by Emile Zola
It was the last day of April when the young woman gave birth. Her contractions started in the afternoon, at about four o’clock, while she was ironing a pair of curtains at Mme Fauconnier’s. She did not want to leave at once, but stayed there, writhing on a chair, running the iron across from time to time when the pain subsided for a moment. The curtains were a rush job and she insisted on finishing them; after all, it might just be indigestion and one couldn’t stop for a tummy-ache. But, as she was talking about starting on some men’s shirts, she suddenly went pale. She had to leave the workshop and cross the street, bent double, steadying herself against the wall. A girl from the laundry offered to accompany her, but she refused, merely asking her to slip round the corner to the midwife in the Rue de la Charbonnière. It was not as though the house was on fire: she would undoubtedly be at it for the whole night. It would not stop her getting Coupeau’s dinner for him when she got home; after that she would see about lying down for a while, without even getting undressed. On the stairs, though, she was so overcome by the pain that she had to sit down right where she was; and she pressed her two fists against her mouth to stop crying out, because she would feel ashamed at being found there by a man, if one were coming upstairs. The pain went and she managed to open the door, very relieved, thinking she must definitely have made a mistake. She was going to make a mutton stew that evening with the outer part of some cutlets. Everything was still fine while she was peeling her potatoes; and the meat was browning in a pan when the sweating and the contractions returned. She was stirring the roux to make a sauce, staggering in front of the stove and blinded by tears. So what if she was having a baby? That was not a reason to leave Coupeau without anything to eat. Finally, the stew was simmering over a damped-down fire. She went back into the bedroom, thinking there was time for her to lay one end of the table. She had to put the bottle of wine down in a hurry. She did not have the strength to reach the bed, but fell down and gave birth on a straw mat on the floor. When the midwife arrived, a quarter of an hour later, that is where she delivered her.
The roofer was still working at the hospital. Gervaise wouldn’t let them go and interrupt him. When he got home at seven o’clock, he found her in bed, well wrapped up and very pale against the pillow. The child was crying, swaddled in a shawl at the mother’s feet.
‘Oh, my poor wife!’ Coupeau said, kissing her. ‘And less than an hour ago, there I was joking while you were yelling in pain. Well, I must say, you don’t make a big thing of it: you drop them in the time it takes to sneeze!’
She gave a weak smile and muttered: ‘It’s a girl.’
‘Just so!’ the roofer continued, teasing her to help her feel better. ‘A girl: that’s what I ordered! I’ve got what I wanted, huh? Do you do everything I ask?’
And, picking up the child, he continued: ‘Let’s have a little look at you then, Miss Slattern! You’ve got a very black little face. Don’t you worry, it will get whiter. You’d better behave yourself, not act like a shameless little hussy, but grow up sensible, like your Mum and Dad.’
Gervaise looked at her daughter, very serious, with eyes wide and slightly clouded by a hint of sadness. She shook her head. She would have liked a boy, because boys always got by and did not run so many risks in this Paris of theirs. The midwife had to take the infant out of Coupeau’s hands. She also told Gervaise not to speak; it was bad enough that people should be making so much noise around her. Then the roofer said that they would have to tell Mother Coupeau and the Lorilleux, but before that, he was dying of hunger, he wanted to eat. The new mother was very upset by the sight of him getting dinner for himself, hurrying into the kitchen to fetch the stew, eating out of a soup plate, not being able to find the bread… Despite instructions to the contrary, she bemoaned the situation and turned round and round in the sheets. It was so silly not to have managed to lay the table; the pain had brought her to the ground as if she had been poleaxed. Her poor husband would reproach her, if she lay there taking it easy while he had such a poor dinner. Were the potatoes cooked enough, at least? She couldn’t remember now if she had salted them.
‘Be quiet, for heaven’s sake!’ the midwife exclaimed.
‘Oh, that’ll be the day, when you stop her worrying,’ said Coupeau, with his mouth full. ‘I bet that if you weren’t here, she would be getting up to cut my bread for me. Stay on your back, you great goose! You mustn’t wear yourself out, or it’ll be two weeks before you’re on your feet again… That stew of yours is very good. This lady will take some with me, won’t you, Madame?’
The midwife refused, but said she would be glad of a glass of wine, because it had really churned her up inside, finding the poor woman down there with the baby. Coupeau left finally, to take the news to the family. Half an hour later, he was back with everybody: Mother Coupeau, the Lorilleux and Mme Lerat, whom he’d happened to run into at the Lorilleux’s. Now that the family was prospering, they had become very friendly, heaping praise on Gervaise while making little qualifying gestures – a nod, a wink – as if hinting that they were reserving their real opinion. In any event, they knew what they knew; it was just that they didn’t want to go against the opinion of the whole neighbourhood.
‘I’ve brought you the whole bunch!’ Coupeau exclaimed. ‘Too bad! They wanted to see you. Don’t say a word, I forbid it. They’ll stay here and look at you quietly, with no formalities, right? I’m going to make coffee for them – and what coffee!’
