‘What about the gold?’ Gervaise said, in a half-whisper.
She looked anxiously in every corner, hunting through all the mess and grime for the splendour she had dreamed about.
Coupeau had started to laugh.
‘The gold?’ he said. ‘Look, there it is, and there, and here’s some at your feet!’
He had pointed in turn to the slender thread that his sister was working; then to another bundle of wire hanging on the wall, near the vice, just like a coil of iron wire; and then at last, getting down on all fours and reaching under the wooden boards that covered the workshop floor, he picked up a piece of scrap, a fragment like the end of a rusty needle. Gervaise protested. Surely this could not be gold, this blackish metal, as ugly as iron! He had to bite the piece for her and show the shining scar left by his teeth. And he continued with his explanation: the bosses supplied the gold wire, in the right alloy, and the workers started by pulling it through the wire die to get it to the correct thickness, taking care to soften it five or six times during the process, to make sure that it did not break. Oh, you needed strength and practice! His sister would not allow her husband to touch the dies because of his cough. She had strong arms: he had seen her draw gold as thin as a hair.
Meanwhile, Lorilleux was doubled over on his stool, seized by a fit of coughing. In between spasms he spoke, still without looking at Gervaise, as if he mentioned the fact solely for his own benefit, saying in a strangled voice:
‘I’m doing column chain.’
Coupeau made Gervaise get up: why didn’t she go closer so that she could see? The chain-maker grumbled his assent. He was rolling the wire that his wife had prepared around a ‘mandrel’, a very slender steel rod. Then he would give a light touch with the saw, which cut the wire along the whole length of the mandrel so that each turn formed a link. Then he soldered them. The links of the chain were placed on a large block of charcoal, he moistened each one with a drop of borax8 from the bottom of a broken glass at his side, and after that heated them until they were red-hot in the horizontal flame of a burner. Then, when he had around a hundred links, he went back to his intricate work, leaning on the edge of the ‘peg’, a piece of board rubbed smooth by the action of his hands. He bent the link with pincers, flattened it on one side, slipped it into the link already in place above and reopened it with a pin: all this was done so smoothly, one link following the other, and so fast, that the chain got longer as Gervaise watched, without her being able to follow or grasp exactly what was going on.
‘This is column chain,’ Coupeau said. ‘There are small links, heavy links, bracelet chains and ropes, but this is column chain. Lorillcux only makes column chain.’
The man gave a snigger of satisfaction. Still pinching the links of the chain, which were invisible as they passed between his black fingernails, he shouted:
‘I’ll tell you a thing, Cadet-Cassis! I was doing some sums this morning. I started when I was twelve, didn’t I? Well, do you know what length of column chain I must have made up to this day now?’
He raised his pale face and his red eyelids winked.
‘Eight thousand metres, d’you hear! Two leagues! What about it: a column two leagues long! You could put it round the necks of all the females in the neighbourhood. And it’s getting longer all the time, you know. I hope one day I’ll get from Paris to Versailles.’
Gervaise had gone to sit down again, disillusioned, finding everything here very ugly. She smiled, so as not to offend the Lorilleux. What bothered her most was the fact that there was no mention of her marriage, something that was so important to her and without which she would certainly not have come. The Lorilleux continued to treat her as an inquisitive intruder brought by Coupeau. When a conversation was at last struck up, it revolved only around the other tenants of the building. Mme Lorilleux asked her brother whether, while he was coming upstairs, he had chanced to hear the people on the fourth floor having a fight. Those Bénards were constantly knocking each other about: the husband would come home, drunk as a pig, and the wife was not perfect, either: she would yell out the most disgusting things. Then they spoke of the draughtsman on the first floor, that great beanpole Baudequin, who gave himself airs, but was always in debt, always smoking, and always shouting with his friends. M. Madinier’s cardboard-box factory was on its last legs: he had sacked another two girls the day before, and it would be no bad thing if he did go bust because he wasted all his money and let his kids go around without a stitch to wear. Mme Gaudron had a funny way of carding the wool for her mattresses because she was knocked up yet again, which was starting to be hardly decent at her age. The proprietor had just turned out the Coquets, on the fifth, because they owed three lots of rent – in addition to which they insisted on lighting their stove on the landing, even though, only the Saturday before, Mlle Remanjou, the old lady from the floor above them, had been taking back some of her dolls and come by just in time to save the Linguerlot child from getting burned all over. As for Mlle Clémence, the one who did ironing, what she got up to was her own business, but it had to be admitted, she loved animals and had a heart of gold. There now! What a shame for a lovely girl like that to sleep with any man who asked! One evening, they’d see her walking the streets, that’s for sure.
