They fought every day.
The husband usually came home drunk and the wife had her faults too, yelling in the filthiest language.
Then they spoke of the designer on the first floor, an uppity show-off with a mound of debts, always smoking, always arguing loudly with his friends.
Monsieur Madinier’s cardboard business was barely surviving. He had let two girl workers go yesterday.
The business ate up all his money, leaving his children to run around in rags.
And that Madame Gaudron was pregnant again; this was almost indecent at her age.
The landlord was going to evict the Coquets on the fifth floor. They owed nine months’ rent, and besides, they insisted on lighting their stove out on the landing.
Last Saturday the old lady on the sixth floor, Mademoiselle Remanjou, had arrived just in time to save the Linguerlot child from being badly burned.
Mademoiselle Clemence, one who took in ironing, well, she lived life as she pleased. She was so kind to animals though and had such a good heart that you couldn’t say anything against her.
It was a pity, a fine girl like her, the company she kept.
She’d be walking the streets before long.
“Look, here’s one,” said Lorilleux to his wife, giving her the piece of chain he had been working on since his lunch.
“You can trim it.”
And he added, with the persistence of a man who does not easily relinquish a joke:
“Another four feet and a half. That brings me nearer to Versailles.”
Madame Lorilleux, after tempering it again, trimmed it by passing it through the regulating draw-plate.
Then she put it in a little copper saucepan with a long handle, full of lye-water, and placed it over the fire of the forge.
Gervaise, again pushed forward by Coupeau, had to follow this last operation.
When the chain was thoroughly cleansed, it appeared a dull red color.
It was finished, and ready to be delivered.
“They’re always delivered like that, in their rough state,” the zinc-worker explained.
“The polishers rub them afterwards with cloths.”
Gervaise felt her courage failing her.
The heat, more and more intense, was suffocating her.
They kept the door shut, because Lorilleux caught cold from the least draught.
Then as they still did not speak of the marriage, she wanted to go away and gently pulled Coupeau’s jacket.
He understood.
Besides, he also was beginning to feel ill at ease and vexed at their affectation of silence.
“Well, we’re off,” said he.
“We mustn’t keep you from your work.”
He moved about for a moment, waiting, hoping for a word or some allusion or other.
At length he decided to broach the subject himself.
“I say, Lorilleux, we’re counting on you to be my wife’s witness.”
The chainmaker pretended, with a chuckle, to be greatly surprised; whilst his wife, leaving her draw-plates, placed herself in the middle of the work-room.
“So it’s serious then?” murmured he.
“That confounded Young Cassis, one never knows whether he is joking or not.”
“Ah! yes, madame’s the person involved,” said the wife in her turn, as she stared rudely at Gervaise.
“Mon Dieu!
We’ve no advice to give you, we haven’t. It’s a funny idea to go and get married, all the same.
Anyhow, it’s your own wish. When it doesn’t succeed, one’s only got oneself to blame, that’s all.
And it doesn’t often succeed, not often, not often.”
She uttered these last words slower and slower, and shaking her head, she looked from the young woman’s face to her hands, and then to her feet as though she had wished to undress her and see the very pores of her skin.
She must have found her better than she expected.
“My brother is perfectly free,” she continued more stiffly.
“No doubt the family might have wished — one always makes projects.
But things take such funny turns. For myself, I don’t want to have any unpleasantness.
Had he brought us the lowest of the low, I should merely have said:
‘Marry her and go to blazes!’ He was not badly off though, here with us.
He’s fat enough; one can very well see he didn’t fast much; and he always found his soup hot right on time. I say, Lorilleux, don’t you think madame’s like Therese — you know who I mean, that woman who used to live opposite, and who died of consumption?”
“Yes, there’s a certain resemblance,” replied the chainmaker.