The Drinking Den (33 page)

And, since the rest of them appeared not to follow her, she added, in still more ingratiating tones:

‘Well, naturally, Monsieur Poisson, who is used to weaponry.'

And she gave the constable the kitchen knife that she was holding. The whole table laughed, gladly and approvingly.

Poisson bowed with military rigidity and brought the goose in front of him. His neighbours, Gervaise and Mme Boche, moved away to
leave room for his elbows. He started to cut slowly, with sweeping gestures and his eyes fixed on the bird, as if to nail it to the plate. When he stuck the knife into the carcass, making the bones crack, Lorilleux felt a surge of patriotism and cried:

‘Ah, now! If only that was a Cossack!'
²

‘Did you ever fight against the Cossacks, Monsieur Poisson?' Mme Boche inquired.

‘No, but I did with the Bedouin,'
³
the constable replied, removing a leg. ‘There are no Cossacks any longer.'

Now there was absolute silence. Every neck was craned, all eyes followed the knife. Poisson had got a surprise for them. Suddenly, he gave one last stab and the hind part of the animal broke away and stood upright, rump in the air: it was the bishop's mitre. At this, they broke into spontaneous applause. Really, it took an old soldier to do things in style! Meanwhile, the goose had discharged a stream of gravy from the gaping hole in its rear end. Boche laughed.

‘Sign me up,' he muttered, ‘if she'll pee in my mouth like that.'

‘Oh, the dirty devil!' the ladies exclaimed. ‘How disgusting can you get!'

‘No, really! I've never known such a repulsive man!' Mme Boche said, more incensed than any of them. ‘Be quiet, do you hear? You would turn the stomach of an army. It's only so that he can have it all to himself, you know.'

At the same time, in the midst of all the noise, Clémence was saying insistently:

‘Monsieur Poisson, Monsieur Poisson, listen, Monsieur Poisson… Keep the rump for me, won't you?'

‘My dear, the rump is yours as of right,' said Mme Lerat, in her discreetly suggestive way.

Meanwhile, the goose had been cut up. The constable, after giving everyone a few moments to admire the bishop's mitre, had separated the pieces and arranged them around the dish. They could help themselves. But the ladies were unbuttoning their dresses and complaining of the heat. Coupeau cried that they were at home, so to hell with the neighbours; and he opened the street door wide, so the party continued against a background of passing cabs and people pushing
and shoving their way along the street. Now, with their jaws rested and a new hole in their stomachs, they resumed their dinner, falling on the goose with gusto. Just waiting and watching the animal being cut up, Boche said jocularly, had sent the veal and the pork right down to his ankles.

Now this was a terrific feast, and no mistake – which meant that none of those present could remember ever having happily risked such a bout of indigestion. Gervaise, huge, leaned on her elbows and ate large chunks of white meat, saying nothing for fear of losing a bite; the only thing that bothered her was a little feeling of shame at appearing like this, munching away like a rabbit, in front of Goujet. In any case, Goujet was filling himself up with the sight of her all pink in the face from eating; and then she remained so kind and good in her gluttony! She said nothing, but all the time she was breaking off to look after Old Bru and put some titbit on his plate. It was really quite touching to see this woman, who liked food so much, take a piece of wing out of her own mouth and hand it across to the old man, who didn't seem to appreciate it, but ate everything up, with his head bent over his plate, stupefied at so much food, when his throat had forgotten the taste of bread. The Lorilleux turned their fury on the goose; they took enough for three days, they would have swallowed up the dish, the table and the whole shop, if they could have ruined Tip-Tap by it. All the ladies wanted the breast – that was ladies' meat. Mme Lerat, Mme Boche and Mme Putois were scraping the bones while Mother Coupeau, who loved the neck, was tearing the meat off it with her last two remaining teeth. As for Virginie, she loved the skin, when it was crisp, and each guest handed his skin over to her, out of gallantry – so much, in fact, that Poisson started to give his wife stern glances, ordering her to stop because she had had enough: on a previous occasion she had eaten too much roast goose and had had to spend a fortnight in bed with a swollen stomach. But Coupeau got angry and served Virginie a piece of leg, shouting that, for God's sake, if she didn't clean the bone of that, she wasn't a proper woman. What harm had a bit of goose ever done anybody? On the contrary: it cured diseases of the spleen. You could eat it without bread, like a dessert. As far as he was concerned, he could go on eating it all night, without any after-effects; and, just
showing off, he crammed a whole drumstick into his mouth. Meanwhile, Clémence was finishing her piece of rump, sucking it and smacking her lips, rolling around with laughter on her chair, because Boche was whispering lewd remarks into her ear. Oh, good Lord, yes, they really stuffed themselves! While you're at it, you might as well do it properly – no? And if one only has a really good feast now and again, it would be crazy not to fill oneself up to the eyeballs. Of course, you could see your belly swell up accordingly. The women all looked pregnant. All of them were bursting out of their skins, the greedy pigs! Their mouths open, their chins spattered with grease, their faces looked like backsides – and so red that you would think they were the backsides of rich people, bursting with prosperity.