‘There you are: another one,’ Lorilleux said to his wife, giving her the piece of chain that he had been working on since lunch-time. ‘You can finish it off.’ And he added, with the obstinacy of a man who refuses to let go of a joke: ‘Another four and a half feet… We’re getting nearer to Versailles.’
Meanwhile, Mme Lorilleux heated the chain once more, ran it through the gauge and then dropped it into a little copper pot with a long handle, full of caustic soda,9 before putting it to descale on the forge. Gervaise was once more pushed forward by Coupeau so that she could watch this final process. When the gold had been descaled, it turned a dark-red colour. It was finished, ready to deliver.
‘It’s delivered as it is,’ the roofer explained. ‘There are polishers who rub it with cloths.’
But Gervaise felt that she couldn’t stand any more. The temperature was rising constantly and the heat stifled her. They left the door shut, because the slightest draught would go to Lorilleux’s chest. And, since no one was talking, still, about their marriage, she wanted to leave, so she lightly tugged at Coupeau’s jacket. He read her meaning. In fact, he too was starting to become slightly embarrassed and irritated by the pointed way in which the subject was being ignored.
‘Well, then, we’ll be going,’ he said. ‘We leave you to get on with your work.’
He hung around, shuffling his feet, for a moment, hoping for some word or allusion. At length, he decided to broach the subject himself:
‘Now then, Lorilleux, we’re counting on you to be a witness for my wife.’
The chain-maker looked up and feigned surprise, sniggering, while his wife, putting down her wires, stood in the middle of the workshop.
‘So, it’s serious, is it?’ Lorilleux said. ‘He’s an old rascal, this Cadet-Cassis; you never know when he’s pulling your leg.’
‘Ah, yes! So this is the young lady,’ the woman remarked, staring at Gervaise. ‘My God, there’s no advice we can give you… Still, it’s an odd idea, getting married. But if that’s what you want, the pair of you… When it doesn’t work, you’ve only got yourselves to blame, that’s all. And it’s not often it does work, not often… Not often at all…’
Lingering over these last few words, she shook her head, looking from the young woman’s face to her hands, then her feet, as though undressing her, to examine the pores of her skin. She must have found her better than she expected.
‘My brother’s quite free,’ she went on, tight-lipped. ‘Of course, the family might have wanted… One always makes these plans. But things turn out in such unexpected ways… Most of all, speaking for myself, I don’t want a row. Even if he’d brought us the lowest of the low, I’d have told him: “Go on, marry her, leave us out of it.
” Even so, he was not badly off here, with us. He’s plump enough: you can see we didn’t starve him. And he always had his soup hot, right on time. Tell me, Lorilleux, don’t you think that the lady looks like Thérèse; you know, the woman opposite, who died of a consumption?’
‘Yes, there is a resemblance,’ the chain-maker said.
‘And you have two children, it seems. Well, as far as that’s concerned, I told my brother: “I don’t understand you marrying a woman with two children.” Oh, don’t be cross, I’m only considering his interests; it’s quite natural… And, as well as that, you don’t look too strong… What do you say, Lorilleux: the young lady doesn’t look strong, does she?’
‘No, no, she’s not strong.’
