‘You had an excuse,’ she went on. ‘Someone had just played a really foul trick on you. Oh, I’m fair-minded, now! In your place, I would have got out a knife.’
She took another three sips, whistling on the edge of the glass; then she abandoned her drawling tone and added quickly, without pausing:
‘Not that it brought them any luck; my God, no luck at all! They went to live in some hole near La Glacière, in a filthy street where there is always mud up to your knees. I went there one morning, two days later, to have lunch with them. It was the devil’s own job to get there on the bus, I tell you! Well, my dear, I found them already having a row. Honestly! When I came in they were hitting each other. Huh! Nice pair of love-birds they were! You know, Adèle is no better than she should be. I know she’s my sister, but that doesn’t stop me saying that she’s a real slut under the skin. She played a whole lot of really mean tricks on me; it would take me too long to tell you all of them, and in any case all that’s between me and her. As for Lantier, well, you know him well enough yourself, he’s not much use either. A right little gentleman, isn’t he? One who’ll have the skin off your back as soon as look at you! And when he hits you, it’s with a closed fist. So they gave one another a really good battering. You could hear them thumping away as you came up the stairs. That very same day, the police arrived. Lantier wanted a soup with oil, some muck they eat down South; and since Adèle thought it was disgusting, they chucked the bottle of olive oil at each other’s faces, then the saucepan, the soup tureen and the whole works – in short, what ensued was a battle to stir up the entire neighbourhood.’
She talked about other fights, and went on and on about the two of them, describing things that would make your hair stand on end. Gervaise listened to all this in silence, her face pale, with a tic at the corner of her mouth, which looked like a little smile. It was almost seven years since she had had any news of Lantier; and she would never have thought that the name ‘Lantier’, murmured in her ear in this way, would give her such a warm feeling in the pit of her stomach. No, she had not thought she would be so curious about the fate of that wretch, who had behaved so badly towards her. She could no longer feel jealous of Adèle now, but she did laugh to herself at the disputes between the couple and imagined the girl’s body covered in bruises, which amused her and gave her a feeling of being avenged. She could have stayed there until the following morning, listening to Virginie’s stories.
She didn’t ask any questions, because she didn’t want to appear that interested. It was as though, suddenly and unexpectedly, someone had filled in a hole for her: now her past led directly to her present.
Eventually, Virginie stuck her nose back in the glass; she was sucking the sugar, with her eyes half closed. At this, realizing that she ought to say something, Gervaise adopted an expression of indifference and asked:
‘Are they still living at La Glacière, then?’
‘Heavens, no!’ the other woman answered. ‘Didn’t I tell you? They split up a week ago. One fine morning, Adèle went off with her things; and Lantier was in no hurry to go running after, I can tell you.’
The laundress let out a little cry and said quite loudly:
‘So they’re not together any longer!’
‘Who’s that?’ Clémence asked, breaking off her conversation with Mother Coupeau and Mme Putois.
‘No one,’ said Virginie. ‘People you don’t know.’
But she looked at Gervaise and noticed that she was strangely agitated. She came closer and appeared to take a malign pleasure in going over her story again. Then, suddenly, she asked what Gervaise would do, if Lantier should come sniffing around her; because, after all, men are such odd creatures and Lantier might well decide to return to his first love. Gervaise drew herself up, in a very prim and haughty manner. She was married, she would quite simply throw Lantier out. There couldn’t be anything between them now, not even a handshake. Honestly, she would have to be entirely lacking in feeling even to look that man in the face again.
‘Of course, I know,’ she said, ‘Etienne is his; there’s a tie there that I cannot break. If Lantier should want to get close to Etienne, I would send the boy to him, because no one can stop a father loving his child. But, where I’m concerned, Madame Poisson, I assure you, I should rather be chopped into pieces than allow him to lay a finger on me. And that’s final.’
As she spoke these last words, she traced the outline of a cross in the air, as if to seal her vow for ever. Then, wishing to break off the conversation, she pretended to come to herself with a start, and shouted at the girls:
‘Hey, now, you lot! Do you think the washing will iron itself? What lazybones you are! Hop, hop! To work!’
