L\'Assommoir

E >> Emile Zola >> L\'Assommoir

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Gervaise told Boche that she thought the shop admirably arranged. She
had looked forward to an evening of torture and was surprised that
she had not experienced a pang.

Nana, as she undressed, asked her mother if the girl on the next
floor, who had been married the week before, wore a dress of muslin
like hers.

But this was the last bright day in that household. Two years passed
away, and their prospects grew darker and their demoralization and
degradation more evident. They went without food and without fire,
but never without brandy.

They found it almost impossible to meet their rent, and a certain
January came when they had not a penny, and Father Boche ordered
them to leave.

It was frightfully cold, with a sharp wind blowing from the north.

M. Marescot appeared in a warm overcoat and his hands encased in warm
woolen gloves and told them they must go, even if they slept in the
gutter. The whole house was oppressed with woe, and a dreary sound of
lamentation arose from most of the rooms, for half the tenants were
behindhand. Gervaise sold her bed and paid the rent. Nana made nothing
as yet, and Gervaise had so fallen off in her work that Mme Fauconnier
had reduced her wages. She was irregular in her hours and often
absented herself from the shop for several days together but was none
the less vexed to discover that her old employee, Mme Putois, had been
placed above her. Naturally at the end of the week Gervaise had little
money coming to her.

As to Coupeau, if he worked he brought no money home, and his wife had
ceased to count upon it. Sometimes he declared he had lost it through
a hole in his pocket or it had been stolen, but after a while he
ceased to make any excuses.

But if he had no cash in his pockets it was because he had spent it
all in drink. Mme Boche advised Gervaise to watch for him at the door
of the place where he was employed and get his wages from him before
he had spent them all, but this did no good, as Coupeau was warned
by his friends and escaped by a rear door.

The Coupeaus were entirely to blame for their misfortunes, but this
is just what people will never admit. It is always ill luck or the
cruelty of God or anything, in short, save the legitimate result
of their own vices.

Gervaise now quarreled with her husband incessantly. The warmth of
affection of husband and wife, of parents for their children and
children for their parents had fled and left them all shivering,
each apart from the other.

All three, Coupeau, Gervaise and Nana, watched each other with eyes
of baleful hate. It seemed as if some spring had broken--the great
mainspring that binds families together.

Gervaise did not shudder when she saw her husband lying drunk in the
gutter. She would not have pushed him in, to be sure, but if he were
out of the way it would be a good thing for everybody. She even went
so far as to say one day in a fit of rage that she would be glad to
see him brought home on a shutter. Of what good was he to any human
being? He ate and he drank and he slept. His child learned to hate
him, and she read the accidents in the papers with the feelings of
an unnatural daughter. What a pity it was that her father had not
been the man who was killed when that omnibus tipped over!

In addition to her own sorrows and privations, Gervaise, whose
heart was not yet altogether hard, was condemned to hear now of the
sufferings of others. The corner of the house in which she lived
seemed to be consecrated to those who were as poor as herself. No
smell of cooking filled the air, which, on the contrary, was laden
with the shrill cries of hungry children, heavy with the sighs of
weary, heartbroken mothers and with the oaths of drunken husbands
and fathers.

Gervaise pitied Father Bru from the bottom of her heart; he lay the
greater part of the time rolled up in the straw in his den under the
staircase leading to the roof. When two or three days elapsed without
his showing himself someone opened the door and looked in to see if
he were still alive.

Yes, he was living; that is, he was not dead. When Gervaise had bread
she always remembered him. If she had learned to hate men because
of her husband her heart was still tender toward animals, and Father
Bru seemed like one to her. She regarded him as a faithful old dog.
Her heart was heavy within her whenever she thought of him, alone,
abandoned by God and man, dying by inches or drying, rather, as an
orange dries on the chimney piece.

Gervaise was also troubled by the vicinity of the undertaker
Bazonge--a wooden partition alone separated their rooms. When he came
in at night she could hear him throw down his glazed hat, which fell
with a dull thud, like a shovelful of clay, on the table. The black
cloak hung against the wall rustled like the wings of some huge
bird of prey. She could hear his every movement, and she spent most
of her time listening to him with morbid horror, while he--all
unconscious--hummed his vulgar songs and tipsily staggered to his
bed, under which the poor woman's sick fancy pictured a dead body
concealed.

