‘And the laundry to go?’ Gervaise asked timidly.
‘No, thank you,’ the old woman replied. ‘There won’t be anything this week.’
Gervaise went pale. They were taking their custom away from her. At this, she lost her head completely and had to sit down on a chair, because her legs were failing her. She didn’t try to defend herself, finding nothing to say except:
‘Is Monsieur Goujet ill then?’
Yes, he was sick, he’d had to come home instead of going to the forge and had just gone to lie down on his bed to rest. Mme Goujet spoke gravely, wearing as always her black dress and with her white face framed in her nun’s coif. The day rate for bolt-makers had been lowered once again: it had gone down from nine francs to seven, because of the machines that, now, were taking over most of the work. So they were trying to save money on everything; she was going to start doing her own laundry again. Of course, it would have been convenient just now if the Coupeaus could have paid back the money that her son had lent them. But she was not the one to send in the bailiffs because they couldn’t pay. When she began to speak of the debt, Gervaise lowered her head and seemed to be following the movement of the needle as it remade the loops, one by one.
‘And yet,’ the lace-maker went on, ‘if you were to make a little effort, you could manage to pay it off. After all, you eat very well, and spend a lot, I’m sure… If you were only to give us ten francs a month – ’
She was interrupted by Goujet’s voice, calling: ‘Mother! Come here!’
When she got back and sat down, almost immediately, she changed the subject. The blacksmith had doubtless told her not to ask Gervaise for money. But, in spite of herself, after five minutes, she once more mentioned the debt. Oh, she’d known what would happen! The roofer was drinking up the shop and he would take his wife down with him. If her son had listened to what she said, he would never have lent those five hundred francs. By now, he would be married, instead of pining away with nothing to look forward to except misery all his life. She started to get carried away, saying harsh things and openly accusing Gervaise of conspiring with Coupeau to take advantage of her booby of a son. Yes, there were some women who would play the hypocrite for years, until their misdemeanours finally came to light.
‘Mother! Mother!’ Goujet’s voice called, this time more fiercely.
She got up and when she returned, picked up her lace-work and said: ‘Go in, he wants to see you.’
Trembling, Gervaise left the door open. The scene disturbed her deeply because it was like an admission of their feelings in front of Mme Goujet. The little bedroom was calm, with pictures around the walls and a narrow iron bedstead, like the room of a fifteen-year-old boy. Goujet’s large form, all his strength drained by what Mother Coupeau had told him, was stretched out on the bed, red-eyed, his fine yellow beard still wet with tears. He must have pounded his pillow with his great fists, in the first moment of his fury, because the feathers were escaping through the torn pillowcase.
‘Listen, mother is wrong,’ he told the laundress, almost in a whisper. ‘You don’t owe me anything. I don’t want to hear a word about it.’
He had sat up and was looking at her. At once, large tears welled up in his eyes.
‘Are you ill, Monsieur Goujet?’ she murmured. ‘Please tell me what is wrong.’
‘Thank you, nothing. I tired myself out yesterday. I am going to sleep a little.’
Then his heart broke and he was unable to restrain himself:
‘Oh, my God! My God! It should never have been, never! You swore to me. And now it’s happened! It’s happened! Oh, my God! I can’t bear it! Go away!’
He gestured for her to leave, gently begging her. Instead of going over to the bed, she went out, as he asked her to, bemused, with nothing to say that would comfort him. In the room next door, she picked up her basket, but still found herself unable to go out, trying to find the right words… Mme Goujet went on with her darning, without looking up; eventually, she was the one who said:
‘Very well, good-evening. Send me back my laundry. We’ll settle up later.’
‘Yes, that’s right. Good-evening,’ Gervaise stammered.
She shut the door slowly, casting a final glance at this clean, well-ordered household, feeling that she was leaving a part of her own decency behind here. She went back towards the shop with the listless manner of a cow going back to its field, not troubling about the way. Mother Coupeau was on a chair by the boiler, out of bed for the first time. But the laundress did not even say a word against her: she was too tired, her bones ached as though she had been beaten, and she thought that in the end life was simply too hard, but if one didn’t die straight away, one couldn’t be expected to tear one’s own heart out.