The women were in no hurry, drowsy and heavy with a stupor of laziness, their arms hanging by their skirts, still holding their empty glasses in one hand, with a few coffee grounds in the bottom of each one. And they went on talking.
‘It was little Célestine,’ Clémence was saying. ‘I knew her. She had a phobia about cat’s hair. You know, she saw cat’s hair everywhere and was constantly turning her tongue round like this, because she thought her mouth was full of it.’
‘Now, once,’ said Mme Putois, ‘I had a friend who had a tapeworm. Oh, they’re so fussy those creatures! It would play havoc with her stomach when she didn’t give it chicken. Imagine: the husband earned seven francs and it all went on titbits for the worm…’
‘I would have cured her at once,’ Mother Coupeau said, breaking in. ‘Good Lord, yes: you just swallow a grilled mouse and that poisons the worm immediately.’
Gervaise herself had slipped back into a pleasant state of idleness. But she shook herself and stood up. Well, I never! An afternoon spent doing nothing! That was hardly the way to keep your purse full. She was the first to go back, to her curtains, but only to find that they had been dirtied by a spot of coffee, so before picking up the iron, she had to rub the stain with a damp cloth. The girls stretched in front of the stove and reluctantly hunted for their iron-holders.
As soon as Clémence moved, she had a fit of coughing, which racked her whole body. Then she finished her man’s shirt, pinning up the sleeves and the collar. Mme Putois had gone back to her petticoat.
‘Well, goodbye then,’ said Virginie. ‘I only came down to get a few ounces of gruyère. Poisson must think I’ve been frozen to the spot.’
However, after she had gone about three yards along the pavement, she returned and opened the door again, to say that she could see Augustine at the end of the street, sliding about on the ice with some kids. The little hussy had been gone for two hours at least. She ran in, red-faced, breathless, with her basket over her arm and her chignon stuck together with a snowball; and she let herself be scolded, with a sly look, saying that you couldn’t walk because it was so slippery. Some good-for-nothing lad must have filled her pockets with ice, as a joke, because quarter of an hour later, her pockets began to spray the shop like watering-cans.
From now on, every afternoon was spent like that. The shop became the best place to go in the neighbourhood if you felt the cold. The whole of the Rue de la Goutte-d’Or knew that it was warm there. There were always talkative women warming themselves in front of the stove, with their skirts pulled up to their knees, forming a little coterie. Gervaise was proud of her good warmth and invited people in – she played the hostess, as the Lorilleux and the Boches said maliciously. The truth was that she remained obliging and helpful, so much so that she would bring the poor inside when she saw them shivering in the street. In particular, she developed a liking for a former house-painter, an old man of seventy who lived in a cubby-hole in the building, where he was shivering and starving to death. He had lost his three sons in the Crimea9 and, for the last two years, unable to hold a brush, had been living as best he could. When Gervaise saw Old Bru stamping around in the cold to keep warm, she would call him in and find a place for him beside the stove; she would often force him to eat a crust of bread with som
e cheese. Old Bru’s body was bent, his beard grey and his face lined like an old apple. He would stay there for hours, saying nothing and listening to the sizzling of the coke. Perhaps he was remembering his fifty years’ work up a ladder: half a century spent painting doors and whitewashing ceilings in every corner of Paris.
‘Now, then, Bru,’ the laundress would ask him sometimes, ‘what are you thinking about?’
‘Nothing, all sorts of things,’ he would answer, as though dazed.
The girls joked, saying that he was lovesick. But he didn’t hear them. He would slip back into his pose of silent melancholy and meditation.