She had read in some paper a dismal tale of some undertaker who took
home with him coffin after coffin--children's coffins--in order to
make one trip to the cemetery suffice. When she heard his step the
whole corridor was pervaded to her senses with the odor of dead
humanity.

She would as lief have resided at Pere-Lachaise and watched the moles
at their work. The man terrified her; his incessant laughter dismayed
her. She talked of moving but at the same time was reluctant to do
so, for there was a strange fascination about Bazonge after all. Had
he not told her once that he would come for her and lay her down to
sleep in the shadow of waving branches, where she would know neither
hunger nor toil?

She wished she could try it for a month. And she thought how delicious
it would be in midwinter, just at the time her quarter's rent was due.
But, alas, this was not possible! The rest and the sleep must be
eternal; this thought chilled her, and her longing for death faded
away before the unrelenting severity of the bonds exacted by Mother
Earth.

One night she was sick and feverish, and instead of throwing herself
out of the window as she was tempted to do, she rapped on the
partition and called loudly:

"Father Bazonge! Father Bazonge!"

The undertaker was kicking off his slippers, singing a vulgar song
as he did so.

"What is the matter?" he answered.

But at his voice Gervaise awoke as from a nightmare. What had she
done? Had she really tapped? she asked herself, and she recoiled from
his side of the wall in chill horror. It seemed to her that she felt
the undertaker's hands on her head. No! No! She was not ready. She
told herself that she had not intended to call him. It was her elbow
that had knocked the wall accidentally, and she shivered from head
to foot at the idea of being carried away in this man's arms.

"What is the matter?" repeated Bazonge. "Can I serve you in any way,
madame?"

"No! No! It is nothing!" answered the laundress in a choked voice.
"I am very much obliged."

While the undertaker slept she lay wide awake, holding her breath and
not daring to move, lest he should think she called him again.

She said to herself that under no circumstances would she ever appeal
to him for assistance, and she said this over and over again with the
vain hope of reassuring herself, for she was by no means at ease in
her mind.

Gervaise had before her a noble example of courage and fortitude in
the Bijard family. Little Lalie, that tiny child--about as big as
a pinch of salt--swept and kept her room like wax; she watched over
the two younger children with all the care and patience of a mother.
This she had done since her father had kicked her mother to death.
She had entirely assumed that mother's place, even to receiving the
blows which had fallen formerly on that poor woman. It seemed to be a
necessity of his nature that when he came home drunk he must have some
woman to abuse. Lalie was too small, he grumbled; one blow of his fist
covered her whole face, and her skin was so delicate that the marks of
his five fingers would remain on her cheek for days!

He would fly at her like a wolf at a poor little kitten for the merest
trifle. Lalie never answered, never rebelled and never complained.
She merely tried to shield her face and suppressed all shrieks, lest
the neighbors should come; her pride could not endure that. When her
father was tired kicking her about the room she lay where he left her
until she had strength to rise, and then she went steadily about her
work, washing the children and making her soup, sweeping and dusting
until everything was clean. It was a part of her plan of life to be
beaten every day.

Gervaise had conceived a strong affection for this little neighbor.
She treated her like a woman who knew something of life. It must be
admitted that Lalie was large for her years. She was fair and pale,
with solemn eyes for her years and had a delicate mouth. To have heard
her talk one would have thought her thirty. She could make and mend,
and she talked of the children as if she had herself brought them into
the world. She made people laugh sometimes when she talked, but more
often she brought tears to their eyes.

Gervaise did everything she could for her, gave her what she could
and helped the energetic little soul with her work. One day she was
altering a dress of Nana's for her, and when the child tried it on
Gervaise was chilled with horror at seeing her whole back purple and
bruised, the tiny arm bleeding--all the innocent flesh of childhood
martyrized by the brute--her father.

Bazonge might get the coffin ready, she thought, for the little girl
could not bear this long. But Lalie entreated her friend to say
nothing, telling her that her father did not know what he was doing,
that he had been drinking. She forgave him with her whole heart,
for madmen must not be held accountable for their deeds. After that
Gervaise was on the watch whenever she heard Bijard coming up the
stairs. But she never caught him in any act of absolute brutality.
Several times she had found Lalie tied to the foot of the bedstead--an
idea that had entered her father's brain, no one knew why, a whim of
his disordered brain, disordered by liquor, which probably arose from
his wish to tyrannize over the child, even when he was no longer
there.

