensions near Boulevard Gambetta. Its stalls offered meat, fish, cheese, fruit, flowers, and vegetables. The narrator recalls the market as a place of many accents and competing voices, where shopping involved inspection and argument as much as purchase.

The mother went there each morning with her cane after rising at six. She handled cuts of meat and fruit, examined the produce, and rejected goods she considered poor or overpriced. The market supplied the provisions for the family’s business and household, making its vendors and stalls part of the practical labor on which their livelihood depended.

The Mother’s Reign

The mother’s dealings with the stallholders gave the market the air of a small public theatre. She would point out a spoiled leaf or scrutinize a melon, cheese, or piece of meat, while vendors protested her handling and criticism. Her disputes could escalate into exchanged insults and gestures, but the account presents this confrontation as familiar ritual: she moved from stall to stall, leaving behind laughter and indignant calls.

Her prolonged quarrel with the butcher Renucci became a recurring performance. For months she stopped at his ham stall, handling the display without buying, deliberately reminding him that he had lost her custom. When she approached, he would shout at her to go away and act as though he were defending his wares in a mortal fight. She responded by examining a ham with exaggerated revulsion, then departed with a triumphant smile. The episode shows how the mother made her judgments visible and transformed ordinary bargaining into a contest of wills.

Her market routine continued at home in the work of running the pension. She returned with fruit and flowers, insisted that her son eat large quantities of fruit, and then attended to menus, suppliers, breakfast, excursion baskets, the cellar, accounts, and other details of the business. The market was thus one stop in a demanding cycle of provisioning and management, rather than an isolated excursion.

A Place Preserved in Memory

The narrator later describes returning to Nice and spending long hours among the market’s vegetables, fruit, meat, flowers, and fish. The voices, gestures, and other features of the place seemed unchanged. By closing his eyes, he could make the remembered scene feel complete; wandering among the stalls became a way of approaching the past through the place itself.

The market also became the setting for a public celebration of the narrator’s first literary success. When his story appeared in Gringoire, the traders held an aperitif in his mother’s honor and made speeches. She kept the issue in her bag and, when an occasion arose, showed the page bearing her son’s name to an adversary before leaving with her head held high. The printed story gave her a new means of asserting herself in the same social arena where she had long challenged the vendors.

Food and the Wider Narrative

The market’s importance belongs to a broader pattern in which food marks care, scarcity, pride, and dignity. Elsewhere in the memoir, the mother’s provision of a steak for her son is revealed as an act of sacrifice: she had claimed to avoid animal fat, but he discovers her eating the cooking fat left in the pan. That scene is not set in the market, yet it clarifies what provisioning meant in their household and gives the daily search for food a private emotional weight.

Food also recurs beyond Nice. In Paris, the narrator’s hunger and humiliation at the sight of a steak outside the Brasserie Médicis lead him to formulate the conviction that everyone should have the right to eat without conditions. At the Capoulade, the café owner Jules eventually agrees to sell him two coffees and a croissant for seventy-five centimes. These separate episodes do not take place at Buffa Market, but they extend the memoir’s attention to food from the market’s daily commerce to questions of need and human dignity. In the remembered market, those concerns remain grounded in the mother’s labor and in a place the narrator can revisit when he longs to recover their shared life.