‘Oh, it’s nothing at all, you’d hardly notice it,’ said Coupeau, trying to be gallant.
She shook her head: she knew very well that it was noticeable; at forty, she would be bent double. Then, softly, with a little laugh, she said: ‘You’re the odd one, fancying a cripple.’
At this, with his elbows still on the table, he thrust his face further forward and paid her increasingly risqué compliments, as if trying to intoxicate her. But she kept shaking her head, refusing to be tempted, though the tender voice caressed her. She listened, staring out into the street, with an apparently renewed interest in the growing crowd. Now people were sweeping up in the empty shops, and the greengrocer was taking off her last pan of chips, while the pork butcher gathered up the plates scattered across his counter. Groups of working men were coming out of all the eating-houses; fellows with beards were clapping one another on the back and fooling around like young boys, sliding noisily on the cobbles in their thick hobnailed boots; others, with both hands thrust deep into their pockets, smoked thoughtfully, their eyes blinking in the sunlight. They poured across the pavement, the roadway and the gutters, a lazy stream flowing out of the open doorways, eddying among the carriages and making a trail of overalls, smocks and old jackets, which seemed pale and drained of colour in the sheet of yellow light pouring down the street. Far off, factory bells were chiming, but the workmen were unhurried, pausing to light their pipes until, with bent backs, after calling to one another from one wine merchant’s to the next, they made up their minds to go back to work, dragging their feet. Gervaise was enjoying following three men, one tall and two shorter, who kept turning back every ten yards and eventually came back down the street, heading straight for Old Colombe’s drinking den.
‘Well, now,’ she muttered, ‘there are three fine idlers!’
‘And I know the tall one,’ said Coupeau. ‘It’s Mes-Bottes, a mate of mine.’
The saloon had filled up. People were talking very loudly, with outbursts of shouting or laughter breaking through the thick murmur of hoarse voices. From time to time, fists pounding on the counter made the glasses tinkle. All standing, with their hands folded on their stomachs or clasped behind their backs, the drinkers formed little groups, pressed one against another; there were some of these associations, near the barrels, who had to wait quarter of an hour before being able to order a round from Old Colombe.
‘Well, well, if it isn’t that swanky Cadet-Cassis!’ yelled Mes-Bottes, landing a hefty blow on Coupeau’s shoulder. ‘A fine gent who smokes papers and wears a shirt! I don’t doubt he’s trying to impress his lady friend by buying her titbits.’
‘Now, now! You mind your mouth!’ Coupeau answered, very put out.
The other man merely giggled.
‘Enough of that! You’re no better than any of us, my good friend. A slob’s a slob, and that’s all there is to it!’
He turned his back, after looking at Gervaise and giving a dreadful leer. She shrank back, slightly unnerved. The pipe smoke and the strong scent of all these men rose together into an atmosphere heavy with alcohol fumes, and she started to cough, stifled by it.
‘My, it’s a dreadful thing, drinking,’ she said, in a half whisper; and she recalled how in the old days, in Plassans, with her mother, she used to drink anisette; but one day it had nearly finished her, and this had put her off. She couldn’t abide strong drink after that.
‘Look, there,’ she said, holding up her glass. ‘I’ve eaten my plum, but I’ll leave the liquid because it would do me no good.’
Coupeau, too, was unable to understand how anyone could toss back whole glasses of spirits. There was nothing wrong with an occasional plum brandy, but when it came to gin, absinthe and that sort of muck, no thank you! Better leave it alone. Even though his mates teased him he stayed at the door when those drunkards went into the drinking den. Old Coupeau, who had been a roofer like himself, had cracked his head open on the pavement of Rue Coquenard, falling off the roof of No. 25, one day when he’d been on the bottle, and that memory had made the whole family abstemious. When Coupeau went down Rue Coquenard and saw the place, you could have got him to drink the water out of the gutter more easily than to accept a free tumbler in the wine merchant’s. And he concluded by saying: ‘In my job, you need to have all your wits about you.’
Gervaise had picked up her basket. However, she did not stand up, keeping it on her knees instead and staring into the distance, dreaming, as though the young workman’s words had stirred in her some distant memories of a different life. Then she went on slowly, without any apparent link to what had been said before: ‘Heavens! I’m not ambitious, I don’t ask for much… My dream would be to work quietly, eat bread every day and have a fairly decent place to sleep: you know, a bed, a table and two chairs, nothing more… Oh, I’d also like to bring up my children and make good citizens of them, if I could… If there was anything else I’d like, it’s not to be hit, if ever I did settle down again with someone… That’s all, you know, nothing more…’
She looked around, analysing her desires and not finding anything much apart from this that appealed to her. However, with a little hesitation, she continued:
‘Yes, perhaps in the end one would like to die in one’s bed. After slaving away all my life, it would be nice to die in my bed, at home.’
