Life resumed. Nana, after sleeping for twelve hours in her old bed, was as sweet as pie for a week. She had done up a modest little dress for herself and wore a bonnet, which she tied under her chignon. In a burst of enthusiasm, she even declared that she would like to work from home: you could earn what you liked at home and you didn’t hear all the dirty talk that circulated in the workshop; so she looked for some work, set up a table with her tools and got up at five o’clock for a few days to roll her violet stems. But after she had delivered a few gross of them, she would start to stretch, while the work waited, her hands twisted with cramp because she had lost the habit of making the stalks; and she was stifling, cooped up like that, after breathing freely for six months. So the glue-pot dried up, the petals and green paper attracted spots of grease and the boss even came herself three times to make a scene and demand the return of her wasted materials. Nana hung around, still attracting clouts from her father, and rowing with her mother morning, noon and night, when the two women would hurl insults at one another. It couldn’t last. On the twelfth day, the little slut vanished, taking only the simple dress on her back and the bonnet on her head. The Lorilleux, who had been quite put out by the girl’s return and repentance, almost fell over laughing. A second performance, a repeat eclipse; all those for Saint-Lazare,6 join the coach. No, it was really too funny. Nana had a real talent for taking French leave. Well, if the Coupeaus wanted to keep her now, they’d simply have to sew up her you-know-what and stick her in a cage!
In front of other people, the Coupeaus pretended that they were well rid of her. Underneath, though, they fumed. But anger does not last for ever. Soon they learned, without blinking an eyelid, that Nana was walking the streets in the neighbourhood. Gervaise accused her of doing this just to dishonour them and considered herself above all the gossip: even if she were to meet the little miss in the street, she would not even dirty her hand by slapping her. Yes, it was all finished now: she could see Nana lying naked on the pavement, dying, and she would walk by without even acknowledging that the slut came from her own loins. Nana was the star turn at all the dance-halls around. She was known from the Reine-Blanche to the Grand Salon de la Folie. When she came into the Elysée-Montmartre, they got up on the tables to watch her doing the pastourelle and dancing the ‘sniffling prawn’. At the Château-Rouge, having twice been thrown out, she would hang around outside the door, waiting for people she knew. The Boule-Noire on the boulevard and the Grand-Turc in the Rue des Poissonniers were respectable places where she went when she had something to wear. But out of all the pubs and dance-halls in the area, she still liked the Bal de l’Ermitage best, in its damp courtyard, and the Bal Robert in the Impasse du Cadran, two ghastly little rooms lit by half a dozen oil-lamps, where it was liberty hall, all free and easy, so that gallants and their ladies were allowed to kiss at the far end without being disturbed. And Nana had her ups and downs, transformed like a fairy tale, at one moment dolled up like a fashionable lady, at the next trailing in mud like a scullion. Oh, she had a fine life!
Several times, the Coupeaus thought that they saw their daughter in unsavoury places. They turned their backs and crossed over the road, so that they would not be obliged to recognize her. They no longer felt like becoming a laughing-stock in some dance-hall just to drag a creature like that home with them. But one evening, around ten o’clock, when they were going to bed, there was a knock on the door. It was Nana, calmly asking if she could sleep there. And what a state she was in: bare-headed, her dress in tatters and her boots scuffed – the sort of get-up that could have you hauled in and sent down to the police station. Of course, she got a beating; then she hungrily grabbed a piece of stale bread and fell asleep, exhausted, still chewing the last mouthful. Then it was back to the old routine. When the child was on her feet again, one morning she would vanish. Out of sight, out of mind! The bird had flown. Weeks or even months would go by and they thought she was lost; then she would reappear suddenly, never saying where she had been, so filthy sometimes that you would not want to touch her with a barge-pole, covered in scratches from head to foot, or at other times well dressed, but so weak and drained by her excesses that she could hardly stand. Her parents just had to get used to it. Beatings got them nowhere. They would hurl insults at her, but it didn’t stop her using their home as an inn, where you stayed by the week. She knew that there was a price to pay for her bed, so she weighed up the pros and cons and took her punishment if it suited her. In any case, you can get tired of hitting someone. Eventually, the Coupeaus accepted Nana’s escapades. She would come back or not, but provided she didn’t leave the door open, that was enough. Good Lord! Respectability, like anything else, wears out with habit.
