The Drinking Den (58 page)

Gervaise slowly carried on walking. In the smoky mist of the falling darkness, the gaslights were coming on; and the long avenues, which had been slowly swamped in darkness, re-emerged all shimmering, spreading further than ever as they cut through the blackness towards
the murky horizon. A great breath swept through the newly expanded neighbourhood, with its strings of little lights beneath the vast, moonless sky. This was the time when, from one end of the boulevards to the other, the wine-sellers, the pubs and the cabarets started to blaze joyfully as the first rounds were ordered and the first sounds of merriment arose. The fortnightly pay-day filled the pavement with louts pushing and shoving, out for a spree. You could feel that people were out to have a good time, a cracking good time, but still good-natured, a bit lit up, nothing more. The cheap restaurants were beginning to fill: through every lighted window, you could see people eating, mouths full and laughing without even bothering to swallow what they had in them. A few old soaks were already settling down in the wine shops, yelling and waving their arms. And an infernal noise rose out of these throats, yelping voices, thick voices, amid the constant tramping of feet along the pavement. ‘Hey, there! Are you coming for a bite? Hurry up, sluggard, I'll pay the first round! Look, there's Pauline! Oh, no, now we'll have a laugh!' The doors gaping, emitting smells of wine and bursts of trombone music. People were queuing in front of Old Colombe's drinking den, which was lit up like a cathedral for high mass; and, heavens, you would have thought there was a real ceremony, because the chaps inside were singing away like choirboys at their stalls, their cheeks swelling, and their paunches sticking out. They were celebrating Saint Pay-Day, a very agreeable saint who must sit behind the till in paradise. But when they saw how things were at this time in the evening, the petty bourgeois, walking along with their wives, shook their heads and muttered that there would be a lot of drunken men in Paris that evening. And the night was very dark, dead and icy, above this din, a darkness broken only by the fiery lines of the boulevards reaching to the four corners of the sky.

Gervaise stood in front of the drinking den and thought. If she had had two
sous
, she would have gone in and taken a drop. Perhaps a drink would calm her hunger. Oh, she had had a few drinks in her time! And enjoyed it, too. From afar, she looked at the boozing machine, feeling that her misfortune came from there and dreaming about finishing herself off with hard spirits, whenever she had the means to do it. Then she felt her scalp prickle, seeing that night had fallen. Come on,
it was time; it was time to be brave and to be nice, unless she wanted to die in the midst of all this merry-making. All the more so, since watching other people eat was not exactly doing anything to fill her own stomach. She slowed down and looked around. The shadows were deeper under the trees and few people went there, only people in a hurry, quickly crossing the boulevard. And, on that wide, dark and deserted piece of pavement, where the bright lights and sounds of the nearby roadways petered out, women were standing and waiting. They would stay motionless for long periods, patiently, as stiff as the slender little plane trees. Then, slowly, they would move, dragging their shoes across the icy ground, take a few paces and then stop once more, rooted to the spot. There was one, with a huge upper half, but the legs and arms of an insect, who was rolling around and bulging, dressed in a tatty piece of black silk and a yellow scarf. Another was tall, dry and bare-headed, with a maid's apron. And still others, heavily made-up old ones and young girls, who were dirty, so dirty and pathetic that not even a rag-and-bone man would have picked them up. But Gervaise didn't know what to do; she tried to learn, by imitating them. Her throat was dry and she felt like a little girl; she no longer knew whether she felt ashamed; she was behaving as though in a bad dream. For quarter of an hour, she stood quite still.

Men walked past without turning round. So she bestirred herself and dared to accost a man who was whistling, with his hands in his pockets, and she muttered, in a choked voice:

‘Monsieur, if you please…'

The man looked sideways at her and carried on walking, whistling more loudly.

