One evening, finding Gervaise alone in the apartment, Goujet came in and did not run away, as he usually did. He sat down and looked at her, as he smoked. He must have something serious to say, because he was turning it over and letting it mature, without managing to find a suitable form for it. Finally, after a long silence, he came to a decision and took his pipe out of his mouth so that he could say, without pausing: ‘Madame Gervaise, will you let me lend you some money?’
She had been leaning over a drawer, looking for dishcloths. She straightened up, blushing fiercely. Had he seen her then, that morning, standing in a trance in front of the shop, for nearly ten minutes? Goujet was smiling with embarrassment, as though he had suggested something hurtful. But she refused emphatically; she would never accept money, if she did not know when she would be able to pay it back. Then, the amount was really too much. And when, very disconcerted, he persisted, she eventually cried: ‘But what about your wedding? I cannot take the money for your wedding, can I?’
‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ he replied, blushing in his turn. ‘I’m not getting married any longer. You know, it was only an idea… Honestly, I’d much rather lend you the money.’
At that, both of them lowered their eyes. There was something very tender between them, which they did not speak about. And Gervaise accepted. Goujet had already told his mother. They crossed over the landing and went to see her straight away. The lace-maker was grave, a little sad, her calm face bent over her work. She did not want to upset her son, but she did not approve of Gervaise’s plans, and she said frankly why not: Coupeau was going to the bad, Coupeau would take all the money from the shop. Most of all, she could not forgive the roofer for refusing to learn to read and write. While he was convalescent, the blacksmith had offered to teach him, but the other man had told him to go to hell, saying that knowledge never fed anyone. The two workmen had almost fallen out over it, and each started to keep himself to himself. In any event, Mme Goujet, when she saw the pleading look of her big boy, became very well-disposed towards Gervaise. It was agreed that they would lend five hundred francs to their neighbours, the money to be reimbursed by a monthly payment of twenty francs. This arrangement would continue until the money was paid off.
‘What’s this! The blacksmith has his eye on you!’ Coupeau exclaimed, with a laugh, when he was told about it. ‘Oh, it doesn’t worry me. He’s such a great lump of bloke… We’ll give his money back to him, though I must say, if he was dealing with rogues, he’d be nicely duped!’
The very next day, the Coupeaus rented the shop. Gervaise spent all day running backwards and forwards from the Rue Neuve to the Rue de la Goutte-d’Or. In the neighbourhood, seeing her dashing about, lightfooted, so pleased that she even lost her limp, people said she must have had an operation.
CHAPTER 5
As it happened, the Boches had left the Rue des Poissonniers on the quarterly rent-day in April,1 to become the concierges at the big house in the Rue de la Goutte-d’Or. What a small world it was! One of Gervaise’s main worries, after living in peace without a concierge in her place in the Rue Neuve, was that she would once again fall under the tyranny of some fierce dragon with whom she would have to argue over a little spilled water or a door closed too noisily one evening. Concierges are such a vile breed!2 But with the Boches, it would be a pleasure. They knew each other and always got along well. They were like family.
On the day of the actual letting, when the Coupeaus went to sign the lease, Gervaise had a lump in her throat as she passed under the high door on to the street. She was really going to live in this house, as large as a small town, the endless thoroughfares of its stairs and corridors crossing and stretching into the distance. The grey frontage with the clothing drying out of the windows in the sun, the dingy courtyard with its uneven stones like a public square, and the murmur of sounds from those working behind the walls, all caused her great emotion, joy at last in being able to fulfil her ambition, and fear that she might not succeed, but be crushed in this huge struggle against hunger, the faint sounds of which she could hear around her. She felt that she was doing something very daring, throwing herself in to the very middle of an active piece of machinery, while the locksmith’s hammers and the cabinet-maker’s planes banged and whistled inside the ground-floor workshops. That day, the water from the dyeworks that flowed under the front porch was a very gentle apple-green. She stepped over it with a smile: the colour seemed to her a good omen.
