On arriving at the Rue de la Goutte-d’Or, she found the whole house upset.
Her workwomen had left the shop, and were in the courtyard looking up above.
She questioned Clemence.
“It’s old Bijard who’s giving his wife a hiding,” replied the ironer.
“He was in the doorway, as drunk as a trooper, watching for her return from the wash-house. He whacked her up the stairs, and now he’s finishing her off up there in their room. Listen, can’t you hear her shrieks?”
Gervaise hastened to the spot.
She felt some friendship for her washer-woman, Madame Bijard, who was a very courageous woman.
She had hoped to put a stop to what was going on.
Upstairs, on the sixth floor the door of the room was wide open, some lodgers were shouting on the landing, whilst Madame Boche, standing in front of the door, was calling out:
“Will you leave off?
I shall send for the police; do you hear?”
No one dared to venture inside the room, because it was known that Bijard was like a brute beast when he was drunk.
As a matter of fact, he was scarcely ever sober.
The rare days on which he worked, he placed a bottle of brandy beside his blacksmith’s vise, gulping some of it down every half hour. He could not keep himself going any other way.
He would have blazed away like a torch if anyone had placed a lighted match close to his mouth.
“But we mustn’t let her be murdered!” said Gervaise, all in a tremble.
And she entered.
The room, an attic, and very clean, was bare and cold, almost emptied by the drunken habits of the man, who took the very sheets from the bed to turn them into liquor.
During the struggle the table had rolled away to the window, the two chairs, knocked over, had fallen with their legs in the air.
In the middle of the room, on the tile floor, lay Madame Bijard, all bloody, her skirts, still soaked with the water of the wash-house, clinging to her thighs, her hair straggling in disorder.
She was breathing heavily, with a rattle in her throat, as she muttered prolonged ohs! each time she received a blow from the heel of Bijard’s boot.
He had knocked her down with his fists, and now he stamped upon her.
“Ah, strumpet!
Ah, strumpet!
Ah strumpet!” grunted he in a choking voice, accompanying each blow with the word, taking a delight in repeating it, and striking all the harder the more he found his voice failing him.
Then when he could no longer speak, he madly continued to kick with a dull sound, rigid in his ragged blue blouse and overalls, his face turned purple beneath his dirty beard, and his bald forehead streaked with big red blotches.
The neighbors on the landing related that he was beating her because she had refused him twenty sous that morning.
Boche’s voice was heard at the foot of the staircase.
He was calling Madame Boche, saying:
“Come down; let them kill each other, it’ll be so much scum the less.”
Meanwhile, Pere Bru had followed Gervaise into the room.
Between them they were trying to get him towards the door.
But he turned round, speechless and foaming at the lips, and in his pale eyes the alcohol was blazing with a murderous glare.
The laundress had her wrist injured; the old workman was knocked against the table.
On the floor, Madame Bijard was breathing with greater difficulty, her mouth wide open, her eyes closed.
Now Bijard kept missing her. He had madly returned to the attack, but blinded by rage, his blows fell on either side, and at times he almost fell when his kicks went into space.
And during all this onslaught, Gervaise beheld in a corner of the room little Lalie, then four years old, watching her father murdering her mother.
The child held in her arms, as though to protect her, her sister Henriette, only recently weaned.
She was standing up, her head covered with a cotton cap, her face very pale and grave. Her large black eyes gazed with a fixedness full of thought and were without a tear.
When at length Bijard, running against a chair, stumbled onto the tiled floor, where they left him snoring, Pere Bru helped Gervaise to raise Madame Bijard. The latter was now sobbing bitterly; and Lalie, drawing near, watched her crying, being used to such sights and already resigned to them.
As the laundress descended the stairs, in the silence of the now quieted house, she kept seeing before her that look of this child of four, as grave and courageous as that of a woman.
“Monsieur Coupeau is on the other side of the street,” called out Clemence as soon as she caught sight of her.
“He looks awfully drunk.”
Coupeau was just then crossing the street.
He almost smashed a pane of glass with his shoulder as he missed the door.
He was in a state of complete drunkenness, with his teeth clinched and his nose inflamed.
And Gervaise at once recognized the vitriol of l’Assommoir in the poisoned blood which paled his skin.
She tried to joke and get him to bed, the same as on the days when the wine had made him merry; but he pushed her aside without opening his lips, and raised his fist in passing as he went to bed of his own accord.
He made Gervaise think of the other — the drunkard who was snoring upstairs, tired out by the blows he had struck.
A cold shiver passed over her. She thought of the men she knew — of her husband, of Goujet, of Lantier — her heart breaking, despairing of ever being happy.