A sink on each landing gave forth a fetid humidity, adding its stench to the sharp flavor of the cooking of onions.
From the basement, all the way to the sixth floor, you could hear dishes clattering, saucepans being rinsed, pots being scraped and scoured.
On the first floor Gervaise saw a half-opened door with the word “Designer” written on it in large letters. Inside were two men sitting by a table, the dishes cleared away from its oilcloth cover, arguing furiously amid a cloud of pipe smoke.
The second and third floors were quieter, and through cracks in the woodwork only such sounds filtered as the rhythm of a cradle rocking, the stifled crying of a child, a woman’s voice sounding like the dull murmur of running water with no words distinct.
Gervaise read the various signs on the doors giving the names of the occupants:
“Madame Gaudron, wool-carder” and
“Monsieur Madinier, cardboard boxes.”
There was a fight in progress on the fourth floor: a stomping of feet that shook the floor, furniture banged around, a racket of curses and blows; but this did not bother the neighbors opposite, who were playing cards with their door opened wide to admit more air.
When Gervaise reached the fifth floor, she had to stop to take a breath; she was not used to going up so high; that wall for ever turning, the glimpses she had of the lodgings following each other, made her head ache.
Anyway, there was a family almost blocking the landing: the father washing the dishes over a small earthenware stove near the sink and the mother sitting with her back to the stair-rail and cleaning the baby before putting it to bed.
Coupeau kept urging Gervaise along, and they finally reached the sixth floor.
He encouraged her with a smile; they had arrived! She had been hearing a voice all the way up from the bottom and she was gazing upward, wondering where it could be coming from, a voice so clear and piercing that it had dominated all the other sounds.
It came from a little old woman in an attic room who sang while putting dresses on cheap dolls.
When a tall girl came by with a pail of water and entered a nearby apartment, Gervaise saw a tumbled bed on which a man was sprawled, his eyes fixed on the ceiling.
As the door closed behind her, Gervaise saw the hand-written card:
“Mademoiselle Clemence, ironing.”
Now that she had finally made it to the top, her legs weary and her breath short, Gervaise leaned over the railing to look down.
Now it was the gaslight on the first floor which seemed a distant star at the bottom of a narrow well six stories deep.
All the odors and all the murmurings of the immense variety of life within the tenement came up to her in one stifling breath that flushed her face as she hazarded a worried glance down into the gulf below.
“We’re not there yet,” said Coupeau.
“Oh! It’s quite a journey!”
He had gone down a long corridor on the left.
He turned twice, the first time also to the left, the second time to the right.
The corridor still continued branching off, narrowing between walls full of crevices, with plaster peeling off, and lighted at distant intervals by a slender gas-jet; and the doors all alike, succeeded each other the same as the doors of a prison or a convent, and nearly all open, continued to display homes of misery and work, which the hot June evening filled with a reddish mist.
At length they reached a small passage in complete darkness.
“We’re here,” resumed the zinc-worker.
“Be careful, keep to the wall; there are three steps.”
And Gervaise carefully took another ten steps in the obscurity. She stumbled and then counted the three steps.
But at the end of the passage Coupeau had opened a door, without knocking.
A brilliant light spread over the tiled floor.
They entered.
It was a narrow apartment, and seemed as if it were the continuation of the corridor.
A faded woolen curtain, raised up just then by a string, divided the place in two.
The first part contained a bedstead pushed beneath an angle of the attic ceiling, a cast-iron stove still warm from the cooking of the dinner, two chairs, a table and a wardrobe, the cornice of which had had to be sawn off to make it fit in between the door and the bedstead.
The second part was fitted up as a work-shop; at the end, a narrow forge with its bellows; to the right, a vise fixed to the wall beneath some shelves on which pieces of old iron lay scattered; to the left near the window, a small workman’s bench, encumbered with greasy and very dirty pliers, shears and microscopical saws, all very dirty and grimy.
“It’s us!” cried Coupeau advancing as far as the woolen curtain.
But no one answered at first.
Gervaise, deeply affected, moved especially by the thought that she was about to enter a place full of gold, stood behind the zinc-worker, stammering and venturing upon nods of her head by way of bowing.
The brilliant light, a lamp burning on the bench, a brazier full of coals flaring in the forge, increased her confusion still more.
She ended however, by distinguishing Madame Lorilleux — little, red-haired and tolerably strong, pulling with all the strength of her short arms, and with the assistance of a big pair of pincers, a thread of black metal which she passed through the holes of a draw-plate fixed to the vise.
Seated in front of the bench, Lorilleux, quite as small of stature, but more slender in the shoulders, worked with the tips of his pliers, with the vivacity of a monkey, at a labor so minute, that it was impossible to follow it between his scraggy fingers.
It was the husband who first raised his head — a head with scanty locks, the face of the yellow tinge of old wax, long, and with an ailing expression.
“Ah! it’s you; well, well!” murmured he.
“We’re in a hurry you know. Don’t come into the work-room, you’d be in our way.
Stay in the bedroom.”
And he resumed his minute task, his face again in the reflection of a glass globe full of green-colored water, through which the lamp shed a circle of bright light over his work.
“Take the chairs!” called out Madame Lorilleux in her turn.
“It’s that lady, isn’t it?
Very well, very well!”
She had rolled the wire and she carried it to the forge, and then, reviving the fire of the brazier with a large wooden fan, she proceeded to temper the wire before passing it through the last holes of the draw-plate.