From that time onwards, Virginie often raised the subject of Lantier with Gervaise. She seemed to enjoy making her think about her former lover, for the pleasure of embarrassing her by speculating about him. One day, she remarked that she had met him; and, when the laundress said nothing, she went no further, only giving her to understand the next day that he had spoken about her at some length and with a good deal of affection. Gervaise was very disturbed by these whispered conversations, which took place in a corner of the shop. Lantier’s name still gave her a burning sensation in the pit of her stomach, as though the man had left something of himself there, under her skin. Naturally, she thought she was quite secure: she wanted to live like a decent, respectable woman, because that is half of happiness. So she did not consider Coupeau in the matter, having nothing against her husband to reproach herself with, even in thought. She thought of the blacksmith, her heart trembling and sick. It seemed to her that the memory of Lantier, coming back to her and slowly taking possession of her in this way, made her unfaithful to Goujet, to their unavowed love, which had the sweetness of friendship. Her days were sad when she felt guilty towards her dear friend. She would have liked to have had affectionate feelings only for him, outside her marriage. All these thoughts took place in her on some high plane far above any base desires that Virginie was trying to see reflected in her face.
When spring came, Gervaise went to find solace with Goujet. She was unable now to sit down and think about nothing, without her thoughts immediately turning to her first lover; she saw him leaving Adèle, packing his clothes at the bottom of their old trunk and coming back to her, with the trunk on a carriage. On days when she went out, she was suddenly possessed by ridiculous terrors, there in the street: she thought she could hear Lantier’s footsteps behind her and didn’t dare turn round, trembling, imagining that she could feel his hands grasping her waist. Of course, he must be spying on her; one afternoon, he would pounce on her; the idea put her in a cold sweat, because he would surely kiss her on the ear, as he used to do, to tease her, in the old days. It was this kiss that terrified her: anticipating it made her deaf, it filled her with a humming noise, against which she could no longer make out the heavy beating of her heart. So, when these fears gripped her, the forge was her only shelter. There she became once more calm and smiling, under Goujet’s protection, his sounding hammer driving away her bad dreams.
What a happy time it was! The laundress took particular care of her customer in the Rue des Portes-Blanches, always taking the washing back to her herself, because the trip, every Friday, was an ideal excuse for going down the Rue Marcadet and going into the forge. As soon as she came round the corner of the street, she felt light and merry, as if she were going for a picnic in the midst of this waste ground, surrounded by grey factories. The highway, black with coal-dust, and the tufts of steam above the roofs, pleased her as much as a mossy lane through a wood on the outskirts of town, hedged on both sides by great clumps of greenery. And she liked the pale horizon, with the stripes of tall factory chimneys standing up against it, and the Butte Montmartre,10 which cut off the sky, with its houses, white, dotted with regular lines of windows. Then, as she reached the forge, she would slow down, jumping over the puddles, taking pleasure in crossing the cluttered, unpeopled corners of the building site. At the far end, the forge glowed, even in the middle of the day, its heart thumping to the rhythm of the hammers. When she went in, she was quite red, the little blonde hairs on the nape of her neck floating loose like those of a woman arriving for an assignation. Goujet was waiting for her, his arms bare, his chest bare, hammering harder on the anvil on those days so as to be heard from further away. He felt her presence, greeting her with a hearty, silent laugh from behind his golden beard. But she didn’t want to distract him from his work and begged him to pick up his hammer, because she liked him more when he was swinging it in his great arms, bulging with muscles. She would go and tap Etienne lightly on the cheek as he hung on the bellows, and stay there for an hour, watching the bolts. They didn’t say ten words to one another. They could not have expressed their affection better had they been all alone in a room together behind a double-locked door. The sniggering of Bec-Salé (also known as Drinks-Without-Thirst) bothered them not one jot, because they didn’t hear it. After a quarter of an hour, she started to feel stifled: the heat, the strong smells and the rising smoke made her feel dizzy, while the dull blows shook her from heel to head. At these moments, she wanted nothing more: this was her pleasure. If Goujet had seized her in his arms, it would not have given her such a powerful feeling. She went closer to him to feel the wind of his hammer on her cheeks, to be part of the blow that he was striking. When the sparks pricked her soft hands, she did not move them away but, on the contrary, took pleasure in this rain of fire that stung her skin. Naturally, he sensed the happiness that she enjoyed there, and kept back the hardest pieces for Fridays, so that he might court her with his full strength and all his skill; he did not spare himself, but risked splitting the anvil in two, panting, his back shuddering with the joy he was giving her. So, for the length of one whole spring, their love filled the forge with a stormy rumbling. It was an idyll in a giant’s smithy, in the midst of the blazing coals and the echoing shock of the shed, with its sooty black frame cracking under the strain. All that crushed iron, kneaded like red wax, preserved the rough impress of their loving. On Fridays, when the laundress left the Rue de la Gueule-d’Or, she would go slowly back up the Rue des Poissonniers, contented, weary, but calm in flesh and in spirit.
