The Drinking Den (28 page)

‘Oh, no, don't say that!' Gervaise exclaimed, devastated. ‘Dress-shirts should be a little stiff, if you don't want a napkin round your body. Look at any gentleman… I do all your linen myself. None of my girls ever touches it, and I assure you I take good care of it, I would do it ten times over if necessary because it's for you, you understand…'

She was blushing slightly as she stammered out the end of the sentence. She was afraid of giving away the pleasure that she took in ironing Goujet's shirts herself. Of course, she had no improper thoughts about them, but she was a little ashamed even so.

‘Oh, I'm not saying anything against your work,' said Mme Goujet. ‘You do it perfectly, I know. Now this bonnet is impeccable. Only you can bring out the embroidery like that. And the fluted frills are so even! Now, I can recognize your handiwork at once. When you give so much as a dishcloth to another laundress, it shows. No? Just use a little less starch, that's all. Goujet doesn't want to look like a gentleman.'

While she was talking, she had taken the book and was crossing off the items one by one. Everything was indeed there. When they settled up, she saw that Gervaise was charging six
sous
for a bonnet. She exclaimed over it, but had to admit that the laundress was not expensive for everyday items; no, men's shirts, five
sous
, women's underwear, four
sous
, pillowcases, one and a half, aprons one
sou:
this was not dear, considering that many laundresses took half, or even a whole
sou
, more for all these things. Then, after Gervaise had called out the dirty linen for the old woman to write it down and put it in her basket, she did not leave, but stood there awkwardly with a request on her lips that made her very embarrassed.

‘Madame Goujet,' she said, at last. ‘If you don't mind, I'll take the money for the laundry this month.'

As it happened the month was a very big one and the bill that they had just drawn up together amounted to ten francs seven
sous
. Mme
Goujet looked at her for a moment with a serious expression on her face, then answered:

‘My child, it shall be as you wish. I don't want to refuse you the money if you need it. But this is not the way to pay off your debt. I'm saying this for your sake, you know. It's true: you must be careful.'

Gervaise hung her head and took this admonishment, stammering that the ten francs were to make up the money for a bill that she had signed with her coal merchant. But Mme Goujet became more stern at the word ‘bill'.
³
She gave her own case as an example. Since Goujet's daily wage had been reduced from twelve to nine francs, she had cut down on expenses. If one was foolish when young, one starved in old age. However, she restrained herself and didn't tell Gervaise that she gave her the washing just so that she could pay off her debt; at one time, she had done it all herself, and she could do so again, if the laundry was going to be costing her so much. When Gervaise had the ten francs and seven
sous
, she thanked Mme Goujet and hurriedly left. Going down the stairs, she felt pleased with things, she even wanted to dance, because she was already growing used to the worries and sordidness of money, and such embarrassments left her only with the joy of having escaped from them, until next time.

It was that very Saturday that Gervaise had a strange meeting as she was coming down the stairs from the Goujets'. She had to flatten herself against the banisters, with her basket, to let past a tall woman with her hair uncovered who was coming up, carrying a mackerel on a piece of paper, so fresh that it was still bleeding at the gills. She recognized Virginie, the girl whose skirt she had pulled up at the wash-house. The two of them looked hard at one another. Gervaise closed her eyes, thinking for a moment that she was going to get the mackerel in her face. But, no; Virginie gave a thin smile and, seeing that, the laundress, whose basket was blocking the staircase, wanted to be polite.

‘I'm sorry,' she said.

‘You're entirely forgiven,' the tall brunette replied.

So they stayed there, halfway down the stairs, chatting, instantly reconciled, without a word being spoken about the past. Virginie was now twenty-nine. She had turned into a splendid woman, well-built
and with a slightly oval face between her two jet-black ringlets. She straight away went through everything that had happened to her, to put Gervaise in the picture: she was now married, in the spring she had married a former cabinet-maker who had given up that work and was now applying for a place as a constable, because a government job is more secure and respectable. She had just bought this very mackerel for him.