One thing made Gervaise mad. This was when her daughter came home wearing a dress with a train or a feather hat. That kind of luxury was just too much. Let Nana have a good time, if she liked; but when she came home, then she should at least dress like a working-class girl. A dress with a train caused a sensation in the house: the Lorilleux sniggered; Lantier got all worked up and hovered around the girl, sniffing her scent; and the Boches forbade Pauline to associate with that tramp in her fancy clothes. Gervaise would also be annoyed by Nana’s utter exhaustion when, after one of these escapades, she would sleep until midday, naked from the waist up, her hair loose and still full of pins, so pale and taking such shallow breaths that she might be dead. She would shake her five or six times in the morning, threatening to throw a jug of cold water over her. This lovely indolent girl exasperated her, half naked, oozing lust, sleeping off a sensual indulgence that seemed to swell her flesh, unable even to rouse herself. Nana would open one eye, then close it again and stretch out, savouring it even more.
One day Gervaise, who had reproached her for her behaviour in crude terms and asked if she had been going with soldiers to come home so exhausted, finally carried out her threat and shook her wet hand over Nana’s body. The girl, furious, rolled herself up in the sheet and shouted:
‘That’s enough, no? We’d better not talk about men, Mum. You did as you liked, now I’m doing as I like.’
‘What? What?’ her mother stammered.
‘Yes, I’ve never spoken about it, because it was none of my business; but it never bothered you; I’ve seen you often enough wandering around in your night-dress, in the flat downstairs, when Dad was snoring… You don’t enjoy it any more, but other people do. So leave me alone, you shouldn’t have set me such a bad example.’
Gervaise went as white as a sheet, her hands trembling, and paced around in distraction, while Nana, lying face down, hugging her pillow, slipped back into her leaden sleep.
Coupeau muttered a bit, but no longer bothered even to deal out a slap. He was completely losing touch. Quite honestly, he could hardly even be called an immoral father, because drink had deprived him of any sense of good and evil.
It was all up now. For six months on end, he wouldn’t be sober; then he would collapse and go into Sainte-Anne. It was a holiday for him. The Lorilleux said that the Duke of Gut-Rot was going to his country estate. After a few weeks, he would come out of the asylum, patched up and stuck together; and he would go back to destroying himself until the day when he was once more on his beam end and in need of repair. In this way, he was admitted to Sainte-Anne seven times in three years. It was said in the neighbourhood that they kept a cell there for him. But the worst part of the affair was that each time this obstinate drunkard was breaking himself up a little more, so that, as he went from relapse to relapse, you could anticipate the final collapse, the last crack of an ailing barrel whose hoops were snapping one by one.
He wasn’t getting any prettier, either. He looked like a ghost! The poison was having a terrible effect on him. Saturated with alcohol, his body was shrivelling up like those foetuses in glass jars at the pharmacy.
He was so thin that when he stood by a window you could see daylight through his ribs. Hollow-cheeked, with foul eyes that oozed enough wax to supply a cathedra
l, he had only one thing that blossomed: his drunkard’s conk, fine and red, like a carnation in the midst of his ravaged face. Those who knew his age, just forty, felt a little chill when he went past, bent double, shaking, as old as the streets themselves. And the trembling in his hands got worse, especially his right hand, which drummed about so much some days that he had to take his glass in both fists to get it to his lips. Oh, that accursed trembling! It was one thing that still annoyed him, in the midst of his general dilapidation. He could be heard muttering savage curses at his hands. At other times, he could be seen for hours on end contemplating his leaping hands, watching them jump like frogs, saying nothing, no longer annoyed, as though trying to discover what inner mechanism could make them hop and skip like that; and, one evening, that is how Gervaise found him, with two large tears running down his drunkard’s leathery cheeks.
