The Drinking Den Page 31

  However, despite this rash of affection for Lantier, Gervaise was very uneasy for the first few weeks. She felt the same burning at the pit of her stomach as she had experienced on the day when Virginie had confided in her. Her greatest anxiety came from her fear that she would not have the strength to resist if one day he found her on her own and tried to embrace her. She thought about him too much, she was still too full of him. But gradually she began to feel calmer, when she saw how respectful he was, not looking her straight in the face, or putting a fingertip near her when the others’ backs were turned. Then Virginie, who seemed able to read her mind, made her feel ashamed of her unworthy notions. What was she so afraid of? You couldn’t meet a nicer man. Of course there was nothing for her to fear. And one day the tall brunette arranged it so that the two of them were brought together in a corner, and then started to turn the conversation towards feelings. Lantier said in a serious voice, choosing his words carefully, that his heart was dead and that from now on he wanted to devote himself solely to the happiness of his son. He never spoke of Claude, who was still in the South. Every evening, he kissed Etienne on the forehead, then didn’t know what to say if the boy stayed in the room, and ignored him while he said flattering things to Clémence. So Gervaise, her mind at rest, felt the past die within her. Lantier’s presence dissolved her memories of Plassans and of the Hôtel Boncoeur. As she saw him constantly, she no longer dreamed of him. She even felt disgust at times at the thought of what they had once been to one another. Oh, that was over! Quite finished! If one day he should dare to ask her for such a thing, she would slap his face – or, rather, she would tell her husband. And once again, without any compunction, but with exceptional tenderness, she thought about her friendship with Goujet.

  One morning when she arrived at work, Clémence announced that the evening before, around eleven o’clock, she had encountered M. Lantier with a woman on his arm. She said all of this in very crude terms, with added malice, in order to gauge her boss’s reaction. Yes, M. Lantier was going up the Rue Notre-Dame de Lorette. The woman was a blonde, one of those knocked-out work-horses from the boulevard, with a bare bottom under her silk dress. Just for a laugh, she followed them. The tart had gone into a delicatessen to buy some prawns and ham. Then, in the Rue de la Rochefoucauld, M. Lantier had planted himself on the pavement in front of the house, with his nose in the air, waiting for the girl, who had gone up alone, to signal to him through the window to join her. But even though Clémence added her own obscene asides, Gervaise went on calmly ironing a white dress. From time to time the story brought a little smile to her lips. These Provençals, she said, were all crazy about women; they needed them at any cost and would even have scooped one up with a shovel from a pile of garbage. And in the evening, when the hatter came, she was amused by Clémence’s teasing of him about his blonde. As it happened, he seemed flattered at being seen. Good Lord! She was just an old friend whom he still saw from time to time, when it wouldn’t bother anyone – a very smart girl, who had an apartment with rosewood furniture; and he mentioned some of her own former lovers: a viscount, an important china merchant, a notary’s son. Actually, he liked women who used perfume, and he was putting his handkerchief to Clémence’s nose so that she could smell the scent that the girl had given him, when Etienne came in. At this, he looked very serious and kissed the child, adding that all that nonsense meant nothing to him and that his heart was dead. Gervaise, leaning over her work, nodded approvingly. And the result, once more, was that Clémence was paid back for her spitefulness, because she had definitely felt Lantier pinch her once or twice surreptitiously and was eaten up with jealousy at not stinking of musk like the girl from the boulevard.

  When spring returned, Lantier, by now part of the household, spoke of finding somewhere to live in the neighbourhood, so that he could be closer to his friends. He wanted a furnished room in a clean house. Mme Boche and even Gervaise set about finding it for him. They scoured the streets all around. But he was too fussy: he wanted a large courtyard, a ground-floor flat; in short, every imaginable convenience. And now, each evening at the Coupeaus, he appeared to be measuring the height of the ceilings and examining the layout of the rooms, wanting something along the same lines. Oh, this is all he would ever want! He would happily have found a quiet spot in some warm corner. Then, every time, he would finish his inspection with the words:

  ‘By golly, you’re well set up the two of you, I must say!’