Lalie sometimes was left there all day and once all night. When
Gervaise insisted on untying her the child entreated her not to touch
the knots, saying that her father would be furious if he found the
knots had been tampered with.

And really, she said with an angelic smile, she needed rest, and the
only thing that troubled her was not to be able to put the room in
order. She could watch the children just as well, and she could think,
so that her time was not entirely lost. When her father let her free,
her sufferings were not over, for it was sometimes more than an hour
before she could stand--before the blood circulated freely in her
stiffened limbs.

Her father had invented another cheerful game. He heated some sous red
hot on the stove and laid them on the chimney piece. He then summoned
Lalie and bade her go buy some bread. The child unsuspiciously took up
the sous, uttered a little shriek and dropped them, shaking her poor
burned fingers.

Then he would go off in a rage. What did she mean by such nonsense?
She had thrown away the money and lost it, and he threatened her with
a hiding if she did not find the money instantly. The poor child
hesitated; he gave her a cuff on the side of the head. With silent
tears streaming down her cheeks she would pick up the sous and toss
them from hand to hand to cool them as she went down the long flights
of stairs.

There was no limit to the strange ingenuity of the man. One afternoon,
for example, Lalie had completed playing with the children. The window
was open, and the air shook the door so that it sounded like gentle
raps.

"It is Mr Wind," said Lalie; "come in, Mr Wind. How are you today?"

And she made a low curtsy to Mr Wind. The children did the same in
high glee, and she was quite radiant with happiness, which was not
often the case.

"Come in, Mr Wind!" she repeated, but the door was pushed open by
a rough hand and Bijard entered. Then a sudden change came over the
scene. The two children crouched in a corner, while Lalie stood in the
center of the floor, frozen stiff with terror, for Bijard held in his
hand a new whip with a long and wicked-looking lash. He laid this whip
on the bed and did not kick either one of the children but smiled in
the most vicious way, showing his two lines of blackened, irregular
teeth. He was very drunk and very noisy.

"What is the matter with you fools? Have you been struck dumb? I heard
you all talking and laughing merrily enough before I came in. Where
are your tongues now? Here! Take off my shoes!"

Lalie, considerably disheartened at not having received her customary
kick, turned very pale as she obeyed. He was sitting on the side of
the bed. He lay down without undressing and watched the child as she
moved about the room. Troubled by this strange conduct, the child
ended by breaking a cup. Then without disturbing himself he took up
the whip and showed it to her.

"Look here, fool," he said grimly: "I bought this for you, and it cost
me fifty sous, but I expect to get a good deal more than fifty sous'
worth of good out of it. With this long lash I need not run about
after you, for I can reach you in every corner of the room. You will
break the cups, will you? Come, now, jump about a little and say good
morning to Mr Wind again!"

He did not even sit up in the bed but, with his head buried in the
pillow, snapped the whip with a noise like that made by a postilion.
The lash curled round Lalie's slender body; she fell to the floor,
but he lashed her again and compelled her to rise.

"This is a very good thing," he said coolly, "and saves my getting
chilled on cold mornings. Yes, I can reach you in that corner--and
in that! Skip now! Skip!"

A light foam was on his lips, and his suffused eyes were starting
from their sockets. Poor little Lalie darted about the room like a
terrified bird, but the lash tingled over her shoulders, coiled around
her slender legs and stung like a viper. She was like an India-rubber
ball bounding from the floor, while her beast of a father laughed
aloud and asked her if she had had enough.

The door opened and Gervaise entered. She had heard the noise. She
stood aghast at the scene and then was seized with noble rage.

"Let her be!" she cried. "I will go myself and summon the police."

Bijard growled like an animal who is disturbed over his prey.

"Why do you meddle?" he exclaimed. "What business is it of yours?"

And with another adroit movement he cut Lalie across the face. The
blood gushed from her lip. Gervaise snatched a chair and flew at the
brute, but the little girl held her skirts and said it did not hurt
much; it would be over soon, and she washed the blood away, speaking
gently to the frightened children.

