Eventually, the pair of them ended up doing a lot of small favours for each other at the Hôtel Boncoeur. Coupeau would go and fetch her milk, do her shopping, carry her bundles of washing; often, in the evening, since he got back from work first, he used to take the children out for a walk along the avenue. In return for these services, Gervaise would go up to the cramped little attic-room where he slept, to take care of his clothes, sew buttons on his overalls and mend his linen jackets. A great deal of familiarity started to grow up between them. She was never bored when he was around: he entertained her with the songs he brought back and with that endless wisecracking of the Parisian working class that was all new to her. As for him, the more he rubbed along beside her, the more it turned him on. He was hooked, no doubt of that! Eventually, it started to bother him. He laughed all the time, but he was so uneasy in his guts, had such a tight feeling in the pit of his stomach, that it was no longer a joke. He didn’t stop his nonsense: he never met her without shouting: ‘When is it to be then?’ She knew what he meant and promised it when there was a week with four Thursdays. So he would tease her, going round to her place carrying his slippers, as though he were about to move in. She made a joke of it and got through the day without blushing despite the constant saucy and equivocal remarks that he sprinkled around her. As long as he was not violent, she would put up with anything. The only time she did get angry was one day when he was trying to force a kiss from her and pulled out some of her hair.
Around the end of June, Coupeau’s good humour left him. He came over all peculiar. Concerned by certain looks he gave her, Gervaise barred the door at nights. Then, after a sulk that lasted from Sunday to Tuesday, suddenly, that Tuesday evening, he came and knocked on her door at around eleven o’clock. At first, she was unwilling to open, but his voice was so soft and hesitant that she eventually moved aside the chest of drawers that she had pushed against the door.
When he did come in, she thought he was ill, he seemed so pale, with reddened eyes and a blotchy face. And he just stood there, stuttering, shaking his head. No, no, he wasn’t ill. He had been weeping for two hours, up there in his room, weeping like a child and biting his pillow so that the neighbours wouldn’t hear. He hadn’t slept for the past three nights. Things couldn’t go on like this.
‘Listen, Madame Gervaise,’ he said, in a stifled voice, about to start crying again. ‘We must put an end to this, we really must… We’re going to get married. That’s what I want, I’ve made my mind up.’
Gervaise gave an appearance of great surprise. She looked very serious.
‘Oh, Monsieur Coupeau,’ she murmured. ‘Whatever gave you that notion? You know very well that I’ve never wanted that of you. It doesn’t suit me, that’s all. Oh, no, indeed not! I’m serious now. Think about it.’
But he went on shaking his head, with a look of unwavering resolve. He had thought it all out. He had come down to see her because he needed a night’s sleep. Surely she wasn’t going to let him go back upstairs to cry again! She just had to say yes and he wouldn’t bother her any more, she could go to bed quietly. All he wanted was to hear her say yes. They’d talk about it in the morning.
‘Of course I’m not going to say yes, just like that,’ Gervaise replied. ‘I don’t want you to accuse me, later on, of having driven you to do something foolish. You see, Monsieur Coupeau, you’re wrong to insist. You don’t know yourself what you feel for me. If you didn’t see me for a week, you’d get over it, I bet. Men often marry for one night, the first one, then the other nights follow, the days stretch out, a whole lifetime of them, and they’re in a fine pickle… Sit down, I’m ready to talk about it right now.’