Gervaise got bolder. She forgot herself in this fierce hunt, with her belly hollow, determined to get her dinner, even though it kept on eluding her. She tramped around for a long time, not knowing where she was or what time it was. Around her, under the trees, the women were moving back and forth, black and silent, confining their steps to the regular up-and-down padding of beasts in a cage. They emerged from the shadows with the slow drifting of apparitions; they would pass through the pool thrown by a gaslight, which would sharply and briefly light up their pale masks; then they would vanish once more,
swinging a white fringe of petticoat, drawn back into the shadows and the quivering allure of the dark pavement. Some men would let themselves be stopped, exchange a few jesting words and leave again, laughing. Others, discreetly, unobtrusively, would set off ten paces behind a woman; there would be murmured discussions, arguments in low voices, angry bargaining, then an abrupt silence. And Gervaise, wherever she walked, saw these women posted there in the dark, as though there were women planted in the ground from one end of the outer boulevards to the other. As soon as she had passed one, there would be another, twenty yards further along. The line extended on and on; all of Paris was under guard. Despised, she lost her temper, changed direction and started to walk from the Chaussée de Clignancourt to the wide Rue de la Chapelle.

‘Monsieur, if you please…'

But the men walked by. She left the abattoirs, their ruins reeking of blood. She cast a glance at the old Hôtel Boncoeur, now closed and disreputable-looking. She walked along the front of the Lariboisière Hospital, mechanically counting the lighted windows burning like lamps at the bedside of a dying man, with their calm, pale glow. She crossed the railway bridge, as the trains thundered by, groaning and rending the air with the desperate cry of their whistles. Oh, how sad the night made all these things! Then she turned on her heels and looked back at the same houses and the monotonous procession along this same piece of thoroughfare, and did this ten, twenty times, unceasingly, without pausing to rest for a minute on a bench. No, no one wanted her. This contempt seemed to increase her shame. She went back down towards the hospital again, then back up towards the abattoirs. This was her final walk, from the bloody courtyards where beasts were struck down to the dimly lit wards where death stiffened you in a communal shroud. Her life lay between the two.

‘Monsieur, if you please -'

Suddenly, she saw her shadow on the ground. When she came closer to a gaslight, the vague shape became more solid and sharper, a huge, squat shadow, so round that it was grotesque. It spread out, belly, breasts and hips, merging and running into one another. She was limping so much that the shadow toppled at every step she took – a
proper puppet! Then, as she got further away, the puppet grew larger, became a giant and filled the whole boulevard, giving little bows that made it knock its head against the trees and houses. My God! How odd and frightening she was! Never had she so well understood her degradation. She couldn't take her eyes off it, waiting for the streetlights to come up and following the antics of her shadow. Why, this was a real strumpet that she had walking beside her! What a pick-up! She was bound to attract men at once. And she lowered her voice, daring only to stammer at the backs of passing men:

‘Monsieur, if you please…'

Meanwhile, it must be very late. Everything was being turned off. The eating-houses were closed and, at the wine sellers', the gas was getting red and one could hear the sound of voices thickened by drink. Good fun was giving way to disputes and blows. Some tattered great brute was yelling: ‘I'm going to take you to pieces, count your bones!' A girl was hitting her lover at the door of a bar, calling him a filthy brute and a sick swine, while he could come up with nothing better than to repeat: ‘So what?' The drink carried out into the streets a need to hit someone, something savage that made the now less frequent passers-by look pale and agitated. There was a punch-up and one drunk fell flat on his back, while his friend, thinking he had done for him, ran off to the sound of his heavy shoes. Some groups were roaring dirty songs and there were long silences, broken by hiccups and the dull sound of drunkards falling over. This is how the fortnightly pay-day celebrations always ended: the wine had been flowing so copiously since six o'clock that it was now going for a walk along the streets. Oh, what pretty traces it left, like spreading foxes' tails right in the middle of the pavement, which the more fastidious of those out late had to step over to avoid walking in them. A clean district, indeed! A foreigner chancing to visit before the road-sweepers had been past in the morning would go away with a very fine impression of it. But right now the drunkards were at home here and couldn't give a damn for the rest of Europe. By God! Knives were coming out of pockets and the little festival was ending in bloodshed. Women quickened their pace while men stalked, sharp-eyed, like wolves, while the night thickened, full of dreadful deeds.
⁴