They were actually to meet the owner in the Boches’ lodge. M. Marescot, a tall cutler from the Rue de la Paix, had once been a knife-grinder on the streets. Today, he was said to be worth several millions. He was a man of fifty-five, strong, bony, with a decoration and the large hands of a former workman. One of his amusements was to take the knives and scissors of his tenants and grind them himself, for the sheer pleasure of it. He had the reputation of not being snobbish, because he would spend hours with his concierges, hidden in the depths of the lodge, going over the accounts. He did all his business there. The Coupeaus found him sitting in front of Mme Boche’s greasy table, listening to how the dressmaker on the second floor, on Staircase A, had refused to pay and uttered an obscenity. Then, when they had signed the lease, he shook the roofer by the hand. He liked working men. At one time, he had needed to struggle himself; but hard work would get you anywhere. And, after counting the two hundred and fifty francs for the first quarter, which was then swallowed up by his huge pocket, he talked about his life and showed them his decoration.
Meanwhile, Gervaise was a little embarrassed by the attitude of the Boches. They pretended not to know her. They were fussing around the owner, bowing and scraping, hanging on his every word and nodding in approval. Mme Boche suddenly swept out and chased away a gang of children who were paddling around the water tap, which had been left open and was flooding the courtyard. And when she came back, stern and upright in her skirt, crossing the yard while slowly turning her head to the left and right, as if to reassure herself that everything in the house was in order, she pursed her lips to show the authority invested in her now that she had three hundred tenants to deal with. Boche had reverted once more to talking about the dressmaker on the second floor. He thought that she should be turned out. He calculated the number of quarters she was late, with the self-important air of a steward whose management might be compromised. M. Marescot approved of the idea of putting her out, but he wanted to wait until halfway through the next quarter. It was hard to throw people on the street, all the more so since it did not put a single sou in the landlord’s pocket. And Gervaise gave a slight shudder, wondering if they would throw her on the street, one day when some misfortune should make it impossible for her to pay. The lodge, smoke-filled and full of black furniture, had the humidity and livid atmosphere of a cellar: under the window, what light there was fell on the tailor’s workbench where an old coat was waiting to be turned; meanwhile, Pauline, the Boches’ child, a redheaded four-year-old, sat on the floor, quietly watching a piece of veal simmering on the stove, delighted by the strong odour of cooking as it wafted past.
M. Marescot was once more holding out his hand, when Coupeau mentioned repairs, reminding him of his verbal promise to speak about this later. But this irritated the landlord: he hadn’t promised anything; in any case, one never did repairs in a shop. However, he did agree to go and look at the premises, followed by the Coupeaus and Boche. The little draper had taken all his shelves, boxes and counters with him when he left, so the shop was entirely bare, revealing its black ceiling and cracked walls, with fragments of some old yellow wallpaper hanging off them. There, in the empty, echoing rooms, a furious argument broke out. M. Marescot shouted that it was up to tradespeople to decorate their own shops, because a tradesperson might ask for gold everywhere and he, the owner, couldn’t put gold everywhere; then he talked about when he had set up shop himself in the Rue de la Paix, which cost him more than twenty thousand francs. Gervaise, with her woman’s obstinacy, repeated an argume
nt that seemed to her irrefutable: in an apartment, he would stick up some wallpaper, wouldn’t he? Well, why didn’t he do the same for the shop as for an apartment? She was not asking for anything except to have the ceiling whitewashed and some paper hung.
Meanwhile, Boche remained aloof and inscrutable: he turned round, looked upwards and refused to commit himself. Coupeau tried winking at him, but he pretended not to want to exploit his great influence over the landlord. Eventually, however, he did give in to a slight grimace, a thin little smile together with a nod of the head: M. Marescot, with a pained and exasperated look, spreading his ten fingers in the spasmodic gesture of a miser whose gold is being torn away from him, gave way to Gervaise, promised the ceiling and the paper, on condition that she paid half the cost of the paper. And he hurried off, not wishing to hear any more about it.