‘He loves mackerel,' she said. ‘We have to spoil these darned men, don't we? But why not come up? You'll see where we live. It's a bit draughty here.'

When Gervaise had told her about her own marriage and said that she had lived in the same flat and even given birth to her daughter there, Virginie urged her still more eagerly to come up. It's always a pleasure to see a place where you have been happy. She had lived for five years across the river, at the Gros-Caillou.
⁴
That is where she had met her husband when he was in the army. But she had got bored with it and dreamed of coming back to the area around the Goutte-d'Or, where she knew everyone. So, a fortnight ago, they had moved into the room opposite the Goujets. Oh, all her things were still in a terrible mess; but it would sort itself out bit by bit.

Then, on the landing, they finally told one another their names.

‘Madame Coupeau.'

‘Madame Poisson.'

And, from then on, they called each other Mme Poisson and Mme Coupeau, large as life, just for the pleasure of acting the ladies, since they had previously been acquainted in less genteel circumstances. Even so, Gervaise felt a tiny bit mistrustful. Perhaps the big brunette was only making friends the better to have her revenge for the beating she had been given in the wash-house, and was cooking up some secret plot against her. Gervaise promised herself that she would stay on her guard. Just for the time being, however, Virginie was being so nice to her that she had to respond.

Upstairs in the room, Poisson, the husband, was working, seated at a table near the window: a man of thirty-five, with a pasty face, a red moustache and an ‘imperial'.
⁵
He was making little boxes. The only tools he had at his disposal were a penknife, a saw the size of a nail-file
and a pot of glue. He was using the wood from cigar boxes, thin sheets of unpolished mahogany, which he would cut out and decorate with the most extraordinary delicacy. Throughout the day, from one end of the year to another, he made identical boxes, eight centimetres by six, but he would adorn them with marquetry, think up new shapes for the lid or put in compartments, all to amuse himself, by way of passing the time while he waited for his appointment to the constabulary. All that remained of his profession as a cabinet-maker was this mania for little boxes. He did not sell his work, but gave it away to people he knew.

Poisson got up and politely greeted Gervaise, whom his wife introduced as an old friend. However, he was not a great talker and at once went back to his little saw – though from time to time he did cast an eye on the mackerel, which had been set down on the edge of the chest of drawers. Gervaise was very pleased to see her old home; she said where the furniture had been and pointed out the place on the floor where she had given birth. What a small world it was, though! When they lost sight of one another, long ago, they would never have expected to meet up again like this, living in the same room one after the other. Virginie told her a bit more about herself and her husband: he had come into a small legacy, from an aunt. Later, no doubt, he would set her up in business, but for the time being she still did some sewing, running up a dress for this one or that. Finally, after a good half-hour, the laundress started to leave. Poisson hardly turned round. Virginie saw her to the door and promised to repay the visit; in any case, she would pass on her customers – that was understood. And, as Virginie kept her talking on the landing, Gervaise guessed that she wanted to say something about Lantier and her sister, Adèle, the polisher. The idea churned her up inside. But not a word was spoken about those unpleasant matters and the two women parted with a very friendly goodbye.

‘Au revoir
, Madame Coupeau.'

‘Au revoir
, Madame Poisson.'

It was the start of a great friendship. A week later, Virginie could not walk past Gervaise's shop without looking in; and she would spend two hours or three hours chattering, until Poisson, thinking she had
been run over, would come anxiously in search of her, with his dumb, corpse-like face. Gervaise, seeing the dressmaker every day, soon began to suffer from a peculiar obsession: she couldn't hear her start a sentence without thinking that she was going to say something about Lantier; she thought, inevitably, about Lantier the whole time that Virginie was there. It was all quite ridiculous, because she didn't care a damn about Lantier, or about Adèle, or about what had become of the two of them. She never asked any questions, and didn't even feel curious for news of them. No, it was something beyond her control. She had the idea of them in her head as one may have an irritating tune on one's lips, and not be able to get rid of it. In any case, she did not hold it against Virginie, because naturally it wasn't her fault. She enjoyed her company very much and would call her back a dozen times before letting her leave.