He vanished into the kitchen. Mother Coupeau kissed Gervaise and wondered at the size of the baby. The other two women also planted big kisses on the new mother’s cheeks. Then all three of them, standing by the bed, with loud exclamations, told stories of childbirth, unusual births, like having a tooth pulled, no worse. Mme Lerat examined the infant all over and pronounced her well formed, even adding, for Gervaise’s sake, that this one would make a complete woman; though, finding that her head was a little pointed, she massaged it gently despite the baby’s cries, in order to make it more round. Mme Lorilleux took the child away from her in annoyance: it would be enough to give a creature all sorts of bad habits, messing it about like that when the skull was still so soft. Then she looked to see whom the child resembled. They nearly came to blows. Lorilleux, craning his neck behind the women, said that the baby had nothing of Coupeau… Perhaps something of the nose, but even then… She was the very image of her mother, with someone else’s eyes; and those eyes definitely didn’t come from their family.
Meanwhile, Coupeau was still out in the kitchen. They could hear him struggling with the stove and the coffee-pot. Gervaise was in torment: it wasn’t a man’s job, making coffee; and she shouted instructions to him, ignoring the midwife’s urgent ‘Hush! Hush!’
‘Take the sprog away!’ Coupeau said, coming back, bearing the coffee-pot. ‘I ask you: isn’t she a pain in the neck! Time for her to have a nap… We’ll drink this out of glasses, if you don’t mind, because you see we left the cups behind in the china shop.’
They sat down round the table and the roofer wanted to serve the coffee himself. It smelled good and strong: it certainly wasn’t any old rubbish. When the midwife had sipped at her glass, she left. Everything was going fine, they didn’t need her any more; if the patient had a bad night, they should send for her in the morning. She had still not reached the bottom of the staircase before Mme Lorilleux was calling her an old soak and a good-for-nothing. She put four lumps of sugar in her coffee and took fifteen francs off you, so that you could deliver the baby by yourself. But Coupeau stood up for her. He would be happy to hand over the fifteen francs; after all, those women spent their youth studying, they were right to charge a lot. After that, Lorilleux got into an argument with Mme Lerat: he claimed that, if you wanted a boy, you only had to turn the head of the bed towards the north, while she shrugged her shoulders and dismissed this as childishness, offering a different recipe, which consisted in hiding a handful of fresh nettles, picked in sunlight, under the mattress, without telling one’s wi
fe. They had drawn the table up, nearer to the bed. Until ten o’clock, Gervaise, gradually overcome with utter exhaustion, stayed there smiling and stupefied, her head on the pillow, turned towards them. She could see, she could hear, but she did not have the strength to venture a single word or gesture. She felt as though she were dead, a very gentle death from the depths of which she was happy to watch others living. Now and then, a little cry came up from the baby, in the midst of the loud voices with their endless observations about some murder that had taken place the day before in the Rue du Bon-Puits, at the other end of La Chapelle.
Then, as people started to think about leaving, someone mentioned the christening. The Lorilleux had agreed to be godfather and godmother; they grumbled about it among themselves, but if the couple had not invited them, they would have kicked up a dreadful fuss. Coupeau could see no sense in having the kid baptized; it wouldn’t ensure her an income of two thousand livres, would it? As it was, she just risked catching a cold. The less he had to deal with the clergy, the happier he was. But Mother Coupeau called him a pagan, and the Lorilleux, though they didn’t go in for eating the Good Lord in church, did pride themselves on being religious.
‘We’ll make it this Sunday, if you like,’ the chain-maker said.
Gervaise nodded, so everyone kissed her and told her to look after herself. They also said goodbye to the baby, each of them leaning over its poor, shivering little body, with little laughs and endearments, as though it could understand. They called her Nana,6 the pet name for Anna, which belonged to her godmother.
‘Good-night, Nana… Come, now, Nana, there’s a lovely girl…’
When they had at last left, Coupeau drew his chair up next to the bed and finished his pipe, holding Gervaise’s hand in his. He smoked slowly, dropping a few remarks between puffs, deeply affected by it all.
‘Well, now, old girl! They got on your nerves, didn’t they? You do see: I couldn’t stop them coming. After all, it shows their goodwill towards us. But we’re better off alone, don’t you think? I really needed to be alone with you for a while, like this. The evening dragged so! Poor little chick! You did have a hard time of it, didn’t you? When they come into the world, these little mites, they never guess what pain they cause. It must have been like having your belly split open. Where does it hurt you? Let me kiss it better.’
He had very softly slipped one of his large hands under her back and he pulled her towards him, kissing her belly through the sheet, smitten with a rough man’s tenderness for this still painful fecundity. He asked whether it was hurting her; he would like to have eased her pain by blowing on her. Gervaise was so happy. She promised him that she was not in any pain at all. All she could think of was to get back on her feet as soon as possible, because she couldn’t afford to stay idle now. But he reassured her. Wouldn’t he be responsible for providing for the child? He would be a real louse if he were ever to leave her with the child on her hands. There was nothing especially clever in making a child; the credit came in bringing it up, wasn’t that right?