Little by little, her fear of Lantier faded and she became reasonable again. At that time, she might have lived very happily, were it not for Coupeau, who was definitely taking a turn for the worse. One day – when she was coming back from the forge, as it happened –she thought she saw Coupeau in Old Colombe’s drinking den, ordering rounds of fire-water, with Mes-Bottes, Bibi-la-Grillade and Bec-Salé (also known as Drinks-Without-Thirst). She walked quickly past, not wanting it to seem as though she were spying on them. But she turned back: yes, it really was Coupeau who was tossing back his little glass of schnapps with a practised gesture. So he had been lying: he really had got on to the hard stuff now. She went home in despair, gripped by her deep horror of hard liquor. She could forgive him wine, because wine nourishes a workman; but liquor, on the other hand, was filth, a poison that took away his appetite for bread. Oh, the government really ought to prevent them from making that foul muck!
When she got to the Rue de la Goutte-d’Or she found the whole house at sixes and sevens. Her workers had left the laundry and were standing in the courtyard, looking upwards. She questioned Clémence.
‘It’s old Bijard, giving his wife a good hiding,’ said the girl. ‘He was in the doorway, drunk as a Pole, waiting for her to come back from the wash-house. He drove her all the way up the stairs with his fists and now he’s thumping her up there in their room… Listen, can’t you hear the screams?’
Gervaise went quickly upstairs. She was fond of Mme Bijard, her washerwoman, who was as brave as they come. She was hoping to put a stop to it. Upstairs, on the sixth, the door of the room was open and a few of the tenants were fussing around on the landing, while Mme Boche was standing in front of the door and shouting: ‘Stop that, will you! We’ll call the constabulary, do you hear?’
No one dared go inside, because they knew Bijard,
a real brute of a man when he was drunk. Not that he was ever sober, as it happens. On the rare days when he worked, he would put down a litre of brandy beside his locksmith’s bench and take a swig straight from the bottle every half-hour. He couldn’t keep going otherwise. If you’d have put a lighted match near his mouth, he would have gone up like a torch.
‘But we can’t let him murder her!’ Gervaise said, shaking all over.
And she went in. The room, right under the roof, was bare and cold, emptied out by the man’s drunkenness: he would take the clothes off the bed to sell for drink. In the struggle, the table had rolled over to the window, the two chairs had toppled over with their legs in the air. Mme Bijard was lying in the middle of the floor, her skirts, still wet from the wash-house, clinging to her thighs, her hair pulled out, bleeding and groaning heavily, with long drawn-out ‘ohs’ ‘ahs’ whenever Bijard kicked her. To start with, he had struck her down with his two fists, now he was stamping on her.
‘Oh, the bitch! Oh, the bitch! Oh, the bitch!’ he was growling, in a husky voice, landing a new blow each time he said the word, repeating it obsessively, striking harder the more hoarse his voice became.
Then he lost his voice entirely, but he went on kicking silently, madly, standing stiff in his tattered blouse and overalls, his face purple beneath his dirty beard, his bald forehead covered in great red blotches. Outside, the neighbours were saying that he was beating her because she had refused to give him twenty sous that morning. They could hear Boche’s voice at the bottom of the stairs. He was calling for Mme Boche, shouting up to her: ‘Come back down, let them kill each other, it will be that much less trash!’