So, until one o’clock in the morning, in the dark room, lit by the smoky light from a candlewick that they forgot to trim, they spoke about their marriage, keeping their voices down so as not to wake up the two children, Claude and Etienne, who were breathing quietly as they slept, with their heads on the same pillow. And Gervaise kept returning to them, showing them to Coupeau: it was an odd dowry she was bringing him, she really couldn’t burden him with two kids. Then, she felt ashamed for him: what would people say in the neighbourhood? People had seen her with her lover, they knew her story, it would hardly be decent for them to see her getting married, after barely two months. Coupeau replied to all these strong arguments with a shrug of the shoulders. What did he care about the neighbourhood? He didn’t go sticking his nose into other people’s affairs – he would be too afraid of getting it dirty, to start with! Well, yes, it was true that she had had Lantier before him. What harm was there in that? She didn’t live it up, she wouldn’t be bringing other men into his home, as so many women did, even the richest. As for the children, they would grow up, they could bring them up together, by God! He would never find himself a woman who was so brave and kind, who had so many good qualities. In any case, that wasn’t the point either: she could have been a hooker, ugly, lazy, repulsive, with a whole litter of filthy kids, and it would not have mattered to him; he wanted her.
‘Yes, it’s you I want,’ he repeated, thumping his hand over and over against his knee. ‘Do you understand, I want you… There’s no answer to that, is there?’
Bit by bit, Gervaise softened. She felt as though she were enfolded in this brutal desire, and was overcome by a weakness of the will and the senses. Now, she was putting up only the feeblest resistance, her hands slumped on her lap, her face bathed in tenderness. From outside, through the half-open window, the lovely June night breathed gusts of warm air, which made the candle gutter and its long, reddish wick smoke. In the deep silence of the sleeping city, one could hear only the childlike sobs of a drunkard, lying on his back in the middle of the boulevard, while, far, far away, from the depths of some restaurant or other, a violin was playing a popular quadrille for some still unfinished party, a clear, slender, crystalline piece like an air on a harmonica. Coupeau, seeing that the young woman, silent, smiling vaguely, had run out of arguments, grasped her and drew her to him. She had reached one of those yielding moments that she so mistrusted, overwhelmed with too deep a feeling for her to refuse and cause someone pain. But the roofer did not realize that she was giving herself to him. He merely held her wrists until it felt that he was crushing them, trying to take possession of her; and both of them gave a sign, at this slight pain, which expressed a little of their emotion.
‘You will say yes, won’t you?’ he asked.
‘How you are torturing me,’ she murmured. ‘Do you really want it? Well, yes, then… Heaven knows, we may be making a dreadful mistake – ’
He got up and grasped her waist, randomly planting a rough kiss on her face. Then, since the kiss was a noisy one, he was the first to show concern, looking at Claude and Etienne, tiptoeing, lowering his voice.
‘Hush! We must be sensible,’ he said. ‘Mustn’t wake up the kids. See you tomorrow.’
At that, he went back to his room. Gervaise, shaking, stayed for almost an hour sitting on the edge of her bed, not even thinking to get undressed. She was touched, she thought of Coupeau as a very decent sort, because at one moment she had imagined it was all over and he would sleep there. Below, in the street, the drunkard was making a harsher sound, like a lost animal. In the distance, the violin stopped playing its merry little air.
In the days that followed, Coupeau wanted to persuade Gervaise to come round one evening to see his sister, in the Rue de la Goutte-d’Or. But the young woman, who was quite shy, appeared terrified at the prospect of this visit to the Lorilleux. It had not escaped her that the workman was secretly in awe of the couple. Of course, he no longer depended on his sister, who was not even the eldest; and Mother Coupeau would willingly give her consent, because she would never go against her son’s wishes. But, the fact was that, in the Coupeau family, the Lorilleux were thought to be earning as much as ten francs a day, and this endowed them with real authority. Coupeau would not have dared to get married unless they were willing to accept his wife.
‘I’ve talked about you to them, so they know about our plans,’ he told Gervaise. ‘Good Lord! What a child you are! Come round this evening. I’ve warned you, haven’t I? You may find my sister a bit stiff, and Lorilleux isn’t always too friendly, either. When it comes down to it, they are a bit put out because, if I get married, then I won’t eat with them any more, and it will mean a little less money coming in. But that doesn’t matter, they won’t throw you out. Do it for me, it’s absolutely essential.’