And what about the wine, my children! It was flowing around the table like water flowing in the Seine. A real torrent, as when it has been raining and the earth is thirsty. Coupeau poured it out with the bottle held high, so that he could see the red stream frothing; and when a bottle was empty, he joked by turning it upside-down and pressing the neck like a woman milking a cow. Another black girl with a broken neck. In a corner of the shop, the pile of dead black girls was rising, a cemetery of bottles on to which they shovelled the scraps from the tablecloth. Mme Putois asked for water, so the roofer indignantly removed the carafes himself. Did respectable people drink water? Did she want to have frogs in her stomach? And the glasses were emptied in a single gulp: you could hear the liquid being tossed back and pouring down their throats, with a noise like rainwater going down a drainpipe during a storm. It was raining cheap wine, wasn't it? A plonk that at first had a taste like an old barrel, but which you soon got used to, so that eventually it had a bouquet of hazelnuts. God in heaven, whatever the Jesuits said; the fruit of the vine was a darned good invention! Everyone laughed in approval; because, after all, a working man couldn't live without wine: old Father Noah had planted vines for the sake of roofers, tailors and blacksmiths. Wine cleaned you out and relaxed you after work, it gave guts to the lazybones; and then, when the old devil started playing tricks on you, well, there was nothing to worry about, Paris belonged to you! And who was saying that the worker, exhausted, penniless, despised by the bourgeois, had so much to be happy about
that you could blame him for getting plastered now and again, just so that he could look on the bright side of life for once? Tell me, right now, did they give a fig for the Emperor? Perhaps the Emperor himself was drunk, but what did that matter, they didn't care a damn for him and they defied him to be more drunk and to be enjoying himself more than they were. Blast the aristocracy! Coupeau said they could all go to hell. Women were what he cared for. And he smacked his pocket, jangling the three
sous
in it as though he was turning over shovelfuls of gold. Even Goujet, who was usually so sober, was getting a bit jolly. Boche's eyes were narrowing, while Lorilleux's had gone pale, and Poisson was wearing increasingly stern expressions on his sun-tanned old soldier's face. They were already as drunk as newts. And the ladies were a little bit merry, too – though it was still just a little bit, a flush on the cheeks and a need to loosen their clothes, so that they had removed their scarves; only Clémence was starting to go too far. But suddenly Gervaise remembered the six bottles of vintage wine. She had forgotten to serve them with the goose, but she brought them and they filled their glasses. At this, Poisson got up and, raising his glass, said: ‘To Gervaise's health!'

They all stood up, in a clatter of moving chairs. Hands reached out, glasses clinked and there was a general hubbub.

‘Fifty years from now!' Virginie cried.

‘Oh, no, no,' Gervaise answered, smiling and quite moved. ‘I'd be too old. Come on, the day comes when you're happy to go.'

