But Coupeau didn’t feel sleepy. He stayed where he was, swaying from one side to the other, like a pendulum in a clock, sniggering with a defiant, provocative air. Gervaise was anxious to get rid of Mme Bijard, so she called Clémence over and got her to count out the clothes, while she wrote them down. But at every item, the great good-for-nothing would let out some obscenity, some dirty word; she pointed up all the customers’ little flaws, their intimate secrets, and had private, laundress’s jokes for all the holes and all the stains that went through her hands. Augustine pretended not to understand, straining her ears, like the vicious little thing that she was. Mme Putois pursed her lips and thought it stupid to say all this in front of Coupeau. A man shouldn’t be dealing with linen: it’s one of those exhibitions that you don’t make in front of respectable people. As for Gervaise, she was serious, preoccupied with what she was doing and seemed not to be listening. Even as she wrote, she followed each item carefully, to recognize each one as it went past; and she never made a mistake, putting a name to each, sensing it by smell or colour. Those towels belonged to the Goujets, it was obvious: they had been used to wipe the bottoms of frying-pans. Now that pillowcase definitely came from the Boches, because of the hair oil that Mme Boche got all over her linen. And there was no need to stick your nose right into M. Madinier’s flannel vests, either: the man’s skin was so greasy that he discoloured the wool. And she knew all sorts of other peculiarities, too, the secrets of each person’s personal habits, the underclothes of the neighbours who crossed the street in silk skirts, the number of stockings, handkerchiefs and shirts that each one dirtied every week, and how some people would tear particular garments, always at the same place. So she was full of stories. Mlle Remanjou’s blouses, for example, were the subject of endless comment: they wore away at the top, so the old girl must have pointed collar-bones; and they were never dirty, even when she had worn them for a fortnight, which just went to show that at that age one is almost like a plank of wood, from which it would be very hard to extract a drop of anything. In this way, every time the linen was sorted in the shop, they undressed the whole neighbourhood of La Goutte-d’Or.
‘This is really choice,’ Clémence exclaimed, opening a new bundle.
Gervaise, suddenly experiencing a feeling of disgust, shrank back.
‘Mme Gaudron’s,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to do hers any more, I’m looking for some excuse. I mean, I’m no more fussy than the next person, I’ve handled some pretty repulsive clothes in my time; but I tell you, I can’t take that one any longer. It makes me want to throw up. What can she be doing, that woman, to get her laundry in such a state!’
She told Clémence to have it done quickly. But the girl continued her commentary, sticking her fingers through the holes, with a different remark on each item, which she brandished like the flags of dirt triumphant. Now the piles of clothing had risen around Gervaise. Still sitting on the edge of the stool, she had almost vanished among the shirts and skirts; in front of her, she had the sheets, trousers and tablecloths, a chaos of soiled linen; and, in the midst of this expanding lake, she still had her arms and neck bare, with the little locks of blonde hair sticking to her temples making her seem pinker and more languid. She had regained her poise, the smile of a shopkeeper who is at once careful and attentive, forgetting Mme Gaudron’s washing, not smelling it any more, but rummaging around with one hand in the piles to make sure that there were no mistakes. Boss-eyed Augustine, who loved to put shovelfuls of coke into the boiler, had just stuffed it so full that the cast-iron plates were turning red. The slanting sun beat on the window and the shop blazed. At this, Coupeau, made more drunk by the heat, was overcome with a rush of affection. He came towards Gervaise, open-armed and emotional.
‘You’re a good little woman,’ he stammered. ‘Let me give you a kiss.’
But he got tangled up in the petticoats, which were in his way, and almost fell over.
‘What a bore you are!’ Gervaise said, without irritation. ‘Just stay there quietly, we’re almost done.’
No, no, he wanted to give her a kiss, he had to, because he loved her. Stammering away, he went round the pile of petticoats, stumbled against the pile of shirts and then, since he wouldn’t give up, his feet became entangled and he fell full-length, with his face in the handkerchiefs. Gervaise, starting to get impatient, pushed him and yelled that he would mix everything up. But Clémence and even Mme Putois told her she was in the wrong. After all, he was being nice. He wanted to give her a kiss. She could let him kiss her, couldn’t she?
