Complete Works of Emile Zola (461 page)
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Authors: Émile Zola
Before he had well finished, the Chamber resounded with applause. His triumph was becoming an apotheosis. The very walls shook.
When they were all leaving, Clorinde watched for Rougon to pass by. He and she had not exchanged a word for the last three years. When he made his appearance, looking younger and lighter, having in a single hour given the lie to all his previous political life, ready to satisfy, under the fiction of constitutionalism, his rageful craving for
power, she yielded to an impulsive feeling and stepped towards him, with hand outstretched and moist caressing eyes. ‘Ah!’ said she, ‘in spite of everything, you are a wonderfully able fellow!’
THE END
THE DRAM SHOP
Anonymous translation
Originally appearing in 1877, this novel is generally considered to be one of Zola’s masterpieces. A harsh and uncompromising study of alcoholism and poverty in the working-class districts of Paris,
L’Assommoir
was a huge commercial success, establishing Zola’s fame and reputation throughout the literary world.
It tells the story of Gervaise Macquart, featured briefly in the first novel of the series, who runs away to Paris with her slothful lover Lantier to work as a washerwoman in a busy laundry in one of the seedier areas of the city. The novel opens with Gervaise and her two young sons being abandoned by Lantier to fend for herself and her children. She later takes up with Coupeau, a temperate engineer, and they are married in one of the most famous descriptions in Zola’s works. The account of the wedding party’s chaotic visit to the Louvre is perhaps the author’s most memorable passage. Through a combination of happy circumstances Gervaise is able to raise enough money to open her own laundry, and the couple’s happiness appears to be complete with the birth of a daughter, Anna. However, the mood of the second part shifts, leading the protagonist into a downward spiral.
The legendary hotel illustration, published in 1906
Advertising poster for the first edition
CONTENTS
CHAPTER XIII
Poster of the theatrical adaptation of 1879
The front cover of the cinema magazine Mon Film, representing Maria Schell in the role of Gervaise in 1956
CHAPTER I
Gervaise had waited up for Lantier until two in the morning. Then, shivering from having remained in a thin loose jacket, exposed to the fresh air at the window, she had thrown herself across the bed, drowsy, feverish, and her cheeks bathed in tears.
For a week past, on leaving the “Two-Headed Calf,” where they took their meals, he had sent her home with the children and never reappeared himself till late at night, alleging that he had been in search of work. That evening, while watching for his return, she thought she had seen him enter the dancing-hall of the “Grand-Balcony,” the ten blazing windows of which lighted up with the glare of a conflagration the dark expanse of the exterior Boulevards; and five or six paces behind him, she had caught sight of little Adele, a burnisher, who dined at the same restaurant, swinging her hands, as if she had just quitted his arm so as not to pass together under the dazzling light of the globes at the door.
When, towards five o’clock, Gervaise awoke, stiff and sore, she broke forth into sobs. Lantier had not returned. For the first time he had slept away from home. She remained seated on the edge of the bed, under the strip of faded chintz, which hung from the rod fastened to the ceiling by a piece of string. And slowly, with her eyes veiled by tears, she glanced round the wretched lodging, furnished with a walnut chest of drawers, minus one drawer, three rush-bottomed chairs, and a little greasy table, on which stood a broken water-jug. There had been added, for the children, an iron bedstead, which prevented any one getting to the chest of drawers, and filled two-thirds of the room. Gervaise’s and Lantier’s trunk, wide open, in one corner, displayed its emptiness, and a man’s old hat right at the bottom almost buried beneath some dirty shirts and socks; whilst, against the walls, above the articles of furniture, hung a shawl full of holes, and a pair of trousers begrimed with mud, the last rags which the dealers in second-hand clothes declined to buy. In the centre of the mantel-piece, lying between two odd zinc candle-sticks, was a bundle of pink pawn-tickets. It was the best room of the hotel, the first floor room, looking on to the Boulevard.