Gervaise still kept going, putting one foot after the other, going up and down with no thought except to keep walking. She would feel sleepy, and even doze off, rocked by the movement of her leg. Then she would suddenly wake up and look around her and realize that she had gone a hundred yards without being aware of it, as though dead. Her tired feet were swelling in her worn shoes. She had no feeling left in her, she was so weary and empty. The last clear thought that she had was that her bitch of a daughter might at this very moment be eating oysters. Then, everything went blank and she stayed staring, open-eyed, though the effort of thinking was too much. The only sensation that persisted in her, in the midst of this abolition of her very being, was that of cold, a bitter cold, a biting, mortal cold, the like of which she had never before experienced. Not even the dead are so cold in the earth. She wearily raised her head and had an icy slap in the face. It was the snow, which had finally decided to fall out of the hazy sky, a fine, dense snow, whirled around by a light wind. They had been waiting for it for three days; it had come at the right moment.

In the first squall, Gervaise woke up and started to walk faster. Men were running, in a hurry to get home, their shoulders already white. And, seeing one approaching slowly under the trees, she went up to him and said again:

‘Monsieur, if you please… '

The man had stopped, but didn't seem to have heard. He was holding out his hand and muttering in a low voice:

‘Charity, I beg you… '

The two of them looked at one another. My God! This is what they had come to, Old Bru begging, Madame Coupeau walking the streets! They remained there, staring at one another, open-mouthed. Now they could meet on equal terms. All evening the old workman had wandered around, not daring to approach anybody; and the first person he stopped was another starveling like himself. Lord, wasn't it pathetic! To work for fifty years and then have to beg! To have been one of the biggest laundresses in the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or and end up in the gutter! They kept on staring. Then, without a word, they went off in opposite directions, lashed by the snow.

It was a real blizzard. High up here, in these wide-open spaces, the fine snow swirled around and seemed to be blowing in from all four corners of the sky. You could not see ten yards ahead; everything was swathed in this flying dust. The whole neighbourhood had vanished, the boulevard seemed dead, as though the storm had stifled the hiccups of the last drunkards under its white sheet. Gervaise kept on walking, painfully, blinded and lost. She was feeling her way along the trees. As she walked towards the gaslights, they glowed through the surrounding pallor like recently extinguished torches. Then, all at once, as she started to cross at an intersection, even these lights failed; she was caught up and rolled along in a pale whirlwind, unable to distinguish anything that might guide her. The ground beneath her feet was disappearing in a hazy whiteness. Grey walls had closed around her. And when she stopped, uncertain where to go, turning to look around her, she could sense, beyond the veil of ice, the vastness of the avenues and the interminable lines of gaslights – the whole black, deserted infinity of Paris asleep.

She was at the point where the outer boulevard meets the Boulevard Magenta and the Boulevard Ornano, and was dreaming of lying down and sleeping on the ground, when she heard footsteps. She ran, but the snow was getting in her eyes and the footsteps went away before she could tell if they were going to the right or left. Then she saw the broad shoulders of a man, a swaying patch of blackness vanishing into the mist. Oh, that one she must have! She wouldn't let him get away! So she ran faster, reached him and tugged on his jacket.

‘Monsieur, Monsieur, if you please… '

The man turned round. It was Goujet.

Now she was picking up Gueule-d'Or! What had she done to the Good Lord for Him to torment her in this way, right to the end? This was the last straw: to throw herself at the feet of the blacksmith, so that he would see her as no different from the cheap whores around here, ashen-faced and desperate. And all this was happening under a gaslight, so that she could see her own shapeless shadow making fun of her on the snow, like a caricature. It looked like a drunken woman. My God! Not to have a crumb of bread or a drop of wine in your body and be taken for a drunk! It was her fault: why did she drink? Of
course, Goujet must think she had been drinking and that she was painting the town.

Goujet, meanwhile, was looking at her, while the snow scattered its white flowers across his fine yellow beard. Then, as she was lowering her head and shrinking away, he caught her.