From now on, Gervaise didn’t give a damn for anything. She had a vague wave that she would make, which meant that everyone could go to hell. With every fresh worry, she resorted increasingly to her one pleasure, which was eating three times a day. The shop could have collapsed; provided she was not underneath it, she would have left it behind happily, without a shirt on her back. And the shop was collapsing, not all at once, but bit by bit day after day. One by one the customers lost patience and took their washing elsewhere. M. Madinier, Mlle Remanjou, even the Boches, had gone back to Mme Fauconnier, who was more punctual and more careful. People eventually got tired of asking for the same pair of stockings for three weeks on end and wearing shirts with last Sunday’s grease stains still on them. Gervaise didn’t miss a mouthful, but said good riddance, giving them all a piece of her mind and saying she was only too delighted at not having to handle their filthy clothes. Yes, indeed! The whole neighbourhood could leave, she would be spared a fine heap of muck; and she would have that much less work. Meanwhile, she kept only those who paid badly, a few tarts and Mme Gaudron, whose washing smelled so bad that no other laundry in the Rue Neuve wanted to take it. The business was in ruins, she had to dismiss her last assistant, Mme Putois, and was left with only her apprentice, squinting Augustine, who was getting more stupid as she got older. Even then, they did not always have enough work between the two of them, but would sit around on a stool for a whole afternoon. In short, the slippery slope. She was heading for disaster.
Of course, with laziness and poverty, in came dirt. It was impossible to recognize the lovely sky-blue shop that had once been Gervaise’s pride and joy. The window-panes and window-frames, which no one bothered to wash, were spattered from top to bottom with mud from passing carriages. In the window, hanging on the brass rod, were three grey rags, left behind by customers who had died in hospital. Inside, it was still more squalid. The damp from the clothes hanging up to dry had loosened the wallpaper; the Pompadour chintz was falling in shreds that hung like spiders’ webs laden with dust; the boiler, broken, with holes driven in it by the poker, was surrounded in its corner by the tangle of old iron that you find in a junk shop; the trestle-table seemed to have served a whole regiment, so stained it was with coffee and wine, and smeared with jam and grease from the Monday feasts. On top of all this, there was a sour odour of starch, a smell compounded of mould, burned fat and grime. But Gervaise felt quite contented here. She had not noticed the shop deteriorate; she gave in and got used to the torn paper and the greasy woodwork, just as she managed to wear torn skirts and to stop washing her ears. Dirt was even a warm nest in which she liked to crouch. Letting things slide, waiting for dust to fill up the holes and leave a velvet blanket over everything, feeling the house sink around one into a drowsy idleness: all this intoxicated her with a real sensual pleasure. Let her be left in peace, first and foremost; she didn’t care about the rest. Even though her debts were still mounting, they no longer worried her. She was losing all sense of honesty; she would pay, or perhaps not: it was all left vague, she preferred not to know about it. When a tradesman refused to allow her any more credit, she would open an account with the one next door. She owed money everywhere and had debts every ten yards along the street. In the Rue
de la Goutte-d’Or alone, she no longer dared walk in front of the coal merchant’s, the grocer’s or the fruiterer’s; so, when she went to the wash-house, she had to make a detour by the Rue des Poissonniers, a round trip often minutes at least. Shopkeepers started to call her a cheat. One evening, the man who had sold Lantier’s furniture caused an uproar among the neighbours, yelling that he would give her a good hiding and repossess her goods if she didn’t cough up his money. Naturally, such scenes left her trembling all over, but she would shake herself like a beaten dog and that was it; she wouldn’t eat with any less appetite the next evening. What a cheek they had, bothering her! She didn’t have any money – she couldn’t mint it for herself, could she? In any case, shopkeepers stole so much themselves, they should expect to wait. And she would go back to sleep in her hole, trying not to think of what must inevitably happen. Yes, damnation take it, she would go under one day, but until then she preferred to be left alone.
