At times, she felt drowsy and almost went to sleep, rocked, as it were, by her lame leg; then she looked round her with a start, and noticed she had walked a hundred yards unconsciously.
Her feet were swelling in her ragged shoes.
The last clear thought that occupied her mind was that her hussy of a daughter was perhaps eating oysters at that very moment.
Then everything became cloudy; and, albeit, she remained with open eyes, it required too great an effort for her to think.
The only sensation that remained to her, in her utter annihilation, was that it was frightfully cold, so sharply, mortally cold, she had never known the like before.
Why, even dead people could not feel so cold in their graves.
With an effort she raised her head, and something seemed to lash her face.
It was the snow, which had at last decided to fall from the smoky sky — fine thick snow, which the breeze swept round and round.
For three days it had been expected and what a splendid moment it chose to appear.
Woken up by the first gusts, Gervaise began to walk faster.
Eager to get home, men were running along, with their shoulders already white.
And as she suddenly saw one who, on the contrary, was coming slowly towards her under the trees, she approached him and again said:
“Sir, just listen — “
The man has stopped.
But he did not seem to have heard her.
He held out his hand, and muttered in a low voice:
“Charity, if you please!”
They looked at one another.
Ah! Mon Dieu! They were reduced to this — Pere Bru begging, Madame Coupeau walking the streets!
They remained stupefied in front of each other.
They could join hands as equals now.
The old workman had prowled about the whole evening, not daring to stop anyone, and the first person he accosted was as hungry as himself.
Lord, was it not pitiful!
To have toiled for fifty years and be obliged to beg!
To have been one of the most prosperous laundresses in the Rue de la Goutte-d’Or and to end beside the gutter!
They still looked at one another.
Then, without saying a word, they went off in different directions under the lashing snow.
It was a perfect tempest.
On these heights, in the midst of this open space, the fine snow revolved round and round as if the wind came from the four corners of heaven.
You could not see ten paces off, everything was confused in the midst of this flying dust.
The surroundings had disappeared, the Boulevard seemed to be dead, as if the storm had stretched the silence of its white sheet over the hiccoughs of the last drunkards.
Gervaise still went on, blinded, lost.
She felt her way by touching the trees.
As she advanced the gas-lamps shone out amidst the whiteness like torches.
Then, suddenly, whenever she crossed an open space, these lights failed her; she was enveloped in the whirling snow, unable to distinguish anything to guide her.
Below stretched the ground, vaguely white; grey walls surrounded her, and when she paused, hesitating and turning her head, she divined that behind this icy veil extended the immense avenue with interminable vistas of gas-lamps — the black and deserted Infinite of Paris asleep.
She was standing where the outer Boulevard meets the Boulevards Magenta and Ornano, thinking of lying down on the ground, when suddenly she heard a footfall.
She began to run, but the snow blinded her, and the footsteps went off without her being able to tell whether it was to the right or to the left.
At last, however, she perceived a man’s broad shoulders, a dark form which was disappearing amid the snow.
Oh! she wouldn’t let this man get away.
And she ran on all the faster, reached him, and caught him by the blouse:
“Sir, sir, just listen.”
The man turned round.
It was Goujet.
So now she had accosted Golden-Beard.
But what had she done on earth to be tortured like this by Providence?
It was the crowning blow — to stumble against Goujet, and be seen by her blacksmith friend, pale and begging, like a common street walker.
And it happened just under a gas-lamp; she could see her deformed shadow swaying on the snow like a real caricature.
You would have said she was drunk.
Mon Dieu! not to have a crust of bread, or a drop of wine in her body, and to be taken for a drunken women!