  One evening, after he had dined there and was saying his piece over the dessert, Coupeau, who was now on familiar terms with him, suddenly cried out: ‘But you must stay here, old chap, if you’d like to… We’ll manage…’

  And he explained that the room with the dirty laundry in it, if it was cleaned up, would make a fine apartment. Etienne could quite simply sleep in the shop, with a mattress on the floor.

  ‘No, no,’ Lantier said. ‘I couldn’t accept. It would be too much trouble for you. I know you mean well, but we’d get on each other’s nerves, living on top of each other like that. And, you know, a person needs his freedom. I’d have to go through your room, and that could sometimes be embarrassing.’

  ‘Oh, listen to him, the animal!’ said the roofer, choking with laughter and banging on the table to get his voice back. ‘He’s always thinking about you know what! Well, don’t you see, you dunderhead? If you use some imagination, you can find a solution. There are two windows in that room, aren’t there? Well, we can knock one down and make a door of it. Then you can come in through the yard and we could even seal up the communicating door if we like. Neither seen, nor heard, you will be in your own place and we’ll be in ours.’

  There was a pause. Then the hatter said:

  ‘Well, yes, that’s a possibility… But no, I’d still be too much trouble to you.’

  He had been avoiding looking at Gervaise, but was obviously waiting for a word from her before accepting. She was very annoyed at her husband’s idea; not that she was too disturbed or upset by the idea of Lantier living with them, but she was wondering where she would put her dirty washing. Meanwhile, the roofer was pointing out the advantages of the arrangement. Their rent of five hundred francs had always been a little high. Well, now their friend here would pay them twenty francs a month for the room, fully furnished. It wouldn’t be much for him, but it would help them on quarter days. He added that he would undertake to build, under their bed, a large box, big enough to hold all the dirty washing of the neighbourhood. So Gervaise, still hesitating, appeared to be looking at Mother Coupeau, whom Lantier had won over months before, by bringing her pastilles for her catarrh.

  ‘Of course, you’d be no trouble to us,’ she said eventually. ‘We’d manage…’

  ‘No, no, thank you,’ Lantier repeated. ‘No, you’re too kind, I’d be taking advantage –’

  At this, Coupeau exploded. Was he going to keep on messing around for much longer? They’d told him that they’d like him to come. Didn’t he see: he’d be doing them a favour? Then, furiously, he yelled:

  ‘Etienne, Etienne!’

  The child had fallen asleep at the table. He looked up, startled.

  ‘Etienne, tell him you’d like it… Yes, that gentleman… Tell him, good and loud: I want you to!’

  ‘I want you to,’ Etienne stammered, his voice thick with sleep.

  They all started laughing. But Lantier soon resumed his solemn and concerned manner. He shook Coupeau’s hand across the table, saying: ‘I accept… In good comradeship on both sides, no? Yes, I accept for the child’s sake.’

  The very next day, as the owner, M. Marescot, had come to spend a while in the Boche’s lodge, Gervaise mentioned the matter to him. At first, he seemed uneasy, refusing and getting annoyed, as though she had asked him to knock down a whole wing of his house. Then, after a minute inspection of the site, when he had looked up to see that the upper floors were not going to be undermined, he eventually gave his permission, though on condition that he would not have to bear any
of the cost. And the Coupeaus had to sign a paper, by which they undertook to put everything back to its previous state at the end of their tenancy. That same evening, the roofer brought in some of his friends, a builder, a carpenter and a painter – decent blokes who would do this little job after their day’s work, as a favour. Even so, the new door and the cleaning of the room set them back a hundred francs, not counting the bottles of wine needed to oil the works. Coupeau told his friends that he would give them the money later, out of his tenant’s first rent. After that, there was the business of furnishing the room. Gervaise left Mother Coupeau’s wardrobe there, and added a table and two chairs from her own room; but she had to buy a wash-stand and a bed, with all its linen, making a total of one hundred and thirty francs, which she had to pay off at ten francs a month. Though Lantier’s twenty francs would be devoured over the first ten months by these debts, later on they would have a nice profit.