The last summer when Nana would spend the dregs of her nights in her parents’ room, was particularly bad for Coupeau. His voice changed completely, as though the booze had put a new sound in his throat. He went deaf in one ear. Then, in the space of a few days, his sight began to fail; he had to hold on to the banisters so as not to fall over. As for his health, his condition was stable, as they say. He had frightful headaches and fits of dizziness that made him see stars. Sharp pains would suddenly grip his arms or legs; he would go pale and have to sit down on a chair and stay there for hours in a stupor. After one such crisis, his arm had even remained paralysed for a whole day. On several occasions, he took to his bed, where he would huddle up, hiding under the sheet, with the heavy, continuous breathing of an animal in pain. Then the outbursts that had occurred at Sainte-Anne began again. Suspicious, anxious, tormented by a burning fever, he would roll around, raging insanely, convulsively tearing his clothes and biting the furniture; or else he would fall into a state of extreme mawkishness, moaning like a little girl, sobbing and saying that nobody loved him. One evening Gervaise and Nana, coming home together, found him no longer in bed; he had put the bolster in his place. And when they did find him, hidden between the bed and the wall, his teeth were chattering and he started saying that some men had come to kill him. The two women had to put him to bed and comfort him like a child.
Coupeau knew of only one cure, which was to take his jug of spirits, a real kick in the stomach that would put him back on his feet. This is how, every morning, he cured his catarrh. His memory had gone long ago, his skull was empty; and no sooner was he up again than he was laughing at his illness. He had never been ill. Yes, he’d reached the point when he would be proclaiming how well he was as he lay dying. In any case, everything else had gone. When Nana came back, after gallivanting around elsewhere for six weeks, he apparently thought that she had just been out shopping. She would often bump into him, when she was on the arm of some man or other, and have a joke because he didn’t recognize her. In short, he no longer counted for her. She might easily have sat down on him, if she couldn’t find a chair.
With the first frost, Nana took to her heels once more, using the excuse that she was going to the fruiterer’s to see if they had any cooked pears. She could feel winter coming, and didn’t fancy shivering in front of an unlit stove. The Coupeaus simply called her a bitch because they were waiting for the pears. No doubt she’d be back. The winter before, she had stayed out three weeks after going to look for two sous’ worth of tobacco. But the months went by and the child did not reappear. This time, she must have really taken flight. June came and, with the sun, she still didn’t return. It was definitely over: she had found a cosy nest somewhere. One day when they were hard up the Coupeaus sold the child’s iron bed, getting six francs for it, which they drank in Saint-Ouen. It had been in their way, that bed.
One morning, in July, Virginie called to Gervaise as she was going by and asked her to give a hand with the washing-up because Lantier had brought a couple of friends home for a meal the night before. And while Gervaise was washing the dishes – dishes that were very greasy from the hatter’s little feast – the man himself, still having a snack in the shop, suddenly called out:
‘I say old girl! I didn’t tell you: I saw Nana the other day.’
Virginie, sitting at the counter, looking anxiously at the jars and drawers as they emptied, shook her head violently. She was restraining herself, not wanting to say too much, because she was starting to suspect something. Lantier quite often happened to see Nana. Oh, she wouldn’t swear to anything, but he was the sort of man to do worse than that if some skirt turned his head. Mme Lerat, who had just come in, being good pals at that time with Virginie, who told her her secrets, put on her most suggestive expression and asked:
‘In what sense precisely did you see her?’
‘Oh, in the best sense,’ the hatter replied, very flattered, laughing and twirling his moustache. ‘She was in a carriage, while I was paddling along on the pavement. Honestly! There is no reason to deny it, because the young men who know her well are damned lucky.’
His eyes lit up and he turned to Gervaise who was standing at the back of the shop, wiping a plate.
‘Yes, she was in a carriage, that smartly dressed – you can’t imagine! I didn’t recognize her, she looked so like a proper lady, with her white teeth in her mug as fresh as a flower! She was the one who gave me a little wave with her glove. She’s got herself a viscount, I do believe. Oh, she’s well away! She can laugh at the lot of us now, the tramp, she’s really fallen on her feet! What a darling little kitten! You can’t imagine!’