She got up. Coupeau, who had nodded in approval at each of her wishes, was already on his feet, anxious about the time. But they did not leave immediately; she was curious to have a look at the back of the room behind an oak paling, where the huge red copper still worked away under the clear-glass roof of the little yard; and Coupeau, who had followed her, explained how it worked, pointing out the different parts of the apparatus and showing her the huge retort with the clear trickle of pure spirit running out of it. There was something forbidding about the still, with its peculiarly shaped containers and its endless twisting pipes: it emitted no smoke; but there was a barely audible breath somewhere inside it, a subterranean purring. The whole thing was like some dark work being carried out in broad daylight by an operator who was powerful, but dumb and speechless. Meanwhile, Mes-Bottes had arrived with his two friends and they were leaning on the barrier, waiting for a place at the bar. He gave a laugh like a rusty chain going over a pulley and shook his head, with a loving glance at the liquor factory. God-damn it! What a darling she was! There was enough in that great copper belly to keep one’s throat oiled for a week. He wished they would just solder the end of the tube to his teeth so that he could feel the vitriol while it was still warm, filling him up, flowing right down to his heels, on and on, like a little river. Damn it! He wouldn’t mind, it would be better than the thimblefuls they got from that skinflint Old Colombe! At which his friends giggled and said that that guy Mes-Bottes had the gift of the gab, no doubt about it. The still, with barely a sound, without a flame or any flash of jollity to liven the dull sheen of the copper, continued to drip out its sweat of liquor, like a slow, stubborn spring, destined in the long run to pour out into the whole room, to spread across the outer boulevards, to flood the vast pit of Paris. Gervaise shuddered and stepped back, but tried to smile as she said: ‘It’s silly, I know, but it gives me the shudders, that machine… Drink gives me the shudders…’
Then, coming back to her pet idea of perfect happiness, she said: ‘Don’t you agree? It would be much better just to work, eat one’s fill, have a place of one’s own, bring up your children and die in your bed…’
‘And not be beaten,’ Coupeau added, teasing her. ‘But I wouldn’t hit you, Madame Gervaise, if you would agree… There’s no danger of that: I don’t drink, and anyway I’m too fond of you… How about it this evening? We’ll keep each other’s tootsies warm.’
He had lowered his voice and was speaking to the back of her neck, while she made her way through the throng, holding her basket in front of her. But she shook her head again, several times. However, she did turn round and smile at him, seeming pleased to learn that he did not
drink. Of course, she would have said yes to him, if she had not promised herself that she wouldn’t live with any man again. At length they got to the door and went out. Behind them, the drinking den was still packed, breathing out into the street the sound of voices made hoarse by drink and the strong, sweet smell of liquor. Mes-Bottes could be heard calling Old Colombe a swindler, saying that his glass had been only half filled. He, Mes-Bottes, was a good sort, a fine fellow, not afraid of anyone. Oh, hell, the boss could take a jump, he wasn’t going back to that lousy place, he was sick of it. And he suggested to his two friends that they go round to the Petit Bonhomme qui Tousse, a bar over by the Barrière Saint-Denis, where they served the stuff neat.
‘We can breathe at last!’ Gervaise exclaimed when they were outside. ‘Well, so long, Monsieur Coupeau, and thank you… I’ve got to hurry back.’
She was about to set off down the boulevard, but he took her hand and would not let go, saying: ‘Why not come along with me, then? Go down the Rue de la Goutte-d’Or, it’s no further, really… I have to go to my sister’s before returning to work… We can keep one another company.’
In the end, she accepted, and they went slowly up the Rue des Poissonniers, side by side, but not arm in arm. He told her about his family. His mother, Mother Coupeau, used to sew waistcoats, but now her eyesight was going, so she did housework. She had been sixty-two last month, on the third. He was her youngest. One of his sisters, Mme Lerat, was a widow of thirty-six, a florist, who lived in the Rue des Moines, at Les Batignolles. The other was thirty; she had married Lorilleux, a chain-maker with a deadpan sense of humour. This was the one they were going to see in the Rue de la Goutte-d’Or, where she lived in the large house on the left. In the evenings, he went to eat with the Lorilleux: it was cheaper for all of them. In fact, the reason he was going now was to tell them not to expect him today, because he had an invitation from a friend –
Gervaise, who had been listening, interrupted suddenly and asked, smiling:
‘Is it right that they call you Cadet-Cassis, Monsieur Coupeau?’