  The hatter moved in during the early part of June. The day before the move, Coupeau had offered to go round and fetch his trunk, to save him the thirty sous for the cab. But the other man had been embarrassed, saying that his trunk was too heavy, as though wanting to keep the place where he lived a secret right to the last. He arrived in the afternoon at about three o’clock. Coupeau wasn’t there; and Gervaise, standing at the door of the shop, felt the blood drain from her face when she recognized the trunk on the cab. It was their old trunk, the one with which she had made the journey from Plassans, now scratched and battered, held together with ropes. She watched its return as she had often dreamed of doing, and could imagine that this was the same cab, the one in which that bitch had made a fool of her, bringing it back. Meanwhile, Boche gave Lantier a hand and the laundress followed them, silent and slightly stunned. When they had put the trunk down in the middle of the room, she said, just to break the silence:

  ‘Well, there’s a good job done, don’t you think?’

  Then, gathering her wits and seeing that Lantier, busy unfastening the ropes, was not even looking at her, she added:

  ‘You’ll have a drink, Monsieur Boche, won’t you?’

  She went to fetch a bottle and glasses. At that moment, Poisson, in uniform, happened to be passing. She gave him a little wave and winked, with a smile. The constable understood exactly what she meant. When he was on duty and someone winked at him, that indicated that he was being offered a glass of wine. He would even spend hours walking backwards and forwards in front of the laundry, waiting for Gervaise to give him the wink. So, to avoid being seen, he went through the courtyard and surreptitiously sipped his drink.

  ‘Oh, ho!’ said Lantier, when he saw him come in. ‘It’s you, is it, Badingue.’2

  He called him this as a joke, to show that he didn’t give a damn for the Emperor. Poisson accepted it in his usual unbending way, so that one couldn’t tell if he was really bothered by it or not. In any case, the two men, despite the difference in their political beliefs, had become very good friends.

  ‘You know the Emperor was a constable in London,’3 Boche said in his turn. ‘Yes, by golly! He used to round up drunken women!’

  Meanwhile, Gervaise had filled three glasses on the table. She preferred not to drink, herself, as she felt quite churned up inside. But she stayed, watching Lantier take off the last ropes and having a strong desire to know what was in the trunk. She could remember in one corner a heap of stockings, two dirty blouses and an old hat. Were these objects still there? Was she about to discover some vestiges of the past? Before opening the lid, Lantier took his glass and drank a toast:

  ‘Your health!’

  ‘And yours!’ said Boche and Poisson.

  The laundress refilled the glasses. The three men wiped their mouths on their hands. Finally, the hatter opened the trunk. It was full of a disordered heap of newspapers, books, old clothes and bundles of washing. He took out in succession a saucepan, a pair of boots, a bust of Ledru-Rollin4 with a broken nose, an embroidered shirt and a pair of workman’s trousers. And Gervaise, leaning forward, caught the smell of tobacco rising from it, the smell of an unclean man who takes care only of the outside, the part of him that can be seen.

  No, the old hat was no longer in the left-hand corner; instead there was a pincushion, which she had never seen before, a gift from some woman. At this, she grew calm, but with a vague feeling of sadness as she continued to watch the objects emerging and wondered if they dated from her time or from the time of others.

  ‘I say, Badingue, have you seen this?’ Lantier asked.

  He thrust a little book under the other man’s nose: The Loves of Napoleon III, illustrated with engravings and published in Brussels. Among other things, it described how the Emperor had seduced the thirteen-year-old daughter of a cook; and there was a picture of Napoleon III, bare-legged, wearing only the great sash of the Legion of Honour, pursuing a young girl who was trying to escape his lust.

  ‘Oh, that’s a good one!’ Boche exclaimed, his furtive desires always ready to be aroused. ‘That’s how it always is!’

  Poisson was struck dumb with consternation, not finding a word to defend the Emperor. It was in a book, he couldn’t deny it. But when Lantier continued to jeer and push the picture towards him, he threw his arms wide and burst out:

  ‘Well, so what? It’s natural, isn’t it?’