‘You don’t know your luck, now, Madame Coupeau,’ said Mme Bijard, whose husband, a locksmith and a drunkard, would beat her up every night when he got home. ‘If only mine was like that, when he’d had a skinful, he’d be a pleasure to live with!’
Gervaise had calmed down and was already regretting having snapped at him. She helped him back on his feet, then offered her cheek, with a smile. But the roofer, without a blush, grabbed her breasts in front of everybody.
‘No offence meant,’ he said, ‘but your washing does stink! And I still love you, even so!’
‘Leave me alone, you’re tickling,’ she said, laughing still louder. ‘What an animal! What a way to behave!’
Now that he had his hands on her, he refused to let go. She abandoned the struggle, stunned by the slight dizziness that swept over her from the pile of washing, unrepelled by Coupeau’s winey breath. And the lingering kiss that they gave one another, mouth to mouth, in the midst of the dirty laundry that she worked with, was like a first slip in the gradual degradation of their lives.
Mme Bijard, meanwhile, had been tying the washing up in bundles, while chatting about her little girl, two years old, a child called Eulalie, who already had the good sense of a grown woman. You could leave her alone, she never cried, she didn’t play with matches. Finally, she carried off the bundles of washing one by one, her waist bending under the weight and her face blotched with purple.
‘This is unbearable, we’re boiling,’ said Gervaise, wiping her face, before turning back to Mme Boche’s bonnet.
And there was talk of giving Augustine a good slap, when they noticed that the boiler was red-hot. The irons, too, were turning red. There must be the devil in that girl! You couldn’t turn your back without her getting up to some mischief. Now they would have to wait a quarter of an hour before they could use the irons. Gervaise damped down the fire with two shovels full of clinker. In addition, she had the idea of stretching a pair of sheets across the brass wires on the ceiling, like blinds, in order to protect them from the sun. After that, it was quite pleasant in the shop. The temperature was still very warm, but you would have thought you were in an alcove, in white light, shut in as one might be at home, far from everything, even though, through the sheets, they could still hear people walking quickly along the pavement. Now they were able to put themselves at their ease. Clémence took off her bodice. Coupeau still refused to go to bed, so he was allowed to stay, provided he promised to keep quiet in a corner, because this was not the moment to nod off on the job.
‘What has that pest done with the polonais this time?’ Gervaise asked, speaking about Augustine.
They always had to look for the little iron, which they would find in some odd place, where they claimed that the apprentice had hidden it. Gervaise at last finished the border of Mme Boche’s bonnet. She had done the lace trimmings roughly, pulling them out by hand, then stuck them up with a touch of the iron. The bonnet had a very elaborate front made up of ruffles alternating with embroidered lace inserts; so she had to take care, working in silence, meticulously ironing the ruffles and the inserts with a coq, an iron egg held by a rod in a wooden stand.
Now, silence reigned. For a moment, all that could be heard were dull blows, muffled by a blanket. The boss, her two workers and the apprentice stood on either side of the large square table, all leaning over their work, with backs bent and arms continually moving backwards and forwards. To her right, each o
f them had her square, a flat brick, scorched by hot irons. In the middle of the table, on the edge of a dish full of clear water, lay a cloth and a little brush. A bunch of great lilies was blooming, in what had been a jar of cherries in brandy, bringing a touch of the royal garden4 to the place, with the cluster of their snow-white petals. Mme Putois had started work on the basket of washing that Gervaise had got ready: towels, knickers, bodices and pairs of sleeves. Augustine was dawdling over her stockings and napkins, her nose in the air, watching a large fly buzzing around. As for Clémence, she had reached her thirty-fifth man’s shirt since the morning.
‘Always wine, never fire-water!’ said the roofer, who felt compelled to utter this remark. ‘Fire-water’s not good for me, mustn’t have it.’
Clémence took an iron off the stove with her leather and iron handle, and held it up to her cheek, to make sure it was hot enough. She rubbed it on her square, wiped it on a cloth hanging from her waist, and started on her thirty-fifth shirt, starting with the yoke and the two sleeves.
‘I don’t know, Monsieur Coupeau,’ she said, after a minute. ‘There’s nothing wrong with a little shot of gin. It perks me up no end. And, you know, the sooner you go, the better it is. Oh, I have no illusions about it, I won’t make old bones.’