Her leg was not mentioned, but Gervaise understood from their sidelong glances and pinched lips that they were referring to it. She remained there, in front of them, hugging her meagre shawl with the yellow palm leaves around her, and answering in monosyllables, like someone in front of a judge. Seeing how much it hurt her, Coupeau eventually shouted:
‘That’s enough now! It doesn’t make a scrap of difference what you say. The wedding will take place on Saturday, the 29th of July. I’ve worked it out with the almanack. Is that agreed? Do you have any objection?’
‘Oh, we don’t object to anything!’ his sister replied. ‘You didn’t need to ask us. I shan’t stop Lorilleux being a witness. All I want is a quiet life.’
Gervaise hung her head, not knowing what to do, and poked the end of her foot into a gap in the wooden planks that covered the floor of the workshop; then, fearing that she might have disturbed something when she took it out, bent down and started feeling around with her hand. Lorilleux quickly brought the lamp across and examined her fingers suspiciously.
‘You’ve got to be careful,’ he said. ‘Small bits of gold can stick to the bottom of one’s shoes and get carried away without anyone knowing.’
A great fuss ensued. The bosses did not allow a milligram of waste: he showed her the hare’s foot that he used to brush up the tiny particles of gold that stayed behind on the ‘peg’, and the leather apron that he put on his knees to catch any droppings. Twice every week the workshop was swept carefully and the dust kept so that it could be burned: the ashes were then sieved and every month they might recover as much as twenty-five or thirty francs’ worth of gold.
Mme Lorilleux kept her eyes fixed on Gervaise’s shoes.
‘But there’s nothing to get upset about,’ she muttered with a friendly smile. ‘The young lady can look at the soles of her shoes herself.’
Gervaise blushed deeply, sat down, lifted her feet and showed that there was nothing on them. Coupeau had already opened the door, shouting: ‘Night!’, in a brusque voice. He called to her from the corridor, so she followed him, muttering a brief goodbye: she hoped that they would meet again and that they would get on with one another. But the Lorilleux had already returned to their work at the back of the dark, poky room, where the little forge glowed like the last coal burning white in the massive heat of a furnace. A corner of the woman’s shift had slipped off her shoulder and her skin glowed red in the glare from the fire; she was drawing a new wire, her neck swelling with each tug, the muscles knotted like ropes. The husband, bending in the green light from the globe of water, had started a new chain, twisting each link with his pincers, flattening it on one side and putting it into the link above, opening it with the aid of a pin, continuously, mechanically, without pausing for a moment to wipe the sweat from his brow.
When Gervaise emerged from the corridor on to the sixth-floor landing, she could not help exclaiming, with tears in her eyes: ‘That doesn’t promise much happiness for us!’
Coupeau shook his head vigorously. Lorilleux would pay for the evening he had given them. Had you ever seen such a skinflint – thinking that they were about to carry off three grains of his gold-dust! All that nonsense was pure greed on their part. Perhaps his sister thought that he would never get married, so that she could save four sous by giving him dinner. No matter: it would take place on July the 29th. He didn’t give a damn about them!
But Gervaise, as she went down the stairs, felt sad even so, pursued by some demon of fear that made her search anxiously through the magnified shadows of the banisters. By this time, the stairway was asleep and deserted, lit only by the gaslight on the second floor, its diminished flame casting merely the flicker of a nightlight in the depths of this well of darkness. Behind the closed doors, one could almost hear the heavy silence, the exhausted sleep of workers who had gone to bed immediately after eating. However, a muffled laugh did emerge from the laundrywoman’s room, and a small shaft of light shone through the lock in Mlle Remanjou’s door: she was still cutting out gauze dresses for the thirteen-sou dolls with a tiny snipping of her scissors. Downstairs, in Mme Gaudron’s, a child was still crying. And the cisterns gave out an even stronger stench in the midst of this dark, heavy silence.