All this time, the neighbourhood was watching through the wide-open door and taking part in the feast. Passers-by would stop in the wide band of light flooding across the pavement and laugh with pleasure at seeing these people enjoying themselves so much. Coachmen, leaning off their seats and whipping their old nags, cast a glance inside and cracked a joke: ‘What's this, is it all for free?… Hey, there, fatty! D'you want the midwife?' And the smell of the goose delighted the whole street, filling it with good cheer. The grocer's boys thought they were eating the bird, on the pavement opposite, while the fruiterer and the tripe merchant were constantly coming out to the front of their shops to sniff the air, licking their lips. The neighbourhood was doubled up with indigestion. The Cudorge ladies, mother and daughter, who
sold umbrellas next door and whom no one ever saw, crossed the road one after the other, casting sidelong glances, with their faces flushed as though they had been leaning over a hot stove. The little jeweller, sitting at his workbench, was unable to carry on with what he was doing, drunk with counting the bottles, in a state of great excitement among his merry cuckoos. Yes, the neighbours were drinking it in, Coupeau said, so why should they hide? Once they had got started, none of them was ashamed at being seen eating; on the contrary, they were flattered and stimulated at the sight of the gathering crowd, gaping with greed; they would have liked to break down the shop-front, drag the table out on to the road and have their dessert there, with everyone watching, amid the hustle and bustle of the street. There was nothing disgusting about it, was there? So there was no reason why they should selfishly shut themselves up indoors. Coupeau, seeing the little watchmaker over the road dribbling at the mouth, raised a bottle so that he could see it from afar; and when the other man nodded his acceptance, carried the bottle and a glass over to him. A feeling of brotherhood was set up with the rest of the street. They clinked glasses to the passers-by. They called out to any acquaintance who looked like a decent sort. The meal spread outwards, from one person to the next, until the whole district of the Goutte-d'Or had its nose in the air and its hands on its belly, in the devil's own Bacchanalian revelry.

For a while, the coal merchant, Madame Vigouroux, had been walking backwards and forwards in front of the door.

‘Hi! Madame Vigouroux! Madame Vigouroux!' everyone yelled.

She came in, laughing like a hyena, sparkling clean and plump enough to burst her stays. The men loved pinching her, because you could pinch her anywhere and never meet a bone. Boche got her to sit next to him and immediately he was giving her knee a sly rub under the table. But she was used to this kind of thing and calmly emptied a glass of wine, announcing that the neighbours were all looking out of their windows and that some people in the apartment block were starting to get annoyed.

‘Oh, leave that to us,' Mme Boche said. ‘We're the concierges, aren't we? So, we're responsible for keeping the noise down. Let them come and complain, we'll tell them where they can get off.'

In the back room, a ferocious battle had just taken place between Nana and Augustine, both wanting to scrape clean the roasting-dish. The dish itself had been bouncing around the floor for the past quarter of an hour, giving a noise like an old saucepan. Now Nana was looking after little Victor, who had a goose bone in his throat; she was sticking her fingers under his chin and forcing him to swallow large lumps of sugar, as medicine. Even so, this did not prevent her from keeping an eye on the big table and every two minutes she ran in to ask for wine, bread and meat for Etienne and Pauline.

‘Here you are. Now get lost!' her mother said. ‘Can't you give me a moment's peace?'

The children couldn't eat another thing, but they were stuffing it in even so, banging their forks in a rhythmical chant, to get themselves excited.

At the same time, in the midst of all this noise, a conversation had started between Old Bru and Mother Coupeau. The old man, a deathly pallor on his face after all that food and wine, was talking about his sons, who had died in the Crimea. Ah, if only the boys had been alive now, he would have had bread every day. But Mother Coupeau, her voice slightly slurred, leaned over and said:

‘Children are enough of a worry, believe you me! Take me: I seem happy enough, don't I? Well, I've had cause to weep more than once. No, don't wish for children.'

Old Bru shook his head.

‘No one wants to give me work anymore,' he muttered. ‘I'm too old. When I go into a workshop, the young ones laugh and ask if I'm the one who used to polish Henry IV's boots. Last year, I could still earn thirty
sous
a day painting a bridge. You had to lie on your back, with the river running underneath; I've been coughing ever since. Nowadays, it's all over, they won't take me on anywhere.'

He looked at his poor, stiff hands and added:

‘It's fair enough, since I'm no good for anything. They're right, I'd do the same. You see, the trouble is, I'm not dead. Yes, it's my fault. You should lie down and die when you can't work any longer.'

‘No, honestly,' said Lorilleux, who had been listening, ‘I can't see why the government doesn't help those who are victims of illness or
injury at work. I was reading about it the other day in the newspaper.'