Madame Vigouroux, the coal dealer next door, returned her greetings.
She was a plump, short woman with bright eyes in a dark face who was always joking with the men while standing at her doorway.
Her shop was decorated in imitation of a rustic chalet.
The neighbors on the other side were a mother and daughter, the Cudorges.
The umbrella sellers kept their door closed and never came out to visit.
Gervaise always looked across the road, too, through the wide carriage entrance of the windowless wall opposite her, at the blacksmith’s forge. The courtyard was cluttered with vans and carts.
Inscribed on the wall was the word “Blacksmith.”
At the lower end of the wall between the small shops selling scrap iron and fried potatoes was a watchmaker.
He wore a frock coat and was always very neat. His cuckoo clocks could be heard in chorus against the background noise of the street and the blacksmith’s rhythmic clanging.
The neighborhood in general thought Gervaise very nice.
There was, it is true, a good deal of scandal related regarding her; but everyone admired her large eyes, small mouth and beautiful white teeth.
In short she was a pretty blonde, and had it not been for her crippled leg she might have ranked amongst the comeliest.
She was now in her twenty-eighth year, and had grown considerably plumper.
Her fine features were becoming puffy, and her gestures were assuming a pleasant indolence.
At times she occasionally seemed to forget herself on the edge of a chair, whilst she waited for her iron to heat, smiling vaguely and with an expression of greedy joy upon her face.
She was becoming fond of good living, everybody said so; but that was not a very grave fault, but rather the contrary.
When one earns sufficient to be able to buy good food, one would be foolish to eat potato parings. All the more so as she continued to work very hard, slaving to please her customers, sitting up late at night after the place was closed, whenever there was anything urgent.
She was lucky as all her neighbors said; everything prospered with her.
She did the washing for all the house — M. Madinier, Mademoiselle Remanjou, the Boches.
She even secured some of the customers of her old employer, Madame Fauconnier, Parisian ladies living in the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonniere.
As early as the third week she was obliged to engage two workwomen, Madame Putois and tall Clemence, the girl who used to live on the sixth floor; counting her apprentice, that little squint-eyed Augustine, who was as ugly as a beggar’s behind, that made three persons in her employ.
Others would certainly have lost their heads at such a piece of good fortune.
It was excusable for her to slack a little on Monday after drudging all through the week.
Besides, it was necessary to her. She would have had no courage left, and would have expected to see the shirts iron themselves, if she had not been able to dress up in some pretty thing.
Gervaise was always so amiable, meek as a lamb, sweet as sugar.
There wasn’t any one she disliked except Madame Lorilleux.
While she was enjoying a good meal and coffee, she could be indulgent and forgive everybody saying:
“We have to forgive each other — don’t we? — unless we want to live like savages.”
Hadn’t all her dreams come true?
She remembered her old dream: to have a job, enough bread to eat and a corner in which to sleep, to bring up her children, not to be beaten, and to die in her own bed.
She had everything she wanted now and more than she had ever expected.
She laughed, thinking of delaying dying in her own bed as long as possible.
It was to Coupeau especially that Gervaise behaved nicely.
Never an angry word, never a complaint behind her husband’s back.
The zinc-worker had at length resumed work; and as the job he was engaged on was at the other side of Paris, she gave him every morning forty sous for his luncheon, his glass of wine and his tobacco.
Only, two days out of every six, Coupeau would stop on the way, spend the forty sous in drink with a friend, and return home to lunch, with some cock-and-bull story.
Once even he did not take the trouble to go far; he treated himself, My-Boots and three others to a regular feast — snails, roast meat, and some sealed bottles of wine — at the “Capuchin,” on the Barriere de la Chapelle.
Then, as his forty sous were not sufficient, he had sent the waiter to his wife with the bill and the information that he was in pawn.
She laughed and shrugged her shoulders.
Where was the harm if her old man amused himself a bit?
You must give men a long rein if you want to live peaceably at home.
From one word to another, one soon arrived at blows.
Mon Dieu! It was easy to understand.
Coupeau still suffered from his leg; besides, he was led astray. He was obliged to do as the others did, or else he would be thought a cheap skate.
And it was really a matter of no consequence. If he came home a bit elevated, he went to bed, and two hours afterwards he was all right again.
It was now the warm time of the year.
One June afternoon, a Saturday when there was a lot of work to get through, Gervaise herself had piled the coke into the stove, around which ten irons were heating, whilst a rumbling sound issued from the chimney.
At that hour the sun was shining full on the shop front, and the pavement reflected the heat waves, causing all sorts of quaint shadows to dance over the ceiling, and that blaze of light which assumed a bluish tinge from the color of the paper on the shelves and against the window, was almost blinding in the intensity with which it shone over the ironing-table, like a golden dust shaken among the fine linen.
The atmosphere was stifling.
The shop door was thrown wide open, but not a breath of air entered; the clothes which were hung up on brass wires to dry, steamed and became as stiff as shavings in less than three quarters of an hour.