Then, in the yard, while Coupeau was asking the concierge in a singsong voice to open up for them, Gervaise turned round and looked at the house one last time. It appeared to have grown beneath the moonless sky. The grey façades, seemingly cleansed of their leprous colour and smeared with shadows, extended as they rose, more naked still and entirely flat now that they were stripped of the rags that hung there in daytime drying in the sun. The closed windows slept. A few, here and there, brightly lit, opened their eyes and made some corners of the building appear to be squinting. Above each of the entrance halls, rowed up from top to bottom, the windows of the six landings, faintly illuminated, made a narrow shaft of white light. A ray of light from a lamp, shining down from the cardboard-box factory on the second floor, left a yellow band across the paved yard, cutting through the gloom that enveloped the ground-floor workshops. And, from the depths of this gloom, in the musty distance, drops of water fell one by one from the tap on the water-fountain, which had not been properly turned off, ringing in the midst of the silence. It seemed to Gervaise that the house was on top of her, weighing down, icily, across her shoulders. This was a fear that she had had from childhood, a silliness that she later laughed about.
‘Mind out!’ Coupeau shouted.
To leave the building, she had to jump over a huge sheet of water that had flowed out of the dyeworks. That day, the puddle was blue, the deep blue of summer skies, which the concierge’s little lamp dotted with stars.
CHAPTER 3
Gervaise didn’t want a big wedding. What was the sense in spending all that money? In addition to which, she was bit shy: she thought there was no point in spreading news of the marriage all round the neighbourhood. But Coupeau protested: they couldn’t just get married like that, not without at least having a meal with some friends. Oh, he didn’t give a fig for the neighbourhood! It would be something quite simple: a little outing in the afternoon, then they’d go and share a rabbit or two at the first chophouse or dining-rooms they saw. Needless to say, there’d be no music over dessert, no clarinet to give the ladies a chance to wiggle their bottoms. Just a drink, a toast and then everybody back home for a bit of shut-eye.
The roof-mender, with a nudge and a wink, made the young woman’s mind up for her when he swore that no one would have a good time: he would keep an eye on the glasses, to prevent anyone coming down with sunstroke. So he set about organizing a picnic for five francs a head at Auguste’s, at the Moulin-d’ Argent, on the Boulevard de la Chapelle. This was a little wine merchant’s where the prices were reasonable and there was a dance-floor behind the shop, in a courtyard with three acacia trees. They’d be fine on the first floor. Over the next ten days, he worked out the guest list at his sister’s in the Rue de la Goutte-d’Or: M. Madinier, Mlle Remanjou, Mme Gaudron and her husband. He even managed to get Gervaise to accept two of his friends: Bibi-la-Grillade and Mes-Bottes. Admittedly, Mes-Bottes had a bit of a thirst, but he had such a crazy appetite on top of it that they always invited him to picnics, just to see the landlord’s face at the s
ight of this bottomless pit shovelling away his twelve pounds of bread.
For her part, the young woman promised to bring her boss, Mme Fauconnier, and the Boches, who were fine people. All in all, there would be fifteen of them round the table, which was enough. When there are too many people, someone always ends up starting a row.
Meanwhile, Coupeau had no money. Without wishing to show off, he did intend to do things properly. He borrowed fifty francs from his boss, out of which he first bought the wedding ring, a gold one worth twelve francs, which Lorilleux got him from the factory for nine. Then he ordered a frock-coat, trousers and a waistcoat from a tailor in the Rue Myrha, putting down only twenty-five francs on account; his patent-leather shoes and bolivar1 were still serviceable. When he had put aside the ten francs for the meal – his contribution and that of Gervaise, the children being allowed in free – he had just six francs left, which was enough for a pauper’s mass. Admittedly, he had no love for those black-coats and it broke his heart to hand over his six francs to such sanctimonious imbeciles who had no need of his money to keep their whistles wet; but you had to admit that a marriage without a mass was not really a marriage. He went to bargain with them at the church himself and got tied up for an hour with a little old priest, in a dirty cassock, who was as tight-fisted as a market-trader. He had a good mind to slap his face. Then, as a joke, he asked if somewhere in the store he didn’t have a cut-price mass, not too shop-soiled, which might still serve for a nice, ordinary young couple. The little old man grumbled that God would have no pleasure in blessing their union, but did finally let him have his mass for five francs. Well, that was still twenty sous saved; he had twenty sous left over.