When Gervaise thought of Lalie she was ashamed to complain. She wished
she had the courage of this child. She knew that she had lived on dry
bread for weeks and that she was so weak she could hardly stand, and
the tears came to the woman's eyes as she saw the precocious mite who
had known nothing of the innocent happiness of her years. And Gervaise
took this slender creature for example, whose eyes alone told the
story of her misery and hardships, for in the Coupeau family the
vitriol of the Assommoir was doing its work of destruction. Gervaise
had seen a whip. Gervaise had learned to dread it, and this dread
inspired her with tenderest pity for Lalie. Coupeau had lost the
flesh and the bloated look which had been his, and he was thin and
emaciated. His complexion was gradually acquiring a leaden hue. His
appetite was utterly gone. It was with difficulty that he swallowed
a mouthful of bread. His stomach turned against all solid food, but
he took his brandy every day. This was his meat as well as his drink,
and he touched nothing else.

When he crawled out of his bed in the morning he stood for a good
fifteen minutes, coughing and spitting out a bitter liquid that rose
in his throat and choked him.

He did not feel any better until he had taken what he called "a good
drink," and later in the day his strength returned. He felt strange
prickings in the skin of his hands and feet. But lately his limbs
had grown heavy. This pricking sensation gave place to the most
excruciating cramps, which he did not find very amusing. He rarely
laughed now but often stopped short and stood still on the sidewalk,
troubled by a strange buzzing in his ears and by flashes of light
before his eyes. Everything looked yellow to him; the houses seemed to
be moving away from him. At other times, when the sun was full on his
back, he shivered as if a stream of ice water had been poured down
between his shoulders. But the thing he liked the least about himself
was a nervous trembling in his hands, the right hand especially.

Had he become an old woman then? he asked himself with sudden fury.
He tried with all his strength to lift his glass and command his
nerves enough to hold it steady. But the glass had a regular tremulous
movement from right to left and left to right again, in spite of all
his efforts.

Then he emptied it down his throat, saying that when he had swallowed
a dozen more he would be all right and as steady as a monument.
Gervaise told him, on the contrary, that he must leave off drinking
if he wished to leave off trembling.

He grew very angry and drank quarts in his eagerness to test the
question, finally declaring that it was the passing omnibusses that
jarred the house and shook his hand.

In March Coupeau came in one night drenched to the skin. He had been
caught out in a shower. That night he could not sleep for coughing.
In the morning he had a high fever, and the physician who was sent
for advised Gervaise to send him at once to the hospital.

And Gervaise made no objection; once she had refused to trust her
husband to these people, but now she consigned him to their tender
mercies without a regret; in fact, she regarded it as a mercy.

Nevertheless, when the litter came she turned very pale and, if she
had had even ten francs in her pocket, would have kept him at home.
She walked to the hospital by the side of the litter and went into
the ward where he was placed. The room looked to her like a miniature
Pere-Lachaise, with its rows of beds on either side and its path down
the middle. She went slowly away, and in the street she turned and
looked up. How well she remembered when Coupeau was at work on those
gutters, cheerily singing in the morning air! He did not drink in
those days, and she, at her window in the Hotel Boncoeur, had
watched his athletic form against the sky, and both had waved their
handkerchiefs. Yes, Coupeau had worked more than a year on this
hospital, little thinking that he was preparing a place for himself.
Now he was no longer on the roof--he had built a dismal nest within.
Good God, was she and the once-happy wife and mother one and the same?
How long ago those days seemed!

The next day when Gervaise went to make inquiries she found the bed
empty. A sister explained that her husband had been taken to the
asylum of Sainte-Anne, because the night before he had suddenly become
unmanageable from delirium and had uttered such terrible howls that it
disturbed the inmates of all the beds in that ward. It was the alcohol
in his system, she said, which attacked his nerves now, when he was so
reduced by the inflammation on his lungs that he could not resist it.

The clearstarcher went home, but how or by what route she never knew.
Her husband was mad--she heard these words reverberating through her
brain. Life was growing very strange. Nana simply said that he must,
of course, be left at the asylum, for he might murder them both.