Gervaise was still wiping her plate, even though it had been clean and shining for some time. Virginie was thinking, worried about two bills that she was not sure how to pay the next day. And Lantier, fine and fat, oozing with the sugar he subsisted on, filled the confectioner’s shop with his enthusiasm for a nice, well-shaped little sweetie, while the place, already three-quarters devoured, gave off an odour of bankruptcy. Indeed, there was nothing left except a few pralines and some sticks of barley-sugar to be eaten up before the Poissons’ business was cleaned out. Suddenly, he noticed the constable himself walking past on the far side of the road, on duty, all buttoned up and with his sword by his side. This made him even merrier. He forced Virginie to take a look at her husband.
‘Well, I never!’ he muttered. ‘He’s looking in fine fettle this morning, Badingue! Mind out! He’s got his buttocks pressed too tightly together. He must have shoved a glass eye up there to take a sly look at people behind him.’
When Gervaise got home, she found Coupeau sitting on the edge of the bed, in the numb stupor induced by one of his crises. He was staring emptily at the floor. She herself slumped down on a chair, her limbs weak, her hands hanging beside her dirty skirt. For a quarter of an hour, she stayed there in front of him, saying nothing.
‘I’ve had some news,’ she murmured at last. ‘Your daughter has been seen… Oh, yes, she’s well off, your daughter, she has no need of you. She’s really got it made, that one, and no mistake! God Almighty! What wouldn’t I give to be in her shoes!’
Coupeau was still staring at the floor. Then he raised his haggard face and gave a mad laugh, stammering:
‘Well, in that case, girl, I’m not stopping you. You’re still not too bad, when you do yourself up. You know what they say: there’s no pot so old that you can’t find a cover for it. Bloody hell! Why not, if it would bring in a crust or two?’
CHAPTER 12
It must have been the Saturday after the quarter-day, somewhere around the 12th or 13th of January.1 Gervaise was no longer sure. She was loosing the thread, because it seemed like years and years since she had had a warm meal. Oh, what a ghastly week! A complete clean-out: two four-pound loaves on Tuesday, which lasted until Thursday, then a dry crust that they had found the day before, and not a crumb for thirty-six hours – a real starvation diet. What she did know, however, because she felt it on her back, was this foul weather, a black frost, and a sky blackened like the bottom of a frying-pan, heavy with snow that refused to fall. When
you have hunger and winter together in your belly, you can tighten your belt, but it doesn’t ease the pain.
Perhaps that evening Coupeau would bring some money home. He said that he was working. Anything’s possible, isn’t it? And Gervaise, though she’d been caught many times already, had reached the stage where she was counting on that money. As for herself, after all sorts of problems, she couldn’t find as much as a dishcloth to wash in the neighbourhood; even one old lady whose housework she had been doing had shown her the door, accusing her of drinking her liqueurs. No one wanted her anywhere, she was done for; and, when it came down to it, that was all right by her, because she had fallen to the point where she would rather die than lift a finger. If Coupeau did bring back his wages, though, they would eat something hot. And, meanwhile, since midday had not yet chimed, she was flat out on her mattress, because one feels the cold and hunger less when one is lying down.
Gervaise called it a mattress, but in reality it was not more than a heap of straw in a corner. Little by little, the bedding had drifted away to the second-hand shops. To start with, on days of need, she had unpicked the mattress so that she could remove handfuls of wool, which she took out in her apron, to sell it for ten sous a pound in the Rue Belhomme. Then, when the mattress was empty, she got thirty sous for the material one morning to buy coffee. The pillows followed, then the bolster. What remained was the wood from the bedstead, which she could not put under her arms, because of the Boches, who would have roused the whole house if they had seen the landlord’s surety vanishing through the door. One evening, however, with Coupeau’s help, she waited until the Boches were having dinner, and calmly removed the bed bit by bit: the sides, the headboard and the frame. On the ten francs from this operation they dined for three days. Wasn’t a straw mattress enough? Even the material from this went the same way as the other; and in the end they had managed to devour all the bedding – and get indigestion eating bread after fasting for twenty-four hours. You could sweep the straw into a heap with a broom, the mattress was always turned and it was no dirtier than anything else.