‘What a pain you are, with your thing about burial!’ Mme Putois interrupted; she didn’t like morbid conversations.
Coupeau had got up and was getting cross, thinking that he had been accused of drinking spirits. He swore on his oath and on the heads of his wife and child, that there was not a drop of spirits in his body. And he went over to Clémence, breathing into her face so that she could smell his breath. Then, when he had his nose on her bare shoulders, he started to snigger. He wanted to have a look. Clémence, after folding the back of the shirt and running the iron across each side, had moved on to the cuffs and collar. But as he was still pushing her, he made her put a crease in the wrong place, and she had to take the brush from the edge of the dish to moisten the starch.
‘Madame!’ she said. ‘Please tell him to stop doing that to me!’
‘Leave her alone and be sensible, won’t you?’ Gervaise said calmly. ‘Can’t you see we’re busy?’
So they were busy? What then? It wasn’t his fault. He was doing no harm. He wasn’t touching, just looking. Wasn’t he allowed to look nowadays at the beautiful things that God had made? She certainly did have lovely tits, that saucy bitch Clémence! She could charge people two sous to have a look and a feel, and no one would consider the money wasted. As for the laundress, she had given up trying to argue and was now laughing at the crude compliments the drunken man was paying her. She even started to trade jokes with him. He was teasing about the men’s shirts: so, she was still doing men’s shirts, was she? Oh, yes, she lived in them. Oh, good God in heaven! Did she know them? Like the back of her hand! She had dealt with enough of them: hundreds and hundreds. Fair-haired or dark, all the men of the neighbourhood wore her work on their backs. Meanwhile, she went on with her task, her shoulders shaking with laughter. She had made five large folds in the back, by putting her iron in through the front; now she turned back the front panel and pleated it too with sweeping gestures.
‘This is the tail!’ she said, laughing even louder.
Boss-eyed Augustine also burst out laughing, thinking the quip very funny. They told her off: just listen to the brat, laughing at words she shouldn’t understand! Clémence handed her iron over to the apprentice, who used them up on her napkins and stockings when they were not hot enough for starched items. But she picked this one up awkwardly and gave herself a ‘cuff’ – a long burn on the wrist. At that she started to sob and accused Clémence of burning her on purpose. The other girl, who had gone to fetch a very hot iron for the front of the shirt, immediately consoled her by threatening to iron both her ears for her, if she went on. As she was talking, she slipped a woollen cloth under the shirt-front and was slowly pushing the iron over it, giving the starch time to come out and dry. The front of the shirt was becoming as stiff and shiny as glossy paper.
‘You cunning bitch!’ Coupeau said, hopping from one foot to the other behind her with his drunkard’s obstinacy.
He stood on tiptoe, laughing like a badly oiled pulley. Clémence, leaning heavily on the work-table, her wrists bent and her elbows apart, waving in the air, bent her head with the effort, and all her naked flesh seemed to swell, her shoulders rising with the slow movement of the muscles contracting under the delicate skin, her breasts, damp with sweat, swelling inside the pink shadows of her gaping blouse. So his hands reached out, wanting to touch.
‘Madame! Madame!’ Clémence shouted. ‘Please tell him to keep quiet, would you? I’m off if this goes on. I don’t want to be insulted.’
Gervaise had just put Mme Boche’s bonnet on a stand covered in cloth and was folding the lace into funnels, minutely, with a small iron. She looked up just as the roofer was reaching out again, putting his hands inside the blouse.
‘Really, Coupeau, you’re behaving very badly,’ she said, in a tone of annoyance, as though scolding a child who insisted on eating the jam with no bread. ‘You’d better go to bed.’