‘Oh, that,’ he answered. ‘It’s a nickname that my friends gave me because I usually have a cassis when they drag me along to the wine merchant’s… Might as well be called Cadet-Cassis as Mes-Bottes, don’t you think?’
‘Of course, there’s nothing wrong with Cadet-Cassis,’ the young woman agreed.
And she asked him about his work. He was still employed there, behind the city wall, on the new hospital. Oh, there was no shortage of work; he certainly wouldn’t leave the site before the end of the year. There were yards and yards of guttering to do!
‘You know,’ he said, ‘I can see the Hôtel Boncoeur from up there… Yesterday, you were at your window and I gave you a wave, but you didn’t see me.’
While they were talking, they had already gone a hundred yards down the Rue de la Goutte-d’Or, where he stopped, looked up and said:
‘This is the house. I’m not far away myself, at No. 22. But I must say this place is a fine old pile! It’s like a barracks, it’s so large inside there.’
Gervaise looked up and examined the front of the house. On the street side, it had five storeys, each with a row of fifteen windows, their black shutters with broken slats lending an air of desolation to the huge expanse of wall. Below, on the ground floor, there were four shops: to the right of the door: a huge greasy chop house; at the left: a coal merchant’s, a draper’s and an umbrella shop. The house seemed all the more vast since it stood between two low, puny little buildings that huddled against it; and, square-set, like a crudely cast block of cement, decaying and flaking in the rain, its huge cube stood out against the clear sky above the neighbouring roofs, the mud-coloured sides unrendered and having the endless nakedness of prison walls, with rows of join stones4 resembling empty jaw-bones gaping in the void. But Gervaise was chiefly looking at the door, a huge arched doorway rising to the second floor and making a deep porch, at the far end of which one could see the dim light from a large courtyard. Through the middle of the entrance, which was paved in the same way as the street, ran a gutter along which some water, coloured soft pink, was flowing.
‘Come on in,’ Coupeau said. ‘No one’s going to eat you.’
Gervaise wanted to wait for him in the street, but she could not resist stepping through the doorway as far as the concierge’s lodge, which was on the right. Here, on the threshold, she looked upwards once again. On the inside, the four regular façades surrounding the huge square courtyard rose to six storeys. They consisted of grey walls, with leprous yellow patches, rising featureless from the paving-stones to the roofing slates without any moulding, and streaked with stains that had trickled off the roof; the only irregularity was where the downpipes bent at each floor where the cast-iron of the gaping cisterns left rusty stains. The windows had no shutters, but exhibited their bare panes, which had the blue-green tint of murky water. Some were open, to allow blue check mattresses to hang out and air, while others had cords stretched across them with clothes on, a whole family’s washing: the man’s shirts, the woman’s camisoles, the children’s pants. From one, on the third floor, hung a child’s nappy, smeared with filth. From top to bottom, cramped dwellings spilled outside, letting scraps of their poverty escape through every opening. Below, on each side, a high, narrow doorway, without any wooden frame, cut directly out of the plasterwork, led into a cracked hallway, at the far end of which was a staircase with muddy steps and an iron railing; so there were four such stairways, designated by the first four letters of the alphabet, which were painted on the wall. Huge workshops had been fitted out on the ground floor, behind windows that were black with grime: a locksmith’s forge blazed away, while farther off one could hear the sound of a carpenter’s plane, and near the concierge’s lodge a dyeworks was gushing out the pale pink flood that ran beneath the porch. Puddles of dye-water, wood shavings and coal-dust dirtied the courtyard, grass grew round its edges, between the uneven flagstones, and it was lit by a harsh light that seemed to cut it in half at the point where the sun stopped. On the shaded side, beside a standpipe with a dripping tap, which ensured that the area was permanently damp, three small hens with muddy claws were pecking the ground in search of worms. And Gervaise slowly took it all in, her eyes descending from the sixth floor downwards to the pavement, then back again, surprised at the vastness of it, with the sensation of being inside a living organism, at the very heart of a city, regarding the house with the same interest as she would had she been confronted by a giant being.