Meanwhile, winter had been drawing on, the fourth that the Coupeaus had spent in the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or. That year,
⁶
December and January were exceptionally harsh. It froze cold enough to split a rock. The snow stayed on the street for three weeks after New Year's Day without melting. Work didn't stop, far from it: winter is the laundresses' best time. It was lovely inside the shop! There were never icicles on the windows, such as you could see at the grocer's and the milliner's opposite. The machinery, stuffed with coke, kept the temperature at Turkish-bath level; the washing steamed, so that you would think it was midsummer; and it was so cosy with the doors shut, with warmth everywhere, and such warmth, that they could fall asleep with their eyes open. Gervaise said with a laugh that to her it felt like being in the country; and, in point of fact, the carriages no longer made any noise as they drove past over the snow; one could hardly hear the footsteps of the passers-by; and in the great silence of extreme cold, only children's voices were audible, the shouts of a gang of kids who had built a huge slide along the gutter outside the blacksmith's. From time to time, she would go over to the window, wipe the condensation off with her hand and look at what was happening to the neighbourhood in this ghastly weather; but not a single nose was poked out of the nearby shops, and the whole district, muffled in snow, seemed to be keeping its head down. She would just exchange a little nod with the
coal merchant from next door, who was walking around with nothing on her head, but grinning from ear to ear now that it was freezing so hard.

What was particularly good in this foul weather was to have a really hot coffee in the middle of the day. The workers had no cause for complaint: their boss made it very strong and didn't just use four grains of chicory – unlike Mme Fauconnier's coffee, which was pure dishwater. The only trouble was that when it was Mother Coupeau who was responsible for pouring the water on the ground coffee, it went on for ever, because she fell asleep in front of the kettle. So the girls, after their lunch, did a bit of ironing while they waited for their coffee.

On the day after Epiphany,
⁷
half-past twelve struck and the coffee was still not ready. That particular day, it was stubbornly refusing to run through. Mother Coupeau was tapping the filter with a teaspoon, and you could hear the drops fall one by one, taking their time about it.

‘Why not leave it?' said big Clémence. ‘All that does is to make it cloudy. Today, naturally, there's plenty to eat and drink.'

Clémence was dealing with a man's shirt, making it good as new and lifting the creases with a fingernail. She had a dreadful cold; her eyes were puffy and her throat racked by fits of coughing that bent her double over the edge of the bench. In spite of that, she was not even wearing a scarf round her neck and was shivering inside a little cardigan that had cost eighteen
sous
. Beside her, Mme Putois, wrapped in flannel and padded up to her ears, was ironing a petticoat, turning it round the dress-board, the small end of which was resting on the back of a chair, while on the ground there was a cloth to stop the petticoat getting dirty if it touched the floor. Gervaise had half the workbench to herself, with some curtains of embroidered muslin over which she was running her iron in straight lines, stretching out her arms, to avoid making creases in the wrong place. Suddenly, hearing the coffee running through noisily, she looked up. It was that squint-eyed Augustine who had just made a hole in the middle of the grounds by sticking a spoon into the filter.

‘Would you leave it alone!' Gervaise exclaimed. ‘What on earth has got into you? We'll have mud to drink now.'

Mother Coupeau had lined up five glasses on a free corner of the workbench. The girls left their work. The boss always poured out the coffee herself, after putting two pieces of sugar into each glass. This was the moment they had all been waiting for. That day, as each of them was taking her glass and squatting down on a little bench in front of the stove, Virginie came in, shivering from head to toe.

‘Ah, my children!' she said. ‘It cuts you in half out there. I can't feel my ears any more. It's a real bitch this cold.'

‘Well, well, it's Madame Poisson,' said Gervaise. ‘I must say, you've come just at the right moment. You must have some coffee with us.'