  This reply shut Lantier up. He set his books and newspapers out on a shelf in the cupboard; and, when he said it was a pity he didn’t have a little bookcase, hanging on the wall above the table, Gervaise promised to get one for him. He had Louis Blanc’s Histoire de Dix Ans, minus the first volume (which he had never possessed); Lamartine’s Les Girondins in instalments at two sous apiece; and Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris and Le Juif errant, not to mention a stack of philosophical and humanitarian works,5 which he had bought from junk shops. But he also regarded the newspapers with affection and respect. He had built up the collection himself over several years. Every time he went to the café and read an article in the paper that was well written and expressed his ideas, he would buy the paper and keep it. In this way, he had amassed a huge parcel, from different dates and publications, stacked together in no particular order. When he had taken the parcel from the bottom of the trunk, he patted it amicably a few times and said to the other two men:

  ‘See this? Well, this belongs to Dad; no one else can boast of having anything as smart. You can’t even imagine what I’ve got there. What I’m saying is that if they were to put half the ideas in here into practice, it would sort out society right away. Oh, yes: your Emperor and his cronies would go bust at once –’

  He was interrupted by the constable, whose red moustache and goatee were bristling in his livid face.

  ‘And the army, eh? What will you do about the army?’

  At this, Lantier flew into a rage, shouting and banging his fist on his newspapers.

  ‘I want an end to militarism, I want brotherhood between nations! I want to abolish privileges, titles and monopolies! I want equal salaries for all, profit-sharing and the glorification of the proletariat! Every type of freedom, do you hear! Every one! And divorce!’

  ‘Yes, yes. Divorce, for the sake of morality,’ Boche said in support.

  Poisson took on an air of majesty and replied:

  ‘But even if I don’t want any of your freedoms, I’m still quite free!’

  ‘If you don’t want them… if you don’t want them…’ Lantier stammered, choked with emotion. ‘No, no, you aren’t free! If you don’t want them, I’ll stick you in Cayenne6 myself! Yes, I will, in Cayenne, with your Emperor and all the swine that follow him.’

  Every time they met, they clashed in this way. Gervaise, who didn’t like arguments, usually intervened. She awoke from the stupor into which she had been plunged by the sight of the trunk, full of the soured perfume of her former love, and gestured towards the three glasses.

  ‘Quite right,’ said Lantier, taking his glass, suddenly calm. ‘Your very good health!’

  �
��And yours,’ replied Boche and Poisson, clinking glasses with him.

  Meanwhile, Boche was shifting from one foot to the other, with something nagging him; he looked askance at the constable.

  ‘All this is between ourselves, isn’t it, Monsieur Poisson?’ he murmured at last. ‘We show you things and say things that –’

  But Poisson did not let him finish. He put his hand on his heart, as if explaining that that was where everything would stay. Of course, he wouldn’t inform on his friends. Coupeau having arrived, they drank a second bottle, then the constable went out, through the yard, and began pacing up and down, left, right, left, right, with stern and solemn tread.

  To start with, everything was upside-down at the laundress’s house. Lantier did indeed have his own room, his own front door and his key; but since, at the last moment, they had decided not to seal up the communicating door, more often than not he would come through the shop. The dirty washing was also a problem for Gervaise, because her husband did nothing about the large box that he mentioned, so she was reduced to sticking the dirty linen here and there, in this corner or that, but chiefly under her bed – which was no joke on hot summer nights. And it was a nuisance for her to have to make Etienne’s bed right in the middle of the shop every evening; when the girls were working late, the child would sleep on a chair until they had gone. Goujet had spoken to her about sending Etienne to Lille where his former boss, a mechanic, was looking for apprentices. She was attracted by the idea, all the more so since the boy, who was not happy at home and wanted a life of his own, begged her to agree. The trouble was that she was afraid Lantier would turn down the idea. He had come to live there solely in order to be near his son, so he wouldn’t want to lose him a fortnight after he had moved in. And yet, when she hesitatingly broached the idea to him, he warmly approved of it, saying that young workers need to see a bit of the world. The morning when Etienne left, he made a speech to him about his rights, then embraced him and proclaimed: