Everything was burning now; the goose would be overdone.
Then Gervaise, feeling quite dejected, talked of sending someone to all the wineshops in the neighborhood to find Coupeau.
And as Goujet offered to go, she decided to accompany him. Virginie, anxious about her husband went also.
The three of them, bareheaded, quite blocked up the pavement.
The blacksmith who wore his frock-coat, had Gervaise on his left arm and Virginie on his right; he was doing the two-handled basket as he said; and it seemed to them such a funny thing to say that they stopped, unable to move their legs for laughing.
They looked at themselves in the pork-butcher’s glass and laughed more than ever.
Beside Goujet, all in black, the two women looked like two speckled hens — the dressmaker in her muslin costume, sprinkled with pink flowers, the laundress in her white cambric dress with blue spots, her wrists bare, and wearing round her neck a little grey silk scarf tied in a bow.
People turned round to see them pass, looking so fresh and lively, dressed in their Sunday best on a week day and jostling the crowd which hung about the Rue des Poissonniers, on that warm June evening.
But it was not a question of amusing themselves.
They went straight to the door of each wineshop, looked in and sought amongst the people standing before the counter.
Had that animal Coupeau gone to the Arc de Triomphe to get his dram?
They had already done the upper part of the street, looking in at all the likely places; at the
“Little Civet,” renowned for its preserved plums; at old mother Baquet’s, who sold Orleans wine at eight sous; at the
“Butterfly,” the coachmen’s house of call, gentlemen who were not easy to please. But no Coupeau.
Then as they were going down towards the Boulevard, Gervaise uttered a faint cry on passing the eating-house at the corner kept by Francois.
“What’s the matter?” asked Goujet.
The laundress no longer laughed.
She was very pale, and laboring under so great an emotion that she had almost fallen.
Virginie understood it all as she caught a sight of Lantier seated at one of Francois’s tables quietly dining.
The two women dragged the blacksmith along.
“My ankle twisted,” said Gervaise as soon as she was able to speak.
At length they discovered Coupeau and Poisson at the bottom of the street inside Pere Colombe’s l’Assommoir.
They were standing up in the midst of a number of men; Coupeau, in a grey blouse, was shouting with furious gestures and banging his fists down on the counter. Poisson, not on duty that day and buttoned up in an old brown coat, was listening to him in a dull sort of way and without uttering a word, bristling his carroty moustaches and beard the while.
Goujet left the women on the edge of the pavement, and went and laid his hand on the zinc-worker’s shoulder.
But when the latter caught sight of Gervaise and Virginie outside he grew angry.
Why was he badgered with such females as those?
Petticoats had taken to tracking him about now! Well!
He declined to stir, they could go and eat their beastly dinner all by themselves.
To quiet him Goujet was obliged to accept a drop of something; and even then Coupeau took a fiendish delight in dawdling a good five minutes at the counter.
When he at length came out he said to his wife: “I don’t like this.
It’s my business where I go.
Do you understand?”
She did not answer.
She was all in a tremble.
She must have said something about Lantier to Virginie, for the latter pushed her husband and Goujet ahead, telling them to walk in front. The two women got on each side of Coupeau to keep him occupied and prevent him seeing Lantier.
He wasn’t really drunk, being more intoxicated from shouting than from drinking.
Since they seemed to want to stay on the left side, to tease them, he crossed over to the other side of the street.
Worried, they ran after him and tried to block his view of the door of Francois’s.
But Coupeau must have known that Lantier was there.
Gervaise almost went out of her senses on hearing him grunt:
“Yes, my duck, there’s a young fellow of our acquaintance inside there!
You mustn’t take me for a ninny. Don’t let me catch you gallivanting about again with your side glances!”
And he made use of some very coarse expressions.
It was not him that she had come to look for with her bare elbows and her mealy mouth; it was her old beau.
Then he was suddenly seized with a mad rage against Lantier.
Ah! the brigand!
Ah! the filthy hound!
One or the other of them would have to be left on the pavement, emptied of his guts like a rabbit.
Lantier, however, did not appear to notice what was going on and continued slowly eating some veal and sorrel.
A crowd began to form.