Meanwhile, Mother Coupeau was enjoying a recovery. For another year, the business staggered on. Needless to say, in summer, there was always a little more work: the white skirts and cotton dresses of the streetwalkers from the outer boulevard. It had turned into a gradual collapse, their noses scraping a little more in the mud each week, yet some ups as well as downs – evenings when they were rubbing their bellies before an empty larder, others when they were stuffing themselves with veal. Mother Coupeau was constantly to be seen on the streets with parcels hidden under her apron, strolling towards the pawnbroker’s in Rue Polonceau. She hunched her back, with the smug and greedy look of a pious old woman on her way to mass; and she took a certain pleasure in it. All these money dealings amused her, all this haggling among pedlars and pawnshops titillated an old gossip’s fancy. Shop assistants in the Rue Polonceau knew her well, calling her ‘Old Mother Four Francs’, because she always asked for four francs when they offered her three, on parcels as large as two sous’ worth of butter. Gervaise would have flogged off the business; she was seized with a passion for putting things in hock and would have shaved her head if anyone had offered her money against her hair. It was too convenient: one couldn’t help going there for a bit of change when one was short of the money for a loaf of bread. The whole caboodle went the same way: linen, clothes, even tools and furniture. To start with, she took advantage of good times to get stuff out of the pawnbroker’s, only to put it back in hock a week later. Then she began not to care about her possessions and let them go, selling the pawn slips. Only one thing broke her heart and that was putting her clock in pawn, to pay a twenty-franc bill when the bailiff came with a summons. Up to then, she had sworn she would starve rather than part with her clock. When Mother Coupeau took it away in a little hat box, she slumped into a chair, her arms dangling, tears in her eyes, as though her whole fortune had been taken away. But when Mother Coupeau came back with twenty-five francs, this unexpected loan – five francs more than she had expected – consoled her. She immediately sent the old woman back out to fetch four sous’ worth of brandy in a glass, simply to celebrate the hundred-sou piece. Often nowadays, when they were getting on well, they would have a tipple together on the corner of the trestle-table – a mixture of spirits and cassis. Mother Coupeau had a knack of bringing a full glass back in the pocket of her apron, without spilling a drop. No need for the neighbours to know, was there? The truth was that the neighbours knew perfectly well. The fruiterer, the tripe merchant and the grocer’s boys would say: ‘How about that! The old girl’s going to my aunt’s’; or: ‘Look: the old girl’s bringing her hooch back in her pocket.’ Inevitably, this turned people even more against Gervaise. She was guzzling it all up, she would soon have done for her business altogether. Yes, indeed: three or four more mouthfuls and the place would be as clean as a picked bone.
In the midst of this general disintegration, Coupeau prospered. The confounded old soak was in fine form. He was getting positively fat on a diet of vino and vitriol. He ate a lot and made fun of that beanpole Lorilleux who said that drink killed people, and would answer him by tapping his belly, his skin stretched over the fat, as taut as a drum. He would perform a concert on it, for vespers after an evening’s drinking, with drum rolls and thumpings that would have made a tooth-puller’s fortune in the fairground. But Lorilleux, annoyed because he had no stomach, said that it was unhealthy yellow fat. No matter. Coupeau drank still more, for the sake of his health. His greying hair would flare up in the wind like a glass of lighted brandy. His drunkard’s face with its monkey’s jaw was now seasoned with shades of winey blue. And he was as joyfully childish as ever, brushing his wife aside if she tried to tell him about her problems. Should a man have to stoop to bother about such irritations? If there was no bread in the larder, it wasn’t his problem. He had to have his grub morning and evening, and he didn’t mind where it came from. When he spent weeks without working, he became still more demanding. Meanwhile, he was still slapping Lantier on the back in a friendly fashion. Of course, he knew nothing of his wife’s misconduct; at any rate, people like the Boches and the Poissons swore by heaven that he didn’t suspect a thing and that it would be a terrible disaster if he ever found out. But his own sister, Mme Lerat, would shake her head and say that she knew some husbands who didn’t mind. One night, Gervaise herself, coming back from the hatter’s, had felt her blood run cold when, in the darkness, she got a slap on the backside; but in the end she managed to talk herself round into believing that she had knocked herself against the bedstead. Honestly, the situation was too frightful: surely her husband wouldn’t amuse himself by playing tricks on her.