After that, when Boche was alone with the Coupeaus, he clapped them round the shoulders and became quite expansive. What about that, then! They’d done it! Without him, they would never have had the wallpaper and the ceiling. Had they noticed how the landlord had given a sidelong glance in his direction and rapidly made up his mind when he smiled? Then, confidentially, he admitted that he was the real boss around the house: he decided when people took their holidays, rented a place if he liked the people and collected the quarterly rents, which he kept for a fortnight in his chest of drawers.
That evening, to thank the Boches, the Coupeaus decided it would be polite to send them a couple of litres of wine. They deserved a present.
The following Monday, the decorators arrived. The buying of the paper was a tremendous affair. Gervaise wanted some grey paper with blue flowers, to make the walls light and merrier. Boche offered to take her: she would choose. But he had strict orders from the owner: they were not to go above fifteen sous a roll. They spent an hour at the paper shop. The laundress kept coming back to a very sweet chintz at eighteen sous a roll, and was desperate to have it, finding all the other papers horrible. Finally, the concierge gave in: he would fix it, charging for an extra roll if he had to. And Gervaise, on her way home, bought some cakes for Pauline. She did not like to hold back; everyone who did her a favour benefited from it.
The shop was to be ready in four days. The work lasted three weeks. Originally, there was talk only of washing down the paintwork; but the painting, which had once been maroon in colour, was so dirty and so dingy that Gervaise let herself be persuaded to have all the front done in light blue, with yellow lettering. Then, the redecoration went on and on. Coupeau, who was still not back at work, used to come over early in the morning to see how it was going. Boche, too, would put down the coat or pair of trousers on which he was resewing the buttonholes and come to cast an eye over ‘his’ men. The two of them would stand watching the workers, hands behind their backs, smoking and spitting, spending all day weighing up every brushstroke. There were endless comments and deep meditations over the extraction of a single nail. The painters, two large, amiable fellows, kept on jumping down from their ladders so that they too could stand in the middle of the shop and join in the discussion, shaking their heads for hours on end as they examined the work they had started. A coat of whitewash was quite quickly slapped on the ceiling. It was the paintwork that threatened to take for ever. It refused to dry. At about nine o’clock in the morning, the painters appeared with their pots, put them down in a corner, cast an eye around, then vanished; they were not seen again. They had gone for lunch, or else they had a little job to polish off, near by, in the Rue Myrrha. At other times, Coupeau would take the whole gang to have a drink: Boche, the painters and any passing friends. Another afternoon wasted. Gervaise was going out of her mind. Suddenly, in two days, it was all finished, the painting done, the paper hung, the rubbish thrown into a truck. The workmen had dashed it off as though it were a game, whistling on their ladders or singing loud enough to deafen the whole neighbourhood.
The move took place immediately afterward. For the first few days, Gervaise was as happy as a child with a new toy, when she crossed over the street after going on some errand or other. She dawdled there, so that she could enjoy her home. From a distance, in the midst of the black row of other shop-fronts, hers seemed to her so light, so new and so merry, with its soft-blue sign, on which the words High Quality Laundry were painted in large yellow letters. In the window, which was closed in at the back with little muslin curtains and lined with blue paper to show off the whiteness of the clothing, some men’s shirts were on show, with women’s hats hanging above them, their ribbons tied to lengths of brass wire. And she thought her shop very pretty, with its sky-blue colour. Inside, you walked into more blue: the paper, an imitation of Pompadour chintz, represented a trellis with bindweed growing up it. The work-table, a huge piece of furniture that filled two thirds of the room, had a thick blanket over it, and, over that, to hide the trestles, a piece of cretonne with a design of large blueish leaves. Gervaise would sit on a stool, sighing with contentment, pleased with her fine property and gloating over her new tools. But the first thing she always looked at was her ‘machinery’, a cast-iron stove on which ten irons could heat up at a time, placed round the fire on sloping stands. She would go and kneel in front of it, examining it with the constant fear that that flibbertigibbet of an apprentice of hers might have cracked it by stoking it up with too much coke.