Coupeau hardly slept that night. He had covered the fire in the stove. Every two hours, he had to get up to give the baby spoonfuls of warm sugared water. Despite that, he left for work the next morning as usual. He even took advantage of his lunch-hour to go down to the town hall and register the birth. Meanwhile, they had got word to Mme Boche, who came straight round to spend the day with Gervaise; but she, having slept deeply for ten hours, was complaining that she ached all over after staying in bed for so long. She would fall ill, if they didn’t let her get up. In the evening, when Coupeau came home, she told him what she had been through: of course, she trusted Mme Boche, but it drove her mad to see a stranger settled down in her room, opening the drawers and touching her things. The following day, when the concierge came back after doing an errand, she found Gervaise on her feet, fully dressed, sweeping the room and making her husband’s dinner. Nothing would make her go back to bed. Were they joking? It was all well and good for fine ladies to appear exhausted; when one was poor, one didn’t have time for all that.
Three days after the birth, she was ironing petticoats at Mme Fauconnier’s, banging away with her flat-irons and sweating in the stifling heat of the stove.
On Saturday evening, Mme Lorilleux brought her godmother’s present: a 35-sou bonnet and a christening robe, pleated, with a narrow lace border, which she had got for six francs, because it was shop-soiled. The next day, Lorilleux, as godfather, gave the mother six pounds of sugar. They knew how to behave. Even in the evening, at the meal that took place at the Coupeaus’, they did not appear empty-handed. The husband arrived with a bottle of superior wine in each hand and the wife brought a big custard tart, which she had bought at a well-known pastry shop in the Chaussée Clignancourt. The only trouble was that the Lorilleux would go and tell everyone in the neighbourhood about these generous gifts and how they had spent nearly twenty francs. Gervaise was outraged when she learned of their gossiping, and gave them no further credit for their fine gestures.
It was at this dinner for the christening that the Coupeaus eventually became close friends with their neighbours on the same floor. The other apartment in the little house was occupied by two people, a mother and son, the Goujets by name. Up to then, they had exchanged greetings on the stairs and in the street, but nothing more; the neighbours seemed to want to keep themselves to themselves. Then, since the mother had brought her up a pail of water on the day after the birth, Gervaise thought it right to invite them to the meal, all the more so since she found them rather nice. And there, of course, they got to know each other.
The Goujets came from the Nord.7The mother mended lace, while the son, a blacksmith by trade, was working in a factory making nuts and bolts. They had been living in the other apartment on that floor for five years. Behind the dumb tranquillity of their lives lay a distant sorrow. In Lille, Old Goujet, in a fit of drunken rage, had beaten a workmate to death with an iron bar, then hanged himself with a handkerchief in his prison cell. The widow and child moved to Paris following this misfortune, which still oppressed them, and made up for it by scrupulous respectability, and unflinching gentleness and determination. There was even a hint of pride in all this, because they eventually came to feel that they were better than the rest. Mme Goujet, who always wore black, her forehead encased in a nun’s coif, had a matronly face, pale and calm, as though the pallor of the lace and the minute work of her fingers had endowed her with an aura of serenity. Goujet was a huge lad of twenty-three, superbly built, with a pink face, blue eyes and Herculean strength. At work, his mates called him Gueule-d’Or, or ‘Golden Mug’, because of his fine blond beard.
Gervaise at once felt a great surge of friendship towards these people. When she went for the first time to their home, she was amazed by the cleanness of the flat. There was no doubt about it: you could blow anywhere without raising a speck of dust, and the parquet flooring shone like ice. Mme Goujet took her into her son’s room, just to show her. It was charming and white, like a young girl’s room, with a little iron bed behind muslin curtains, a table, a dressing-table and a narrow bookshelf hanging from the wall. Then, there were pictures from top to bottom, figures of people cut out, coloured prints fixed up with four nails, portraits of all kinds of characters, taken from the illustrated papers. Mme Goujet said that her son was just a big child. In the evening, reading tired him out, so he enjoyed looking at pictures. Gervaise forgot the time and spent an hour with the neighbour, who had gone back to her lace-maker’s frame by the window. She was interested to see the hundreds of pins fastening the lace, and happy to be there, breathing in the good, clean smell of the apartment, to which this delicate handiwork brought a thoughtful silence.
The Goujets got better the better one knew them. They worked long hours and put aside more than a quarter of their fortnight’s wages in the savings bank. People would say hallo to them in the neighbourhood and gossip about their savings. Goujet never had a hole in his clothes and went to
work in spotless overalls. He was very polite, even a little shy, despite his broad shoulders. The women from the laundry at the end of the street giggled at the way he would hang his head as he went past. He hated to hear them swearing, considering it unpleasant when women were constantly using foul language. One day, however, he came home drunk – whereupon, without any further reproach, Mme Goujet confronted him with a portrait of his father, a poorly executed painting that she hid piously at the back of a drawer. After that lesson, Goujet never went over the limit, though he had nothing against a drop of wine; a workman needs wine. On Sundays, he went out with his mother, giving her his arm; usually, they went towards Vincennes,8 or sometimes to the theatre. His mother was his one true passion: he spoke of her as though he were still a little boy. With his square head and flesh thickened by hard work behind the hammer, there was something about him of the ox: slow-witted, but good, for all that.