The strong odor which slapped her in the face as she sorted the piles of clothes made her feel drowsy.
She seemed to be intoxicating herself with this stench of humanity as she sat on the edge of a stool, bending far over, smiling vaguely, her eyes slightly misty.
It was as if her laziness was started by a kind of smothering caused by the dirty clothes which poisoned the air in the shop.
Just as she was shaking out a child’s dirty diaper, Coupeau came in.
“By Jove!” he stuttered, “what a sun!
It shines full on your head!”
The zinc-worker caught hold of the ironing-table to save himself from falling.
It was the first time he had been so drunk.
Until then he had sometimes come home slightly tipsy, but nothing more.
This time, however, he had a black eye, just a friendly slap he had run up against in a playful moment.
His curly hair, already streaked with grey, must have dusted a corner in some low wineshop, for a cobweb was hanging to one of his locks over the back of his neck.
He was still as attractive as ever, though his features were rather drawn and aged, and his under jaw projected more; but he was always lively, as he would sometimes say, with a complexion to be envied by a duchess.
“I’ll just explain it to you,” he resumed, addressing Gervaise.
“It was Celery-Root, you know him, the bloke with a wooden leg.
Well, as he was going back to his native place, he wanted to treat us.
Oh! We were all right, if it hadn’t been for that devil of a sun.
In the street everybody looks shaky.
Really, all the world’s drunk!”
And as tall Clemence laughed at his thinking that the people in the street were drunk, he was himself seized with an intense fit of gaiety which almost strangled him.
“Look at them! The blessed tipplers!
Aren’t they funny?” he cried.
“But it’s not their fault. It’s the sun that’s causing it.”
All the shop laughed, even Madame Putois, who did not like drunkards.
That squint-eyed Augustine was cackling like a hen, suffocating with her mouth wide open.
Gervaise, however, suspected Coupeau of not having come straight home, but of having passed an hour with the Lorilleuxs who were always filling his head with unpleasant ideas.
When he swore he had not been near them she laughed also, full of indulgence and not even reproaching him with having wasted another day.
“Mon Dieu! What nonsense he does talk,” she murmured.
“How does he manage to say such stupid things?”
Then in a maternal tone of voice she added, “Now go to bed, won’t you?
You see we’re busy; you’re in our way. That makes thirty-two handkerchiefs, Madame Bijard; and two more, thirty-four.”
But Coupeau was not sleepy.
He stood there wagging his body from side to side like the pendulum of a clock and chuckling in an obstinate and teasing manner.
Gervaise, wanting to finish with Madame Bijard, called to Clemence to count the laundry while she made the list.
Tall Clemence made a dirty remark about every item that she touched. She commented on the customers’ misfortunes and their bedroom adventures. She had a wash-house joke for every rip or stain that passed through her hands.
Augustine pretended that she didn’t understand, but her ears were wide open.
Madame Putois compressed her lips, thinking it a disgrace to say such things in front of Coupeau.
It’s not a man’s business to have anything to do with dirty linen. It’s just not done among decent people.
Gervaise, serious and her mind fully occupied with what she was about, did not seem to notice.
As she wrote she gave a glance to each article as it passed before her, so as to recognize it; and she never made a mistake; she guessed the owner’s name just by the look or the color.
Those napkins belonged to the Goujets, that was evident; they had not been used to wipe out frying-pans.
That pillow-case certainly came from the Boches on account of the pomatum with which Madame Boche always smeared her things.
There was no need to put your nose close to the flannel vests of Monsieur Madinier; his skin was so oily that it clogged up his woolens.
She knew many peculiarities, the cleanliness of some, the ragged underclothes of neighborhood ladies who appeared on the streets in silk dresses; how many items each family soiled weekly; the way some people’s garments were always torn at the same spot.
Oh, she had many tales to tell.
For instance, the chemises of Mademoiselle Remanjou provided material for endless comments: they wore out at the top first because the old maid had bony, sharp shoulders; and they were never really dirty, proving that you dry up by her age, like a stick of wood out of which it’s hard to squeeze a drop of anything.
It was thus that at every sorting of the dirty linen in the shop they undressed the whole neighborhood of the Goutte-d’Or.
“Oh, here’s something luscious!” cried Clemence, opening another bundle.
Gervaise, suddenly seized with a great repugnance, drew back.
“Madame Gaudron’s bundle?” said she.
“I’ll no longer wash for her, I’ll find some excuse.