Really, if you listened to all your customers, you’d never have time to eat.
You could work yourself to death like a dog on a leash!
Well!
No matter who came in to-day, even if they offered one hundred thousand francs, she wouldn’t touch an iron on this Monday, because it was her turn to enjoy herself.
The entire morning was spent in completing the purchases.
Three times Gervaise went out and returned laden like a mule.
But just as she was going to order wine she noticed that she had not sufficient money left.
She could easily have got it on credit; only she could not be without money in the house, on account of the thousand little expenses that one is liable to forget.
And mother Coupeau and she had lamented together in the back-room as they reckoned that they required at least twenty francs.
How could they obtain them, those four pieces of a hundred sous each?
Mother Coupeau who had at one time done the charring for a little actress of the Theatre des Batignolles, was the first to suggest the pawn-shop.
Gervaise laughed with relief.
How stupid she was not to have thought of it!
She quickly folded her black silk dress upon a towel which she then pinned together. Then she hid the bundle under mother Coupeau’s apron, telling her to keep it very flat against her stomach, on account of the neighbors who had no need to know; and she went and watched at the door to see that the old woman was not followed.
But the latter had only gone as far as the charcoal dealer’s when she called her back.
“Mamma! Mamma!”
She made her return to the shop, and taking her wedding-ring off her finger said:
“Here, put this with it.
We shall get all the more.”
When mother Coupeau brought her twenty-five francs, she danced for joy.
She would order an extra six bottles of wine, sealed wine to drink with the roast.
The Lorilleuxs would be crushed.
For a fortnight past it had been the Coupeaus’ dream to crush the Lorilleuxs.
Was it not true that those sly ones, the man and his wife, a truly pretty couple, shut themselves up whenever they had anything nice to eat as though they had stolen it?
Yes, they covered up the window with a blanket to hide the light and make believe that they were already asleep in bed.
This stopped anyone from coming up, and so the Lorilleuxs could stuff everything down, just the two of them.
They were even careful the next day not to throw the bones into the garbage so that no one would know what they had eaten.
Madame Lorilleux would walk to the end of the street to toss them into a sewer opening.
One morning Gervaise surprised her emptying a basket of oyster shells there.
Oh, those penny-pinchers were never open-handed, and all their mean contrivances came from their desire to appear to be poor.
Well, we’d show them, we’d prove to them what we weren’t mean.
Gervaise would have laid her table in the street, had she been able to, just for the sake of inviting each passer-by.
Money was not invented that it should be allowed to grow moldy, was it?
It is pretty when it shines all new in the sunshine.
She resembled them so little now, that on the days when she had twenty sous she arranged things to let people think that she had forty.
Mother Coupeau and Gervaise talked of the Lorilleuxs whilst they laid the cloth about three o’clock.
They had hung some big curtains at the windows; but as it was very warm the door was left open and the whole street passed in front of the little table.
The two women did not place a decanter, or a bottle, or a salt-cellar, without trying to arrange them in such a way as to annoy the Lorilleuxs. They had arranged their seats so as to give them a full view of the superbly laid cloth, and they had reserved the best crockery for them, well knowing that the porcelain plates would create a great effect.
“No, no, mamma,” cried Gervaise; “don’t give them those napkins!
I’ve two damask ones.”
“Ah, good!” murmured the old woman; “that’ll break their hearts, that’s certain.”
And they smiled to each other as they stood up on either side of that big white table on which the fourteen knives and forks, placed all round, caused them to swell with pride.
It had the appearance of the altar of some chapel in the middle of the shop.
“That’s because they’re so stingy themselves!” resumed Gervaise.
“You know they lied last month when the woman went about everywhere saying that she had lost a piece of gold chain as she was taking the work home.
The idea!
There’s no fear of her ever losing anything!
It was simply a way of making themselves out very poor and of not giving you your five francs.”
“As yet I’ve only seen my five francs twice,” said mother Coupeau.
“I’ll bet next month they’ll concoct some other story. That explains why they cover their window up when they have a rabbit to eat. Don’t you see? One would have the right to say to them: ‘As you can afford a rabbit you can certainly give five francs to your mother!’ Oh! they’re just rotten!