‘Yes, you go to bed, Monsieur Coupeau, that would be the best thing,’ said Mme Putois.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ he said, still giggling. ‘You’re a nasty bunch. Can’t someone have a joke, then? Women don’t mind me, I’ve never hurt one of them. A man can pinch a lady, can’t he? I wouldn’t go further than that; one must respect the fair sex. And then, when you show off what you’ve got, it’s so that a man can make his choice, isn’t it? Why is the big blonde showing everything like that? No, it’s not decent…’
And he turned towards Clémence, saying: ‘You know what, duck, you’re wrong to be so stuck up. If it’s because there are other people around –’
But he was unable to go on. Gervaise had seized him with one hand, without violence, and had put her other hand over his mouth. He made a show of resistance, just for fun, while she was pushing him to the back of the shop, towards the bedroom. He freed his mouth and said that he was quite happy to go to bed, but that the big blonde should come and keep his feet warm. Then they heard Gervaise taking off his shoes. She undressed him, pushing him about a bit, in a motherly way. When she pulled down his trousers, he roared with laughter, not struggling any more but lying back, arching his back in the very middle of the bed; and he kicked around, saying that she was deliberately tickling him. Finally, she wrapped him up well, like a child. Was he comfortable, at least? But he didn’t answer, instead shouting to Clémence: ‘Come on, sweetie, I’m here, waiting for you.’
When Gervaise came back into the shop, boss-eyed Augustine was getting a slap from Clémence, who really meant it. It was to do with a dirty iron that Mme Putois had found on the stove: she, quite unsuspecting, had blackened a whole bodice with it. And since Clémence, trying to avoid blame for not cleaning her iron, had accused Augustine, swearing to high heaven that the iron was not hers, despite the cake of burned starch on the bottom, the apprentice had spat on her dress, quite openly, on the front, outraged at the injustice of it. The result was a well-aimed blow. The girl held back her tears and cleaned the iron with a candle-end. But, every time she had to pass behind Clémence, she gathered some saliva and spat, laughing to herself when it dribbled down her skirt.
Gervaise went back to curling the lace on the bonnet. In the sudden quiet that followed, they could hear Coupeau’s thick voice from the back of the shop. He was no trouble, just laughing to himself and muttering a few disconnected phrases:
‘What a silly one, my wife is! The silly, putting me to bed! I ask you! In the middle of the day! How silly, when I’m not tired!’
Then, quite suddenly, he was snoring. Gervaise gave a sigh of relief, content to know that he was at rest finally, sleeping off his bibulousness on two good mattresses. And she began to speak in the silence, not pausing, in a slow voice, keeping her eyes on the brisk movements of the l
ittle goffering-iron.
‘What do you expect? He’s not quite himself, you can’t get cross with him. And even if I did give him a hard time, it wouldn’t get us anywhere. I prefer to go along with what he says and get him to bed; at least, that way, it’s all over at once and he leaves me alone… And then, there’s no harm to him; he’s fond of me. You saw him just now, he would have gone through fire and water to give me a kiss. That’s another nice thing about him, because there are plenty of men, when they’re drunk, who go off to the brothel… He comes straight back here. He has a bit of a joke with the girls, but nothing more than that. You know what I mean, Clémence: you mustn’t get upset. You know what men are like when they’re drunk: they could kill their fathers and mothers and not remember a thing about it… Oh, I forgive him with all my heart! He’s no different from the rest, God knows.’
She said all this in a weak, dispassionate tone, having already become accustomed to Coupeau’s bingeing, still justifying her own indulgence of him, but already unable to see any harm in him pinching the girls’ bottoms in her own house. When she stopped speaking, silence returned and was not broken. Every time she took a new piece, Mme Putois would pull out the basket from under the cretonne cloth spread over the work-top; then, when the item had been ironed, she reached up with her little arms and placed it on a shelf. Clémence had just pressed her thirty-fifth man’s shirt. There were still piles of work: they had calculated that even if they hurried they would have to stay up until eleven o’clock. Now that there was nothing more to distract them everyone was working hard and fast. The naked arms flew backwards and forwards, patches of pink that brought out the whiteness of the linen. The boiler had been filled up again with coke and as the sun, finding its way between the sheets, was shining directly on the stove, the heat could be seen rising in the beam of sunlight, an invisible flame making the air quiver. It was so stifling under the skirts and cloths hanging from the ceiling to dry that boss-eyed Augustine’s saliva failed her and she had her tongue poking out between her lips. There was a smell of overheated stove and of sour starch-water, a scorched smell of flat-irons, an insipid bath-house smell to which the four women, baring their shoulders, added the rougher odour of their hair and necks drenched in sweat, while the bouquet of lilies faded in the greenish water of its jar, giving out a scent that was very pure and strong. And, from time to time, in the midst of the noise of the irons and the poker scraping in the stove, one of Coupeau’s snores rumbled with the regularity of a huge clock ticking, regulating the labour of the shop.