The Drinking Den (18 page)

Meanwhile, Coupeau was still out in the kitchen. They could hear him struggling with the stove and the coffee-pot. Gervaise was in torment: it wasn't a man's job, making coffee; and she shouted instructions to him, ignoring the midwife's urgent ‘Hush! Hush!'

‘Take the sprog away!' Coupeau said, coming back, bearing the coffee-pot. ‘I ask you: isn't she a pain in the neck! Time for her to have a nap… We'll drink this out of glasses, if you don't mind, because you see we left the cups behind in the china shop.'

They sat down round the table and the roofer wanted to serve the coffee himself. It smelled good and strong: it certainly wasn't any old rubbish. When the midwife had sipped at her glass, she left. Everything was going fine, they didn't need her any more; if the patient had a bad night, they should send for her in the morning. She had still not reached the bottom of the staircase before Mme Lorilleux was calling her an old soak and a good-for-nothing. She put four lumps of sugar in her coffee and took fifteen francs off you, so that you could deliver the baby by yourself. But Coupeau stood up for her. He would be happy to hand over the fifteen francs; after all, those women spent their youth studying, they were right to charge a lot. After that, Lorilleux got into an argument with Mme Lerat: he claimed that, if you wanted a boy, you only had to turn the head of the bed towards the north, while she shrugged her shoulders and dismissed this as childishness, offering a different recipe, which consisted in hiding a handful of fresh nettles, picked in sunlight, under the mattress, without telling one's wife. They had drawn the table up, nearer to the bed. Until ten o'clock, Gervaise, gradually overcome with utter exhaustion, stayed there smiling and stupefied, her head on the pillow, turned towards them. She could see, she could hear, but she did not have the strength to venture a single word or gesture. She felt as though she were dead, a very gentle death from the depths of which she was happy to watch others living. Now and then, a little cry came up from the baby, in the midst of the loud voices with their endless observations about some murder that had taken place the day before in the Rue du Bon-Puits, at the other end of La Chapelle.

Then, as people started to think about leaving, someone mentioned the christening. The Lorilleux had agreed to be godfather and godmother; they grumbled about it among themselves, but if the couple had not invited them, they would have kicked up a dreadful fuss. Coupeau could see no sense in having the kid baptized; it wouldn't ensure her an income of two thousand
livres
, would it? As it was, she
just risked catching a cold. The less he had to deal with the clergy, the happier he was. But Mother Coupeau called him a pagan, and the Lorilleux, though they didn't go in for eating the Good Lord in church, did pride themselves on being religious.

‘We'll make it this Sunday, if you like,' the chain-maker said.

Gervaise nodded, so everyone kissed her and told her to look after herself. They also said goodbye to the baby, each of them leaning over its poor, shivering little body, with little laughs and endearments, as though it could understand. They called her Nana,
⁶
the pet name for Anna, which belonged to her godmother.

‘Good-night, Nana… Come, now, Nana, there's a lovely girl…'

When they had at last left, Coupeau drew his chair up next to the bed and finished his pipe, holding Gervaise's hand in his. He smoked slowly, dropping a few remarks between puffs, deeply affected by it all.

‘Well, now, old girl! They got on your nerves, didn't they? You do see: I couldn't stop them coming. After all, it shows their goodwill towards us. But we're better off alone, don't you think? I really needed to be alone with you for a while, like this. The evening dragged so! Poor little chick! You did have a hard time of it, didn't you? When they come into the world, these little mites, they never guess what pain they cause. It must have been like having your belly split open. Where does it hurt you? Let me kiss it better.'

He had very softly slipped one of his large hands under her back and he pulled her towards him, kissing her belly through the sheet, smitten with a rough man's tenderness for this still painful fecundity. He asked whether it was hurting her; he would like to have eased her pain by blowing on her. Gervaise was so happy. She promised him that she was not in any pain at all. All she could think of was to get back on her feet as soon as possible, because she couldn't afford to stay idle now. But he reassured her. Wouldn't he be responsible for providing for the child? He would be a real louse if he were ever to leave her with the child on her hands. There was nothing especially clever in making a child; the credit came in bringing it up, wasn't that right?