The two children were sleeping side by side, with their heads on the same pillow. Claude, aged eight years, was breathing quietly, with his little hands thrown outside the coverlet; while Etienne, only four years old, was smiling, with one arm round his brother’s neck! And bare-footed, without thinking to again put on the old shoes that had fallen on the floor, she resumed her position at the window, her eyes searching the pavements in the distance.
The hotel was situated on the Boulevard de la Chapelle, to the left of the Barriere Poissonniere. It was a building of two stories high, painted a red, of the color of wine dregs, up to the second floor, and with shutters all rotted by the rain. Over a lamp with starred panes of glass, one could manage to read, between the two windows, the words, “Hotel Boncoeur, kept by Marsoullier,” painted in big yellow letters, several pieces of which the moldering of the plaster had carried away. The lamp preventing her seeing, Gervaise raised herself on tiptoe, still holding the handkerchief to her lips. She looked to the right, towards the Boulevard Rochechouart, where groups of butchers, in aprons smeared with blood, were hanging about in front of the slaughter-houses; and the fresh breeze wafted occasionally a stench of slaughtered beasts. Looking to the left, she scanned a long avenue that ended nearly in front of her, where the white mass of the Lariboisiere Hospital was then in course of construction. Slowly, from one end of the horizon to the other, she followed the octroi wall, behind which she sometimes heard, during night time, the shrieks of persons being murdered; and she searchingly looked into the remote angles, the dark corners, black with humidity and filth, fearing to discern there Lantier’s body, stabbed to death.
She looked at the endless gray wall that surrounded the city with its belt of desolation. When she raised her eyes higher, she became aware of a bright burst of sunlight. The dull hum of the city’s awakening already filled the air. Craning her neck to look at the Poissonniere gate, she remained for a time watching the constant stream of men, horses, and carts which flooded down from the heights of Montmartre and La Chapelle, pouring between the two squat octroi lodges. It was like a herd of plodding cattle, an endless throng widened by sudden stoppages into eddies that spilled off the sidewalks into the street, a steady procession of laborers on their way back to work with tools slung over their back and a loaf of bread under their arm. This human inundation kept pouring down into Paris to be constantly swallowed up. Gervaise leaned further out at the risk of falling when she thought she recognized Lantier among the throng. She pressed the handkerchief tighter against her mouth, as though to push back the pain within her.
The sound of a young and cheerful voice caused her to leave the window.
“So the old man isn’t here, Madame Lantier?”
“Why, no, Monsieur Coupeau,” she replied, trying to smile.
Coupeau, a zinc-worker who occupied a ten franc room on the top floor, having seen the door unlocked, had walked in as friends will do.
“You know,” he continued, “I’m now working over there in the hospital. What beautiful May weather, isn’t it? The air is rather sharp this morning.”
And he looked at Gervaise’s face, red with weeping. When he saw that the bed had not been slept in, he shook his head gently; then he went to the children’s couch where they were sleeping, looking as rosy as cherubs, and, lowering his voice, he said,
“Come, the old man’s not been home, has he? Don’t worry yourself, Madame Lantier. He’s very much occupied with politics. When they were voting for Eugene Sue the other day, he was acting almost crazy. He has very likely spent the night with some friends blackguarding crapulous Bonaparte.”
“No, no,” she murmured with an effort. “You don’t think that. I know where Lantier is. You see, we have our little troubles like the rest of the world!”
Coupeau winked his eye, to indicate he was not a dupe of this falsehood; and he went off, after offering to fetch her milk, if she did not care to go out: she was a good and courageous woman, and might count upon him on any day of trouble.
As soon as he was gone, Gervaise again returned to the window. At the Barriere, the tramp of the drove still continued in the morning air: locksmiths in short blue blouses, masons in white jackets, house painters in overcoats over long smocks. From a distance the crowd looked like a chalky smear of neutral hue composed chiefly of faded blue and dingy gray. When one of the workers occasionally stopped to light his pipe the others kept plodding past him, without sparing a laugh or a word to a comrade. With cheeks gray as clay, their eyes were continually drawn toward Paris which was swallowing them one by one.