This speech scared Gervaise even more; but, one Saturday evening, she agreed. Coupeau came to fetch her at half-past eight. She was dressed up: a black dress, a shawl in printed cashmere with yellow palm fronds and a white bonnet trimmed with a narrow band of lace. She had been working for six weeks and had saved up the seven francs for the shawl and the two francs fifty for the hat; the dress was an old one, which she had cleaned and darned.
‘They’re waiting for you,’ Coupeau said, as they were walking round, through the Rue des Poissonniers. ‘Oh, they’re starting to get used to the idea of my getting married. They seem very pleasant this evening. And, if you’ve never seen someone making gold chains, it will be amusing for you to watch. As it happens they have an urgent order for Monday.’
‘Do they have gold in their house?’ Gervaise asked.
‘They certainly do: it’s on the walls, on the floor, everywhere.’
Meanwhile, they had gone through the arched door and across the courtyard. The Lorilleux lived on the sixth floor, Staircase B. Coupeau laughed and called to her to take a firm hold on the banister and not to let it go. She looked up and blinked, seeing the high empty tower of the stairwell, lit by three gaslights, one every second floor. The last, right at the top, looked like a twinkling star in a black sky, while the other two cast long beams of light, oddly broken up where they fell across the endless spiral of stairs.
‘What’s this?’ the roofer said when he got to the first-floor landing.
‘There’s a strong smell of onion soup here. Someone’s been eating onion soup, no doubt of that.’
He was right: Staircase B, grey, dirty, with its greasy steps and banisters, and plaster showing through the scratched paint on its walls, still reeked of an overpowering smell of cooking. From every landing, corridors led off echoing with noise, and yellow doors opened, blackened around the locks with marks from dirty hands; and the cistern, level with the window, gave off a fetid dampness, its stench mingling with the sharp odour of cooked onions. From the ground floor to the sixth, one could hear the sounds of washing-up, the rinsing of pots, the scraping of pans with spoons to clean them. On the first floor, Gervaise glanced through an open door, with the word Draughtsman on it in large letters, and saw two men sitting in front of an oiled tablecloth after the dishes had been cleared away, having a heated discussion amid the smoke from their pipes. The second and third floors were quieter: one could hear only the rocking of a cradle through the gaps in the woodwork, the stifled cries of a child’s or a woman’s thick accent pouring out like the dull murmur of running water, without any distinguishable words; and Gervaise could read placards nailed to the doors, giving the inhabitants’ names: Madame Gaudron, carder;5 and, further on, Monsieur Madinier, packing shop. There was a fight in progress on the fourth floor: such a stamping that the floor trembled, furniture overturned, and a dreadful racket of blows and curses – though it didn’t stop the neighbours opposite from playing cards with the door open to let in the air. But when she reached the fifth floor, Gervaise had to pause for breath. She was not used to climbing; the constantly winding wall and the apartments, half glimpsed as they went by, made her head spin. In any case, there was a family blocking the way on the landing: the man was washing dishes on a little clay stove near the cistern while the mother, leaning back against the ramp, was cleaning the child before putting him to bed. All the time, Coupeau was urging her on: they were nearly there; and when at last they reached the sixth floor, he turned round to help her with a smile. She had her head lifted, trying to decide where a particular voice was coming from, shrill and clear, which she had been hearing above the other sounds right from the first step. It was a little old woman who lived under the roof and sang as she dressed dolls costing thirteen sous. Also, as a tall girl was returning with a pail to one of the neighbouring rooms, Gervaise caught sight of an unmade bed, where a man was waiting in shirtsleeves, sprawling and looking towards the ceiling; when the door shut, a handwritten visiting card announced: MADEMOISELLE CLÉMENCE, IRONING. At that, reaching the very top, breathless, her legs aching, curiosity made her lean over the banisters: now, it was the ground-floor gaslight that looked like a star, at the bottom of the narrow well, six storeys deep; and the smell and vast rumbling life of the house was wafted up to her in a single breath, a hot blast breaking over her anxious face, making her feel as though she were perched on the edge of an abyss.