Coupeau hardly slept that night. He had covered the fire in the stove. Every two hours, he had to get up to give the baby spoonfuls of
warm sugared water. Despite that, he left for work the next morning as usual. He even took advantage of his lunch-hour to go down to the town hall and register the birth. Meanwhile, they had got word to Mme Boche, who came straight round to spend the day with Gervaise; but she, having slept deeply for ten hours, was complaining that she ached all over after staying in bed for so long. She would fall ill, if they didn't let her get up. In the evening, when Coupeau came home, she told him what she had been through: of course, she trusted Mme Boche, but it drove her mad to see a stranger settled down in her room, opening the drawers and touching her things. The following day, when the concierge came back after doing an errand, she found Gervaise on her feet, fully dressed, sweeping the room and making her husband's dinner. Nothing would make her go back to bed. Were they joking? It was all well and good for fine ladies to appear exhausted; when one was poor, one didn't have time for all that.

Three days after the birth, she was ironing petticoats at Mme Fauconnier's, banging away with her flat-irons and sweating in the stifling heat of the stove.

On Saturday evening, Mme Lorilleux brought her godmother's present: a 35-
sou
bonnet and a christening robe, pleated, with a narrow lace border, which she had got for six francs, because it was shop-soiled. The next day, Lorilleux, as godfather, gave the mother six pounds of sugar. They knew how to behave. Even in the evening, at the meal that took place at the Coupeaus', they did not appear empty-handed. The husband arrived with a bottle of superior wine in each hand and the wife brought a big custard tart, which she had bought at a well-known pastry shop in the Chaussée Clignancourt. The only trouble was that the Lorilleux would go and tell everyone in the neighbourhood about these generous gifts and how they had spent nearly twenty francs. Gervaise was outraged when she learned of their gossiping, and gave them no further credit for their fine gestures.

It was at this dinner for the christening that the Coupeaus eventually became close friends with their neighbours on the same floor. The other apartment in the little house was occupied by two people, a mother and son, the Goujets by name. Up to then, they had exchanged greetings on the stairs and in the street, but nothing more; the neighbours
seemed to want to keep themselves to themselves. Then, since the mother had brought her up a pail of water on the day after the birth, Gervaise thought it right to invite them to the meal, all the more so since she found them rather nice. And there, of course, they got to know each other.

The Goujets came from the Nord.
⁷
The mother mended lace, while the son, a blacksmith by trade, was working in a factory making nuts and bolts. They had been living in the other apartment on that floor for five years. Behind the dumb tranquillity of their lives lay a distant sorrow. In Lille, Old Goujet, in a fit of drunken rage, had beaten a workmate to death with an iron bar, then hanged himself with a handkerchief in his prison cell. The widow and child moved to Paris following this misfortune, which still oppressed them, and made up for it by scrupulous respectability, and unflinching gentleness and determination. There was even a hint of pride in all this, because they eventually came to feel that they were better than the rest. Mme Goujet, who always wore black, her forehead encased in a nun's coif, had a matronly face, pale and calm, as though the pallor of the lace and the minute work of her fingers had endowed her with an aura of serenity. Goujet was a huge lad of twenty-three, superbly built, with a pink face, blue eyes and Herculean strength. At work, his mates called him Gueule-d'Or, or ‘Golden Mug', because of his fine blond beard.

Gervaise at once felt a great surge of friendship towards these people. When she went for the first time to their home, she was amazed by the cleanness of the flat. There was no doubt about it: you could blow anywhere without raising a speck of dust, and the parquet flooring shone like ice. Mme Goujet took her into her son's room, just to show her. It was charming and white, like a young girl's room, with a little iron bed behind muslin curtains, a table, a dressing-table and a narrow bookshelf hanging from the wall. Then, there were pictures from top to bottom, figures of people cut out, coloured prints fixed up with four nails, portraits of all kinds of characters, taken from the illustrated papers. Mme Goujet said that her son was just a big child. In the evening, reading tired him out, so he enjoyed looking at pictures. Gervaise forgot the time and spent an hour with the neighbour, who had gone back to her lace-maker's frame by the window. She was
interested to see the hundreds of pins fastening the lace, and happy to be there, breathing in the good, clean smell of the apartment, to which this delicate handiwork brought a thoughtful silence.

The Goujets got better the better one knew them. They worked long hours and put aside more than a quarter of their fortnight's wages in the savings bank. People would say hallo to them in the neighbourhood and gossip about their savings. Goujet never had a hole in his clothes and went to work in spotless overalls. He was very polite, even a little shy, despite his broad shoulders. The women from the laundry at the end of the street giggled at the way he would hang his head as he went past. He hated to hear them swearing, considering it unpleasant when women were constantly using foul language. One day, however, he came home drunk – whereupon, without any further reproach, Mme Goujet confronted him with a portrait of his father, a poorly executed painting that she hid piously at the back of a drawer. After that lesson, Goujet never went over the limit, though he had nothing against a drop of wine; a workman needs wine. On Sundays, he went out with his mother, giving her his arm; usually, they went towards Vincennes,
⁸
or sometimes to the theatre. His mother was his one true passion: he spoke of her as though he were still a little boy. With his square head and flesh thickened by hard work behind the hammer, there was something about him of the ox: slow-witted, but good, for all that.