Lantier, too, was not wasting away. He took good care of himself, measuring his belly by the belt on his trousers, constantly afraid that he might have to tighten or loosen the buckle: he considered himself just right and, out of vanity, wanted to avoid either putting on weight or losing it. This made him fussy about his food, because he would weigh up every dish according to its effect on his waistline. Even when there was not a sou in the house, he had to have eggs, cutlets and other things that were nourishing, but light. Since he had started to share the boss with her husband, he considered he had an entirely equal share in the household, he would pick up any twenty-sou pieces lying around, had Gervaise at his beck and call, grumbled, yelled and seemed even more at ease than the roofer. In short, it was a home with two masters; and the second-hand master was the cleverer, the one who dragged the blanket over to his side of the bed and took first choice in everything: wife, board and all the rest. He was plucking the Coupeaus, wasn’t he? And he didn’t mind who knew it! Nana was his pet still, because he liked nice little girls; but he paid less and less attention to Etienne, because boys, in his view, should learn to manage for themselves. He always seemed to be there when someone came looking for Coupeau, in his slippers and shirtsleeves, emerging from the back of the shop with the bored look of a husband being disturbed; and he would answer for Coupeau – it was all the same, according to him.
It was not a whole lot of laughs for Gervaise, living between the two of these gentlemen. She had no complaints about her health, thank God, though she was also putting on weight. But it was often too much for her, having these two men on her back, to look after and keep happy. God only knows, one husband is enough trouble. The worst thing was that they got on so well, the sly dogs! They never argued, but grinned across the table at one another after dinner, in the evening, leaning on their elbows; and they would be snuggling up to each other all day long, like a couple of pampered pleasure-loving cats. On days when they did come home in a bad mood, she was the butt of them both. Go on! Thump the animal! She had a broad back, and it cemented their friendship to bawl her out together. Heaven help her if she tried to protest! At the beginning, when one of them yelled, she would silently plead with the other out of the corner of her eye, to elicit a word of support. The trouble was, it hardly ever worked. Nowadays she took it as it came and bent her heavy shoulders, realizing that they enjoyed kicking her about, because she was so
round, a real football. Coupeau, who was very foul-mouthed, called her atrocious names, while Lantier, on the other hand, picked on her silliness, with outlandish words that no one uses, which was even more hurtful. Fortunately, one can get used to anything: the two men’s insults and unfairness eventually ran off her smooth skin like water off an oiled cloth. By the end she even preferred it when they were angry, because on the occasions when they were being nice, they were more of a pain, constantly making demands and not letting her iron a single bonnet in peace. At such times, they asked for little snacks, wanted salt, or no salt; she had to say, ‘yessir, nossir’, pet them one after the other and wrap them each up in cottonwool. After a week, she was aching from head to foot and staring wildly, like a mad thing. It can wear a woman out in no time, that sort of work.
Yes, Coupeau and Lantier were wearing her away, that was it. They were burning her at both ends, as they say about candles. Of course, the roofer had no education, but the hatter had too much, or rather he had an education like an unkempt person has a white shirt with stains on it. One night, she dreamed that she was on the brink of a well; Coupeau was shoving her with his fist, while Lantier was tickling her back to make her jump more quickly. That’s how her life was. Oh, she was getting plenty of help, so it was not surprising if she let herself go. The neighbours were hardly fair to blame her for the bad habits she was picking up, because the trouble was not of her making. At times, when she thought about it, a shudder ran through her. Then she would think that things could, after all, be worse. For example, it was better to have two men than to lose both arms. And she considered her situation to be natural, like that of so many others; she tried to get what happiness she could out of it. The thing that proved it was all getting cosy and friendly was that she didn’t dislike Coupeau any more than she did Lantier. In a play she had been to at the Théâtre de la Gaieté, she once saw this slut who hated her husband so much that she poisoned him, for the sake of her lover; and this made Gervaise angry, because she felt nothing like that in her own heart. Wasn’t it more sensible to live together, the three of them, in harmony? No, no, she didn’t need any of that nonsense, which stirred things up; already, life was no joking matter. In short, in spite of their debts and the threat of poverty, she would have told you she would be quite calm and contented, if only the roofer and the hatter roughed her up and bawled her out less often.