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.’
‘Gracious, I won’t say no. Just crossing the road is enough to chill you to the bone.’
Luckily, there was some coffee left. Mother Coupeau went to fetch a glass and Gervaise politely allowed Virginie to take her own sugar. The girls moved back to make a small place for her near the stove. She shivered for a moment, her nose red, clasping her glass in her stiffened hands to warm them up. She had just come from the grocer’s where you could freeze just waiting for half a pound of gruyère cheese. And she exclaimed at the heat in the laundry: honestly, you’d think you were in an oven, it would revive the dead, the heat gave you such a pleasant tingling feeling on the skin. Then, warming up, she stretched out her long legs and the six women slowly sipped their coffee, surrounded by the unfinished washing, in the damp haze of steaming linen. Only Mother Coupeau and Virginie sat on chairs. The others, on their low benches, looked as though they were seated on the ground, and that squinting Augustine had even pulled a corner of the sheet under her petticoats, so that she could stretch out. For a while they said nothing, each with her nose in her glass, savouring the coffee.
‘It is good after all,’ Clémence announced.
But she nearly choked, in a sudden fit of coughing. She leaned her head against the wall, so that she could cough harder still.
‘That’s a nasty one,’ said Virginie. ‘Where did you pick it up?’
‘Who knows?’ Clémence answered, wiping her face on her sleeve. ‘It must have been the other evening. There were two people having a punch-up outside the Grand Balcon. I wanted to take a look, so I stopped there, in the snow. Oh, boy! What a ruckus! I nearly died laughing. One of them had her nose torn and the blood was pouring on the ground. When the other one – a great beanpole, she was, like me – when she saw the blood, she took to her heels. Anyway, that night, I started to cough. And I have to say men are that stupid when they sleep with a woman: they take the bedclothes and leave you uncovered all night…’
‘Fine way to behave,’ Mme Putois said. ‘You’re killing yourself, my girl.’
‘So what, if I want to kill myself! As if life was that much fun… You slave all bloody day long to earn fifty-five sous, boiling yourself morning, noon and night in front of the stove; no, honestly, I’ve had it up to here! But, believe me, this cold won’t do me the favour of carrying me off. It will go away just as it came.’
There was a silence. That good-for-nothing Clémence, who led the chahut8 in the dance-halls, screeching like a whore, always depressed people with her talk of death when she was at work. Gervaise knew what she was like and merely remarked:
‘You’re not exactly jolly on these mornings after, are you?’
The truth was that Gervaise would have preferred to avoid any talk about fights between women. It bothered her when anyone talked about kicks on the shins or a bunch of fives in the chops in front of her and Virginie, because of the scrap in the wash-house. As a matter of fact, Virginie was looking at her with a smile.
‘Oh,’ she murmured, ‘I saw a real hair-puller yesterday. They were going at one another like two cats…’
‘Who was?’ asked Mme Putois.
‘The midwife from the end of the street and her maid, you know, that little blonde girl… She’s a right little bitch, that one. She was yelling at the midwife: “Yes, yes, you got rid of that baby for the greengrocer’s wife, and I’ll be off to tell the police about it, if you don’t pay me.” And you should have seen how she was blinding and cursing! At this, the midwife let fly a punch, bam! Right on the nose! At this the darned bitch went for her mistress’s eyes and started to scratch her and tear out her hair. Oh, boy, yes, by the roots! The pork butcher had to separate them.’
The girls gave a complicit laugh. Then each of them took a little sip of coffee in a swaggering sort of way.
‘Do you really think she did that? Got rid of a baby?’ said Clémence.
‘Hell, I don’t know! There was a rumour going around,’ Virginie replied. ‘But I wasn’t there, of course. In any case, it goes with the job. They all do it.’
‘Ah, no,’ said Mme Putois. ‘It’s silly to go to them. What, and get yourself crippled! No thanks! Especially when there’s one sovereign remedy. Every evening you drink a glass of holy water and make the sign of the cross three times over your belly with your thumb. It blows away then like an ill wind.’
Mother Coupeau, whom everyone thought was asleep, shook her head in protest. She knew another way, and this one really was infallible. You had to eat a hard-boiled egg every two hours and put spinach leaves on the small of the back. The four other women looked serious. But Augustine, the one with the squint, who would start to giggle all on her own, and no one ever knew why, emitted the chicken’s cackle that was her own peculiar laugh. Everyone had forgotten about her. Gervaise lifted the petticoat and saw her on the cloth, rolling around like a piglet with her legs in the air. She pulled her out and put her back on her feet with a slap. What was she laughing about, the silly goose? Ought she to be listening, when grown-ups were talking? First of all she could take back the washing of a friend of Mme Lerat, in Batignolles. As she spoke, the boss was slipping the basket under her arm and pushing her towards the door. The boss-eyed girl, sobbing and grousing, went off, dragging her feet through the snow.
Meanwhile, Mother Coupeau, Mme Putois and Clémence were debating the effectiveness of hard-boiled eggs and spinach leaves. Then, Virginie, who had been lost in thought, holding her glass of coffee, said quietly:
‘Good heavens, people fight, people kiss, what does it matter, when the heart’s in the right place…’
And, leaning over to Gervaise, with a smile, she added:
‘No, of course I don’t hold it against you… Do you remember the business in the wash-house?’
The laundress was quite
embarrassed. This is what she had been fearing. Now, she guessed that they would start talking about Lantier and Adèle. The stove grumbled, and the heat radiated twice as fiercely as before from the red pipe. In their stupor, the girls, who were making their coffee last in order to delay their return to work as long as possible, looked out at the snow in the street, with expressions of languid voluptuousness on their faces. They had reached the stage of exchanging confidences; they said what they would have done if they had had an income of ten thousand francs: they would have done nothing at all, they would have spent whole afternoons warming themselves like this, showing their utter contempt for work and not going anywhere near it. Virginie had come close to Gervaise, so as not to be heard by the others. And Gervaise felt weak and faint-hearted, no doubt because of the excessive heat; so soft and so faint-hearted, in fact, that she could not find the strength to change the subject; she was actually waiting to hear what the big girl had to say, and enjoying the feeling that swept over her, though she would not have admitted it to herself.
‘I hope I’m not upsetting you?’ the dressmaker went on. ‘I’ve had it on the tip of my tongue, twenty times. In any case, since we’ve raised the subject… I didn’t mean anything by it, you understand? No, of course not, I don’t hold it against you, what happened. On my honour! I haven’t an ounce of ill will towards you.’
She stirred the dregs of her coffee in the glass, to take up all the sugar, then drank three drops, with a little whistling on her lips. Gervaise, with a lump in her throat, said nothing, but she did wonder if Virginie had really forgiven the beating as easily as that: she could see a yellow spark light behind the pupils of her black eyes. The she-devil must have put her rancour in her pocket and her handkerchief on top.