To begin with, Gervaise embarrassed him quite a lot. Then, in a few weeks, he became accustomed to her. He waited for her to come home so that he could carry up her shopping or laundry, and treated her as a sister, with brusque familiarity, cutting out pictures for her. One morning, however, opening the door without knocking, he surprised her half naked, washing her neck, and for a week would not look her straight in the eye, so much so that in the end she herself started to blush.

Cadet-Cassis, with his ready Parisian tongue, thought Gueule-d'Or a bit of a dummy. It was all very well not getting sozzled and not running after girls in the street; but a man should be a man; otherwise he might as well slip into a skirt straight away. He would tease him in front of Gervaise, accusing him of giving the glad eye to all the women
in the neighbourhood, which the great drum-major Goujet hotly denied. This didn't stop the two workmen being friends. They called for one another in the morning, left for work together and sometimes had a glass of beer before coming home. Since the christening dinner they had used the familiar
tu
with each other, because constantly saying
vous
⁹
is so longwinded. That was the point they had reached, when Gueule-d'Or did Cadet-Cassis a real favour, one of those outstanding favours that you remember for the rest of your life. It was on the 2nd of December.
¹⁰
The roofer, just for a lark, had the brilliant idea of going to see the uprising. Not that he gave a toss about the Republic, Bonaparte or any of that; but he liked gunpowder and thought that gunshots were entertaining. And he was on the point of getting himself trapped behind a barricade, if the blacksmith had not come across him, just in time to protect him with his huge body and help him to escape. Goujet, as they went back up the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière, walked fast, with a serious look on his face. Now, he did concern himself with politics: he was a Republican, sensibly, in the name of justice and the general good. Despite that, he had not taken up arms. He explained why: the common people was tired of having to bear the cost of the chestnuts that it pulled out of the fire for the sake of the bourgeoisie, getting its fingers burned. February and June
¹¹
had been real lessons. From now on, the working-class suburbs would let the middle-class down town manage things as they saw fit. Then, when they reached the top, at the Rue des Poissonniers, he turned round, looking back at Paris. After all there was some dirty work going on down there, and one day the people might regret having stood by with folded arms. But Coupeau sniggered and said that you had to be a bit silly to risk your hide just so that those lazy good-for-nothings in Parliament could keep on getting their twenty-five francs. That evening, the Coupeaus invited the Goujets to dinner. Over the dessert, Cadet-Cassis and Gueule-d'Or planted two big kisses on each other's cheeks. From now on it was life or death.

For three years, the life of the two families went on uneventfully on either side of the landing. Gervaise had managed to bring up the girl while never losing more than two days of work in a week. She had become a skilled worker for fine linen and earned up to three francs a
day; so she decided to put Etienne, who was coming up to eight, in a little school in the Rue de Chartres, which cost her five francs for the week. Despite having two children to care for, the couple put aside twenty or thirty francs each month in the savings bank. When their savings reached the sum of six hundred francs, the young woman started to lose sleep over it, obsessed by her daydream of setting up her own business, renting a little shop and employing her own workers. She had it all figured out. After twenty years, if the enterprise prospered, they might be able to purchase an annuity, which could keep them for the rest of their lives, somewhere in the country. But she was afraid to take the risk. She said that she was still looking for a shop, so that she could have time to consider it. The money was quite safe in the savings bank; in fact, it was multiplying. In those three years, she had satisfied only one of her desires: she had bought herself a clock; and even then this timepiece, a rosewood clock with twisted columns and a copper gilt pendulum, had to be paid off over a year, at the rate of five francs every Monday. She got cross when Coupeau said he would wind it up, because only she was allowed to take off the glass globe and religiously wipe the columns, as though the marble top of her chest of drawers had been transformed into a chapel. Under the glass cover, behind the clock, she hid the savings book. And often, when she was dreaming about her shop, she would sit there, miles away, in front of the dial, staring at the turning hands, for all the world as if she was waiting for some particular, solemn moment before she made up her mind.