‘We’re not there yet!’ Coupeau said. ‘It’s quite a journey!’
He had turned left, down a long corridor. He took two further turnings, the first again to the left, the next to the right. The corridor continued, branched, narrowed, cracked and crumbling, lit at long intervals by a slender tongue of gas; and the doors, each one like the next, lined up like the doors of a prison or a convent, but almost all wide open, continued to reveal scenes of poverty or labour, interiors that the warm June evening filled with a reddish mist. At last, they reached the end of a completely dark passage.
‘This is it,’ the roofer said. ‘Look out! Keep to the wall: there are three steps to go down.’
Gervaise took a further ten paces, cautiously, in the dark. She stumbled, then counted the three steps; but Coupeau, at the end of the passage, had just pushed open a door, without knocking. A harsh light shone across the floor. They went in.
The room was constricted, a sort of funnel looking like nothing more than an extension of the corridor. A faded woollen curtain, held up for the time being by a piece of string, divided the funnel in two. The first compartment contained a bed, wedged under the sloping mansard roof, a cast-iron stove still warm from dinner, two chairs, a table and a cupboard with part of the beading sawn off so that it could fit between the bed and the door. The second compartment served as the workshop: at the far end, a small forge and bellows; on the right, a vice fixed to the wall, beneath a shelf covered in scraps of metal; and on the left, by the window, a tiny workbench, littered with pliers, shears and minute saws, all greasy and very dirty.
‘We’re here!’ Coupeau shouted, advancing through the room as far as the woollen curtain.
But at first there was no reply. Gervaise, quite overcome, especially disturbed by the idea that she was entering a place full of gold, kept behind the workman, stammering, trying out some nods by way of greeting. Her anxiety was increased by the bright light from a lamp burning on the work-table and a brazier of flaming coals in the forge. Eventually she did manage to see Mme Lorilleux, a short, rather heavily built redhead who, with all the strength of her stubby arms, was using a large pair of pincers to pull out a thread of black metal, which she had passed through the holes of a draw die6 fixed to the vice. In front of the workbench, Lorilleux, who was no taller but more lanky, was working with the sprightliness of a monkey, using the tips of his pincers on such fine material that it disappeared in his gnarled fingers. The husband was the first to look up, raising a head that was nearly bald and the pale yellow of old wax, with a long, unhealthy-looking face.
‘Oh, it’s you, good, good!’ he muttered. ‘We’re pushed for time, you know. Don’t come into the workroom, you’d get in our way. Stay in the bedroom.’
And he resumed his fine work, bending his face once more into the greenish light of a water globe,7 through which the lamp cast a circle of bright light on his work.
‘Sit Down!’ Mme Lorilleux shouted in her turn. ‘This is the lady, is it? Fine, fine!’
She had rolled up the wire that she now took to the forge and there, rousing the fire to life with a large wooden f
an, she softened the wire preparatory to drawing it through the smallest holes in the die.
Coupeau brought up the chairs and sat Gervaise down next to the curtain. The room was so narrow that he could not find a place for himself next to her: he sat behind her, leaning across her shoulder to explain the work. The young woman, stunned into silence by the Lorilleux’s strange manner of greeting and uneasy beneath their sideways glances, had a buzzing in her ears that made it hard for her to hear. She thought the woman looked very old for thirty, surly in manner, and not quite clean, with her hair hanging in a pigtail across her unbuttoned blouse. The husband, who was only a year older, seemed to her an old man, with his nasty thin lips, his shirtsleeves, and his bare feet in worn slippers. But most of all she was shocked by the size of the cramped workshop, its stained walls, the rusty metal tools and the black grime everywhere in this clutter like a rag-and-bone merchant’s. It was dreadfully hot. Drops of sweat had gathered on Lorilleux’s pallid face, while Mme Lorilleux chose to remove her blouse, leaving her arms naked and her undershirt sticking to her sagging breasts.