On Sunday only could Gervaise go to Sainte-Anne. It was a long
distance off. Fortunately there was an omnibus which went very near.
She got out at La Rue Sante and bought two oranges that she might not
go quite empty-handed.

But when she went in, to her astonishment she found Coupeau sitting
up. He welcomed her gaily.

"You are better!" she exclaimed.

"Yes, nearly well," he replied, and they talked together awhile, and
she gave him the oranges, which pleased and touched him, for he was a
different man now that he drank tisane instead of liquor. She did not
dare allude to his delirium, but he spoke of it himself.

"Yes," he said, "I was in a pretty state! I saw rats running all over
the floor and the walls, and you were calling me, and I saw all sorts
of horrible things! But I am all right now. Once in a while I have a
bad dream, but everybody does, I suppose."

Gervaise remained with him until night. When the house surgeon made
his rounds at six o'clock he told him to hold out his hands. They
scarcely trembled--an almost imperceptible motion of the tips of his
fingers was all. But as the room grew darker Coupeau became restless.
Two or three times he sat up and peered into the remote corners.

Suddenly he stretched out his arms and seemed to crush some creature
on the wall.

"What is it?" asked Gervaise, terribly frightened.

"Rats!" he said quietly. "Only rats!"

After a long silence he seemed to be dropping off to sleep, with
disconnected sentences falling from his lips.

"Dirty beasts! Look out, one is under your skirts!" He pulled the
covering hastily over his head, as if to protect himself against the
creature he saw.

Then starting up in mad terror, he screamed aloud. A nurse ran to the
bed, and Gervaise was sent away, mute with horror at this scene.

But when on the following Sunday she went again to the hospital,
Coupeau was really well. All his dreams had vanished. He slept like
a child, ten hours without lifting a finger. His wife, therefore, was
allowed to take him away. The house surgeon gave him a few words of
advice before he left, assuring him if he continued to drink he would
be a dead man in three months. All depended on himself. He could live
at home just as he had lived at Sainte-Anne's and must forget that
such things as wine and brandy existed.

"He is right," said Gervaise as they took their seats in the omnibus.

"Of course he is right," answered her husband. But after a moment's
silence he added:

"But then, you know, a drop of brandy now and then never hurts a man:
it aids digestion."

That very evening he took a tiny drop and for a week was very
moderate; he had no desire, he said, to end his days at Bicetre.
But he was soon off his guard, and one day his little drop ended in
a full glass, to be followed by a second, and so on. At the end of
a fortnight he had fallen back in the old rut.

Gervaise did her best, but, after all, what can a wife do in such
circumstances?

She had been so startled by the scene at the asylum that she had
fully determined to begin a regular life again and hoped that he would
assist her and do the same himself. But now she saw that there was
no hope, that even the knowledge of the inevitable results could not
restrain her husband now.

Then the hell on earth began again; hopeless and intolerant, Nana
asked indignantly why he had not remained in the asylum. All the money
she made, she said, should be spent in brandy for her father, for the
sooner it was ended, the better for them all.

Gervaise blazed out one day when he lamented his marriage and told him
that it was for her to curse the day when she first saw him. He must
remember that she had refused him over and over again. The scene was
a frightful one and one unexampled in the Coupeau annals.

Gervaise, now utterly discouraged, grew more indolent every day. Her
room was rarely swept. The Lorilleuxs said they could not enter it, it
was so dirty. They talked all day long over their work of the downfall
of Wooden Legs. They gloated over her poverty and her rags.

"Well! Well!" they murmured. "A great change has indeed come to that
beautiful blonde who was so fine in her blue shop."

Gervaise suspected their comments on her and her acts to be most
unkind, but she determined to have no open quarrel. It was for her
interest to speak to them when they met, but that was all the
intercourse between them.

On Saturday Coupeau had told his wife he would take her to the circus;
he had earned a little money and insisted on indulging himself. Nana
was obliged to stay late at the place where she worked and would sleep
with her aunt Mme Lerat.

Seven o'clock came, but no Coupeau. Her husband was drinking with his
comrades probably. She had washed a cap and mended an old gown with
the hope of being presentable. About nine o'clock, in a towering rage,
she sallied forth on an empty stomach to find Coupeau.

"Are you looking for your husband?" said Mme Boche. "He is at the
Assommoir. Boche has just seen him there."

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