The Drinking Den (57 page)

Then, finally, the procession ended. Gervaise, standing in the middle of the street, was still watching the gate. It was starting to look bad. Two stragglers came out, but there was no sign of Coupeau. And when she asked them whether Coupeau was coming, they, knowing how things stood, told her, joking, that he had just gone with Thingy out of the back door, to take the hens to pee. Gervaise understood. Coupeau had been lying again; she could twiddle her thumbs. So, slowly, dragging her worn-out shoes along, she went down the Rue de la Charbonnière. Her dinner was running away ahead of her and she watched it run, in the yellow dusk, with a little shudder. This time, it was all over. Not a scrap, not a glimmer of hope, nothing ahead except night and hunger. It would be a fine night to die, this filthy night lowering around her shoulders.

She was dragging herself up the Rue des Poissonniers when she heard Coupeau's voice. Yes, there he was, in the Petite Civette, getting Mes-Bottes to buy him a round. That rogue Mes-Bottes, at the end of the previous summer, had managed to get himself married to a lady, a pretty decrepit one, admittedly, but with some decent remains – and a lady from the Rue des Martyrs, not some piece of rubbish who scoured the outer boulevards. You should have seen the man, living like a bourgeois, the lucky devil, with his hands in his pockets, well dressed and well fed. He was so plump you wouldn't recognize him. His friends said that his wife had as much work as she wanted with some gentlemen of her acquaintance. A wife like that and a house in the country: what more did one need to make life pleasant? Coupeau regarded Mes-Bottes with admiration. Didn't the rascal even have a gold ring on his little finger!

Gervaise put a hand on Coupeau's shoulder, just as he was coming out of the Petite Civette.

‘Hey, you, I've been waiting… I'm hungry. Is that all I'm getting out of you?'

But he snapped straight back at her.

‘If you're hungry, eat your fist! And keep the other one for tomorrow!'

He thought it was outrageous, making a scene in front of everyone. So what! He hadn't worked, but the bakers were making bread all the same. Perhaps she thought he was some kind of cutthroat, to come threatening him with her nonsense!

‘Do you want me to steal?' she asked, in a dull voice.

Mes-Bottes rubbed his chin in a conciliatory sort of way.

‘No, that's illegal,' he said. ‘But when a woman knows how to use her assets – '

Coupeau broke in to say: ‘Hear, hear!' Yes, a woman should know how to use her assets. But his had always been an old hag, a gormless bitch. It would be her fault if they died like animals. Then he reverted to his idolization of Mes-Bottes. Look how smart he was, the rotter! A proper gent, with white linen and really neat pumps! By heaven! It was not any old rubbish. Here, at any rate, was one fellow whose old woman knew how to manage things.

The two men were walking down towards the outer boulevard. Gervaise followed. After a pause, she repeated, addressing Coupeau's back:

‘I'm hungry, you know… I was counting on you. You've got to find some grub for me.'

He didn't reply, so she repeated in a painfully heart-rending tone:

‘So, is that all you'll give me?'

‘How can I, in God's name! I haven't got anything!' he yelled, turning round angrily. ‘Leave me alone, won't you! Or I'll thump you!'

His fist was already raised. She shrank back and seemed to make up her mind.

‘Very well, then, I'm off. I'll find myself a man.'

At that, the roofer began to laugh, pretending it was a joke. Without appearing to, he urged her on. Now that was a fine idea! At night,
under a streetlight, she might still look attractive enough. If she did pull some man, he recommended the Capucin restaurant: they had little private rooms where you could eat very decently. And, as she set off for the outer boulevard, fierce and deathly pale, he shouted after her:

‘Listen, you can bring me back the dessert. I like cakes. And if your gentleman is well turned out, ask him for an old coat, it would make my day.'

Gervaise, with this infernal chatter following her, walked quickly away. Then, finding that she was all alone in the midst of the crowd, she slowed down. Her mind was made up. Between stealing and doing
that
, she preferred that, because at least it would not harm anyone. She would just be using what belonged to her. Of course, it wasn't very decent; but decency and indecency were all mixed up in her head at this moment. When you are dying of hunger, you don't spend much time on philosophy, you eat whatever bread is to hand. She had reached the Chaussée Clignancourt. It seemed as though night would never fall. So, biding her time, she walked along the boulevards like a lady taking the evening air before going in to dinner.

She felt ashamed being in this neighbourhood, it was improving so much, now open on all sides. The Boulevard Magenta, coming up from the heart of Paris, and the Boulevard Ornano, going off into the countryside, had driven right through the old barrier: a tremendous amount of houses had been torn down to make way for these two great avenues, still white with plaster, which had spared the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière and the Rue des Poissonniers, the two ends of which, cut short and mutilated, twisted like dark bowels, and led away on either side. The outer boulevards had long since been enlarged by the people who demolished the toll barrier, and given carriageways on each side and a promenade in the middle for pedestrians, set with four rows of little plane trees. It was a vast crossroads extending its endless roadways towards the distant horizon, with their bustling crowds merging into the chaos of building works. But among the tall new houses, several rickety old shacks remained standing; between the sculptured façades, black holes gaped, yawning kennels, exposing their ragged windows. Beneath the growing luxury of Paris, the poverty of
the slums was undermining and besmirching this workshop of a new city, so hastily put up.
²

Gervaise felt entirely alone and abandoned in the bustle of the broad pavement, beside the little plane trees. These vistas along the avenues into the far distance made her stomach feel even more empty. Just imagine: in this stream of humanity, where there were people who were really quite well off, not a Christian soul guessed her situation and slipped ten
sous
into her hand. Yes, it was all too big and too beautiful; her head swam and her legs gave way under her, beneath this exaggerated breadth of grey sky spread above such a vast expanse of land. Dusk had that dirty-yellow hue of Parisian sunsets, a colour that makes one want to die at once because it makes the sight of the streets so ugly. There was a suspect ambivalence about the moment: a muddy tint blurred the distant edges of the view. Gervaise, who was already exhausted, had arrived at the very time when workers were going home. This was the hour when ladies with hats and smartly turned-out gentlemen who lived in the new houses were swamped by the common people, streams of men and women still pale from the tainted atmosphere of the factories. Hordes of them emerged from the Boulevard Magenta and the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière, panting from the uphill walk. Amid the duller rumbling of omnibuses and cabs, among the drays, curtained carriages and goods' wagons returning empty at the gallop, an ever-growing swarm of smocks and linen jackets spread across the roadway. Street porters were returning, with their hooks over their shoulders. Two workmen were striding along briskly side by side, talking very loudly and gesticulating, but not looking at one another. Others, alone, in caps and cloth coats, walked along the edge of the pavement, their heads bent. Still others came in groups of five or six, in a line, not talking, hands in pockets, pale-eyed. A few kept their dead pipes in their mouths. Bricklayers, in a cab which they had hired for four together, their hods bouncing along on top, went by, exhibiting their white faces at the windows. Painters were swinging their paint-pots, a roofer carried a long ladder, narrowly avoiding putting out everyone's eyes with it, while a late-returning fountain-keeper, his box on his back, was playing the tune of ‘Le Bon Roi Dagobert', a melancholy air, on his trumpet. Oh, what sad music it
was, seeming to mark time to the tramping of the herd, these beasts of burden dragging themselves along, exhausted! Another day done! Honestly, the days were too long and there were too many of them. One hardly had time to cram in some food and digest it before it was already daylight and time again to put on the yoke of misery. Yet these chaps were whistling, tapping their feet, marching straight ahead, their eyes fixed on supper.

Gervaise let the stream of people go past, indifferent to knocks, elbowed right and left, rolled along in the midst of the current; for men have no time to spend on gallantry when they are broken with fatigue and raging with hunger.

Suddenly, looking up, the laundress saw the former Hôtel Boncoeur in front of her. The little house, after being for a time a dubious café, which was closed down by the police, now stood abandoned, its shutters covered with posters and its lamp broken, crumbling and disintegrating from top to bottom under the rain, its tawdry wine-coloured distemper mouldering away. And nothing around seemed to have changed. The newsagent's and the tobacconist's were still there. Above these low buildings, one could still see the peeling façades and dilapidated outlines of the five-storey houses behind. Only the dance-hall of the Grand Balcon was no longer there; the hall with its ten blazing windows had just been turned over to a sugar-mill, from which continual humming sounds emerged. Yet it was here, in the depths of that shack, the Hôtel Boncoeur, that all this had started. She remained standing, looking at the first-floor window, where there was a shutter hanging off, and recalled her youth with Lantier, their first quarrels and the disgusting way in which he had left her. No matter, she had been young and all this now seemed light-hearted to her, at this distance. A mere twenty years, and now, good Lord, she was on the streets. The sight of the house pained her, so she walked up the boulevard towards Montmartre.

On piles of sand, between the benches, children were still playing as night fell. The procession continued, women workers trotting past, hurrying to make up time spent looking in shop windows. One tall girl had stopped and given her hand to a boy who was accompanying her to three doors away from her home; others, as they parted, made arrangements to meet that night in the Grand Salon de la Folie or the
Boule-Noire. In the midst of the groups, some home-workers were carrying their work under their arms. A chimney-sweep, in a harness, was pulling a cart full of debris and nearly got run down by an omnibus. Meanwhile, as the crowd thinned, a few women ran out bare-headed after lighting their fires, to get something for dinner; they pushed through the crowd, rushed into the butcher's and the pork butcher's, hurriedly bought their meat and left with it in their hands. There were little girls of eight, sent out to do the shopping, walking past the shops clasping great four-pound loaves as tall as they were, like lovely yellow dolls, who stopped and stared for five minutes at a picture in a window, their cheeks pressed against the bread. Then the flow petered out, the groups became more widely spaced, the workers had gone home; and in the blazing of the gaslights, now that the day was over, one could hear the dull retaliation of idleness and merry-making, as they started to awake.

Oh, yes, Gervaise's day was done! She was more exhausted than all these working people who had just pushed past her. She could lie down there and die because work no longer wanted her, and she had slaved enough in her life to say: ‘Whose turn is it now? I've had my fill of it!' This was the time when everyone was eating. It really was the end, the sun had snuffed out its candle and the night would be long. My God! Just to stretch out at least and not get up again, to think that one had put down one's tools for good and that one could idle eternity away! That would be good, after knocking oneself out for twenty years. And Gervaise, in spite of herself, amid the cramps twisting her stomach, started to remember the holidays, the parties and the good times she had had in her life. Once in particular, when it was bitterly cold, on the third Thursday in Lent,
³
she had properly painted the town. She really had been pretty in those days, blonde and fresh-looking. Her wash-house in the Rue Neuve had named her Queen, in spite of her leg. So they had promenaded along the boulevards, in carts decked with greenery, while the fashionable passers-by looked and lusted after her. Gentlemen raised their monocles as if for a real queen. Then, in the evening, they had had a magnificent feast and danced until daybreak. Queen, yes, queen! With a crown and a shawl, for twenty-four hours, twice round the clock! And, with her mind dulled in the agony of
hunger, she stared at the ground as if seeking the stream that had carried off her fallen majesty.

She looked up again. She was opposite some abattoirs that were being demolished. The façade had been torn away to reveal dark courtyards, stinking and still damp with blood. And when she went further back down the boulevard, she also saw the Lariboisière Hospital, with its great grey wall, above which the regularly spaced windows fanned out like gloomy wings. One door, in the outer wall, terrified the neighbourhood – the door of the dead, built of solid oak, without a gap, as stern and silent as a tombstone. So, to escape from it, she went on further, as far as the railway bridge. The track was hidden from her by the high parapets of riveted sheet steel. All she could see, against the luminous horizon of the city, was the wide angle of the station roof, blackened with soot; and in this vast emptiness she could hear the whistles of the locomotives, the rhythmical shuddering of the turntables – a buzz of mighty, unseen activity. Then a train went by on its way out of Paris, the sound of its panting breath and grinding wheels getting steadily louder. She saw nothing of it except a white cloud, a sudden puff of smoke that rose above the parapet and vanished. But the bridge shook and left her trembling in the shock of its passage, full steam ahead. She turned round, as if to follow the invisible engine as it rumbled away. On that side she could imagine the countryside, the open sky seen from the bottom of a cutting, with tall houses right and left, isolated, put up in no particular order, with façades and walls unwhitewashed or painted with giant advertisements, all stained to the same yellowish colour by the soot from the locomotives. If only she could leave, if only she could go away somewhere, away from these houses of poverty and suffering! Perhaps she would start to live again. Then she turned back and started to read the notices that had been stuck on the steel parapets. There were some of every colour and variety. A small, pretty blue one promised a fifty-franc reward for a lost dog. Now, there was an animal that must have been loved!