The living quarters, behind the shop, were very satisfactory. The Coupeaus slept in the first bedroom, where they also ate and did the cooking; a door, at the back, opened into the courtyard. Nana’s bed was in the right-hand room, a large box-room lit by a round fanlight, near the ceiling. As for Etienne, he shared the left-hand room with the dirty washing: there were always huge piles of that lying around on the floor. There was just one disadvantage, which the Coupeaus did not want to admit at first: the damp positively pissed out of the walls and you could not see clearly after three in the afternoon.
The new shop caused a great stir around and about. The Coupeaus were accused of going too fast and asking for trouble. It was true that they had spent the Goujets’ five hundred francs just moving in, and not even kept enough to live on for a fortnight, as they had promised each other they would. On the day when Gervaise took down the shutters for the first time, she had just six francs in her purse. But she wasn’t worried: customers had started to come and business looked good. A week later, on the Saturday before she went to bed, she spent two hours doing her sums on a piece of paper; and she woke Coupeau up, her face shining, to tell him that, if they were careful, they would make pots of money.
‘Well, I never!’ Mme Lorilleux exclaimed, all up and down the Rue de la Goutte-d’Or. ‘That half-witted brother of mine is in a pretty pickle! All we needed was for Tip-Tap to start making a living. Suits her, doesn’t it?’
There was now a feud to the death between the Lorilleux and Gervaise. At the start, while the shop was being done up, they had almost died with fury. Even when they saw the painters from a distance, they would cross over to the other pavement and go upstairs to their apartment with their teeth clenched. Whatever was the world coming to when that nonentity could have a blue shop! As a result, on the second day, when the apprentice emptied out a bowl of starch just as Mme Lorilleux was leaving the building, she stamped up and down the street telling everyone that her sister-in-law was getting her workers to insult her. And relationships were broken off. When they did happen to meet now, they just glared fearsomely at one another.
‘Yes, and a fine living it is!’ Mme Lorilleux went on. ‘We all know where it came from, the money for her dump. She earned it from the blacksmith… And there’s another fine lot for you! Didn’t the father cut his throat with a knife to spare the guillotine the trouble? In any case, it was some sordid affair of the kind!’
She quite openly accused Gervaise of sleeping with Goujet. She even lied, pretending that she had stumbled across the two of them one evening, on a bench on the outer boulevards. The idea of this liaison, and the pleasure that her sister-in-l
aw must be enjoying, exasperated her still further, upright and ugly as she was. Every day, what she felt in her heart rose to her lips: ‘What has she got, I ask you, that cripple, for anyone to love her? No one loves me, do they?’
Then, there were endless gossips with the neighbours. She told them the whole story. Come now, she’d given a bit of an odd look on the day of the wedding! Oh, she had an instinct for such things, she could already guess how it would turn out. Good heavens, yes: later on Tip-Tap had behaved so sweetly, the hypocrite, that she and her husband, out of respect for Coupeau, had agreed to be Nana’s godmother and godfather, even though it cost a pretty penny, a baptism like that. But now, they could take her word for it, Tip-Tap could be at death’s door and ask for a glass of water – she would certainly not be the one to give it to her! She couldn’t stand brazen women and shameless strumpets. As for Nana, she would always be welcome, if she wanted to come up and see her godparents: after all, the child was not responsible for her mother’s misdeeds, was she? As for Coupeau, he had no need of her advice. Any man, in his place, would have dunked his wife’s backside in a bucket of water and given her a good hiding; but it was his business; all they asked was that he should demand some respect for his family. God’s truth on it! If Lorilleux had caught her, Mme Lorilleux, in the act, she would have known all about it: he would have stuck his scissors in her belly.