Christmastime in Les Halles outside the Baltard pavilions on a damp Saturday morning in December. It is the day of the Christmas flower market held in a covered through road next to the fresh fish pavilion - "le pavillon de la maree", or "le pavillon des poissons". Customers did not carry out huge quantities of flowers - it was left to the porters inside. This porter with his rented diable (barrow) is waiting in the crowd beyond the barrier for his customer who is buying flowers and Christmas greenery and who will have the goods brought out to him. The customer or buyer will typically be a flower shop owner, a buyer for a restaurant or even a dealer from another market. The porter will load up the barrow and the customer will send him off to deliver the order. Christmastime is a big buying time and crowds of people are milling around or queueing up anxiously waiting to be allowed in. There is a grey winter light and photographer Harold Chapman recalls that... "the light is so weak it is very difficult to hold the camera vertically. I would practise for ages. I could never get a good sharp picture - I would be out of breath if I took too many vertical pictures. It was a strain, a feat for me to hold the camera steady - but that is only in bad light." The pavilions were made of iron, brick, wood and glass. Inside the covered through road is the exposed iron framework of cast and wrought iron. In the carreau forain in Rue Rambuteau, Quartier des Halles, 1er arrondissement, Right Bank, Paris, France, circa 1960s.