The Drinking Den by Émile Zola Page B

outside. ‘Well, so long, Monsieur Coupeau, and thank you… I’ve got to hurry back.’
    She was about to set off down the boulevard, but he took her hand and would not let go, saying: ‘Why not come along with me, then? Go down the Rue de la Goutte-d’Or, it’s no further, really… I have to go to my sister’s before returning to work… We can keep one another company.’
    In the end, she accepted, and they went slowly up the Rue des Poissonniers, side by side, but not arm in arm. He told her about his family. His mother, Mother Coupeau, used to sew waistcoats, but now her eyesight was going, so she did housework. She had been sixty-two last month, on the third. He was her youngest. One of his sisters, Mme Lerat, was a widow of thirty-six, a florist, who lived in the Rue des Moines, at Les Batignolles. The other was thirty; she had married Lorilleux, a chain-maker with a deadpan sense of humour. This was the one they were going to see in the Rue de la Goutte-d’Or, where she lived in the large house on the left. In the evenings, he went to eat with the Lorilleux: it was cheaper for all of them. In fact, the reason he was going now was to tell them not to expect him today, because he had an invitation from a friend –
    Gervaise, who had been listening, interrupted suddenly and asked, smiling:
    â€˜Is it right that they call you Cadet-Cassis, Monsieur Coupeau?’
    â€˜Oh, that,’ he answered. ‘It’s a nickname that my friends gave me because I usually have a cassis when they drag me along to the wine merchant’s… Might as well be called Cadet-Cassis as Mes-Bottes, don’t you think?’
    â€˜Of course, there’s nothing wrong with Cadet-Cassis,’ the young woman agreed.
    And she asked him about his work. He was still employed there, behind the city wall, on the new hospital. Oh, there was no shortage of work; he certainly wouldn’t leave the site before the end of the year. There were yards and yards of guttering to do!
    â€˜You know,’ he said, ‘I can see the Hôtel Boncoeur from up there… Yesterday, you were at your window and I gave you a wave, but you didn’t see me.’
    While they were talking, they had already gone a hundred yards down the Rue de la Goutte-d’Or, where he stopped, looked up and said:
    â€˜This is the house. I’m not far away myself, at No. 22. But I must say this place is a fine old pile! It’s like a barracks, it’s so large inside there.’
    Gervaise looked up and examined the front of the house. On the street side, it had five storeys, each with a row of fifteen windows, their black shutters with broken slats lending an air of desolation to the huge expanse of wall. Below, on the ground floor, there were four shops: to the right of the door: a huge greasy chop house; at the left: a coal merchant’s, a draper’s and an umbrella shop. The house seemed all the more vast since it stood between two low, puny little buildings that huddled against it; and, square-set, like a crudely cast block of cement, decaying and flaking in the rain, its huge cube stood out against the clear sky above the neighbouring roofs, the mud-coloured sides unrendered and having the endless nakedness of prison walls, with rows of join stones 4 resembling empty jaw-bones gaping in the void. But Gervaise was chiefly looking at the door, a huge arched doorway rising to the second floor and making a deep porch, at the far end ofwhich one could see the dim light from a large courtyard. Through the middle of the entrance, which was paved in the same way as the street, ran a gutter along which some water, coloured soft pink, was flowing.
    â€˜Come on in,’ Coupeau said. ‘No one’s going to eat you.’
    Gervaise wanted to wait for him in the street, but she could not resist stepping through the doorway as far as the concierge’s lodge, which was on the right. Here, on