‘Is Madame looking for anybody?’ the concierge shouted, inquisitively, coming to the door of her lodge.
The young woman explained that there was someone she was waiting for. She went off towards the street; then, as Coupeau was taking longer than she expected, came back, drawn to the place, still looking it over. She did not find it ugly. Among the rags hanging from the windows, there were splashes of jollity: a wallflower in a pot, a cage of canaries twittering, shaving-mirrors shining like bright stars in the shadowy depths. Downstairs, a cabinet-maker was singing to the accompaniment of the regular whistling noise of his trying-plane, while in the locksmith’s workshop, the hammers beat rhythmically in a great silvery din. Meanwhile, at almost every open window, against the glimpses of the poverty behind, children showed their grubby, laughing faces or women sat sewing, their calm profiles bent over their work. Men had gone back to their work outside after the midday break and the rooms were empty, the house returning to a great tranquillity, unbroken except for the noises of craftsmen and the lulling sound of a refrain, always the same, repeated hour after hour. But the courtyard was a little damp; if Gervaise had lived there, she would have wanted an apartment at the back, on the side that got the sun. She had taken five or six steps and could smell the musty aroma of poor dwellings, a smell of old dust and rancid grime; but since it was covered by the acrid smell of water from the dyeworks, she decided that it was far preferable to that of the Hôtel Boncoeur. She was already cho
osing her window, in the left-hand corner where there was a little window-box with some runner beans, their slender stems beginning to wind around a cat’s-cradle of strings.
‘I kept you waiting, didn’t I?’ said Coupeau, whom she suddenly heard close to her. ‘They make a fuss when I don’t have dinner with them, especially today, because my sister had bought some veal.’
And, since she had started a little with surprise, he continued, examining the surroundings in his turn:
‘You were looking at the house. It’s always let, from top to bottom. There are three hundred tenants, I think… Now, if I’d had any furniture, I’d have kept an eye open for a room here myself. It would be nice, don’t you think?’
‘Yes, it would,’ Gervaise murmured. ‘In Plassans, there were fewer people in our street… Oh, look, that’s pretty, the window on the fifth floor, with the runner beans.’
At which, persistent as ever, he asked again if she was willing. As soon as they had a bed, this is where they’d rent somewhere. But she fled, hurrying under the porch, begging him not to start that nonsense again. The house could surely fall down before she would sleep in it under the same blanket as him. Even so, when Coupeau left her outside Mme Fauconnier’s workshop – just as a friend, mind – she let him keep her hand in his for a moment.
For a month, the young woman remained on good terms with the roofer. He admired her spirit when he saw her working herself to death, looking after the children and still managing to find time to do all kinds of sewing in the evenings. Some women didn’t keep themselves clean, painted the town, stuffed themselves; but she was nothing like that, by gosh, she took things far too seriously! When he said that, she would laugh and protest modestly: worse luck, she hadn’t always been so sensible; and she would remind him that she had first got pregnant when she was fourteen, or recall the litres of anisette that she had drunk in the old days with her mother. It was simply that she had learned from experience. He was wrong to think she had a lot of will-power; on the contrary, she was very weak; she would give in to the slightest entreaty, for fear of upsetting someone. Her dream was to live among decent people, because if you kept bad company, according to her, it would hit you like a blow from a mallet, break your head and flatten a poor woman in no time. She fell into a cold sweat at the idea of what was to come and compared herself to a penny tossed in the air and falling heads or tails, depending on how it hit the pavement. Everything she had seen, all the bad examples she had known as a child, had been a dreadful lesson to her. But Coupeau teased her for always looking on the dark side and roused her spirits by trying to pinch her bottom. She would push him off, slapping his hands, while he laughed and shouted that, weak woman though she might be, it wasn’t easy to get your hands on her. He was the kind of easygoing chap who didn’t bother about the future. One day followed another, damn it; there would always be bed and a spot of grub somewhere. This neighbourhood seemed decent enough, if you were prepared to overlook a good number of drunkards who ought to be cleared out of the gutters. He wasn’t such a bad sort, some of what he said was quite reasonable and he even cared about his appearance: he would wear his hair carefully parted on the side, nice ties and polished shoes on Sundays. Added to that, he was as sharp and cheeky as a monkey, with the typical Parisian worker’s impudent sense of humour and the gift of the gab – and he could get away with it still because of his youthful looks.