That evening everyone in the tenement was discussing Coupeau’s strange malady.
The Boches invited Gervaise to have a drink with them, even though they now considered Clump-clump beneath them, in order to hear all the details.
Madame Lorilleux and Madame Poisson were there also.
Boche told of a carpenter he had known who had been a drinker of absinthe. The man shed his clothes, went out in the street and danced the polka until he died.
That rather struck the ladies as comic, even though it was very sad.
Gervaise got up in the middle of the room and did an imitation of Coupeau.
Yes, that’s just how it was.
Can anyone feature a man doing that for hours on end?
If they didn’t believe they could go see for themselves.
On getting up the next morning, Gervaise promised herself she would not return to the Sainte-Anne again.
What use would it be?
She did not want to go off her head also.
However, every ten minutes, she fell to musing and became absent-minded.
It would be curious though, if he were still throwing his legs about.
When twelve o’clock struck, she could no longer resist; she started off and did not notice how long the walk was, her brain was so full of her desire to go and the dread of what awaited her.
Oh! there was no need for her to ask for news.
She heard Coupeau’s song the moment she reached the foot of the staircase.
Just the same tune, just the same dance. She might have thought herself going up again after having only been down for a minute.
The attendant of the day before, who was carrying some jugs of tisane along the corridor, winked his eye as he met her, by way of being amiable.
“Still the same, then?” said she.
“Oh! still the same!” he replied without stopping.
She entered the room, but she remained near the door, because there were some people with Coupeau.
The fair, rosy house surgeon was standing up, having given his chair to a bald old gentleman who was decorated and had a pointed face like a weasel.
He was no doubt the head doctor, for his glance was as sharp and piercing as a gimlet.
All the dealers in sudden death have a glance like that.
No, really, it was not a pretty sight; and Gervaise, all in a tremble, asked herself why she had returned.
To think that the evening before they accused her at the Boches’ of exaggerating the picture!
Now she saw better how Coupeau set about it, his eyes wide open looking into space, and she would never forget it.
She overheard a few words between the house surgeon and the head doctor.
The former was giving some details of the night: her husband had talked and thrown himself about, that was what it amounted to.
Then the bald-headed old gentleman, who was not very polite by the way, at length appeared to become aware of her presence; and when the house surgeon had informed him that she was the patient’s wife, he began to question her in the harsh manner of a commissary of the police.
“Did this man’s father drink?”
“Yes, sir; just a little like everyone. He killed himself by falling from a roof one day when he was tipsy.”
“Did his mother drink?”
“Well! sir, like everyone else, you know; a drop here, a drop there. Oh! the family is very respectable!
There was a brother who died very young in convulsions.”
The doctor looked at her with his piercing eye. He resumed in his rough voice:
“And you, you drink too, don’t you?”
Gervaise stammered, protested, and placed her hand upon her heart, as though to take her solemn oath.
“You drink!
Take care; see where drink leads to. One day or other you will die thus.”
Then she remained close to the wall.
The doctor had turned his back to her.
He squatted down, without troubling himself as to whether his overcoat trailed in the dust of the matting; for a long while he studied Coupeau’s trembling, waiting for its reappearance, following it with his glance.
That day the legs were going in their turn, the trembling had descended from the hands to the feet; a regular puppet with his strings being pulled, throwing his limbs about, whilst the trunk of his body remained as stiff as a piece of wood.
The disease progressed little by little.
It was like a musical box beneath the skin; it started off every three or four seconds and rolled along for an instant; then it stopped and then it started off again, just the same as the little shiver which shakes stray dogs in winter, when cold and standing in some doorway for protection.
Already the middle of the body and the shoulders quivered like water on the point of boiling.
It was a funny demolition all the same, going off wriggling like a girl being tickled.
Coupeau, meanwhile, was complaining in a hollow voice.