The Drinking Den

by Emile Zola

  She simply murmured: ‘Oh!’

  ‘Yes, I was going down the Rue des Martyrs, watching a little thing mincing along on the arm of some old guy in front of me, and I thought: Now, don’t I know that bottom? So I speeded up and found myself walking right alongside Nana… Well, you know, you have no need to feel sorry for her: she’s happy as can be, with a pretty woollen dress on her, a gold cross round her neck and a saucy look to cap it all!’

  ‘Oh!’ Gervaise repeated, in a duller voice.

  Lantier, who had finished the mints, took a barley-sugar from another jar.

  ‘She’s a real little flirt, that girl!’ he continued. ‘Would you believe: she signalled to me to follow her, cool as you like. Then, she dumped her old man somewhere, in a café – yep, he’s a real picture, the old bloke! Sucked dry! Well, after that she met me under a doorway. What a charmer! Sweetness itself, putting it on and nuzzling up to you like a little puppy! Yes, she gave me a kiss and wanted news of everyone. I tell you, I was really pleased to see her.’

  ‘Oh!’ Gervaise said for the third time.

  She said nothing more, waiting. Didn’t her daughter have any message for her? In the silence, they could hear Poisson’s saw again. Lantier, pleased as punch, was sucking his barley-sugar, making a whistling sound.

  ‘Well, if I saw her, I’d cross over to the other side of the street,’ said Virginie, who had just pinched the hatter again, hard. ‘Yes, I’d blush to be greeted in public by one of those women… Excuse me saying this in front of you, Madame Coupeau, but your daughter is a proper little baggage, rotten to the core. Every day Poisson rounds up girls who are better than that.’

  Gervaise said nothing and stayed quite still, staring into space. Eventually, she slowly shook her head, as though in response to something inside her, while the hatter, as though licking his lips, murmured:

  ‘Rotten she may be, but you wouldn’t mind getting indigestion from her. She’s tender as a chicken…’

  But Virginie was giving him such a fearsome look that he was obliged to pause and do something to appease her. He looked at the constable, saw that he had his head bent over his little box and took advantage of the moment to stick a piece of barley-sugar into the confectioner’s mouth. She gave a knowing laugh, and redirected her anger towards the washerwoman.

  ‘Hurry up, won’t you? It’s not getting the work done if you just stay planted there like a signpost. Get a move on, I don’t want to be paddling in water until this evening.’

  And, in a lower voice, she added, more maliciously:

  ‘Is it my fault if her daughter has gone off the rails?’

  Gervaise, apparently, did not hear this. She had gone back to scrubbing the floor, her back aching, flattened against the ground, dragging herself along with heavy movements like a frog. With both hands gripping the wood of the brush, she was driving forward a black wave, which had splattered her with filth, even her hair. All that was left to do was to rinse it down, after sweeping the dirty water out into the gutter.

  However, after a short pause, Lantier felt bored and said loudly:

  ‘I didn’t tell you, Badingue, I saw your boss yesterday in the Rue de Rivoli. He’s looking a real wreck; there can’t be more than six months left in that old carcass. Well, damn it! With the kind of life he leads…’

  He was talking about the Emperor. The constable replied drily, without looking up:

  ‘If you were the government, you wouldn’t be so fat.’ ‘

  Ah, old chap! If I was the government,’ the hatter retorted, suddenly adopting a serious air, ‘things would be a lot better than they are, you take my word for it. I mean, their foreign policy, honestly! It’s been enough lately to keep you awake at nights. Now if I just knew one journalist that I could tell my views to…’

  He was getting excited and, as his barley-sugar was finished, he had opened a drawer and was taking pieces of marshmallow, which he ate while gesticulating.

  ‘It’s quite simple… First of all, I’d put Poland back together and I’d set up a great Scandinavian state to act as a bulwark against the giant of the North2… Then I should make a republic out of all the little German kingdoms. As for England, we have nothing to fear from her; if she were to make a move, I’d send a hundred thousand men to India. In addition to that, I’d frog-march the Grand Turk to Mecca and the Pope to Jerusalem… Huh? Europe would soon be cleaned up. I mean, Badingue, just look here…’

  He paused to take five or six pieces of marshmallow.

  ‘Well, it would take as long as swallowing this.’

  And he threw the pieces one after another into his mouth.

  ‘The Emperor has his own plans,’ said the constable, after a full two minutes’ thought.

  ‘Give over!’ said the hatter. ‘We know all about his plans! We’re the laughing-stock of Europe. Every day, the flunkeys at the Tuileries3pick your boss up from under the table, between two high-class whores!’

  But Poisson was on his feet. He took a step forward and said, hand on heart:

  ‘You are hurting my feelings, Auguste. Please can you discuss this without making it personal.’

  At that Virginie intervened, telling them to give her some peace. She didn’t give a fart for Europe. How could two men, who shared everything else, be constantly rowing about politics? They growled a few more angry words for a bit, then the constable, to show that there were no hard feelings, brought the lid of the little box that he had just finished. On it, in marquetry, was written: TO AUGUSTE, A TOKEN OF FRIENDSHIP. Lantier, very flattered, leaned back, spreading out so that he was almost on top of Virginie, while the husband watched, with a face the colour of the plaster on an old wall, his cloudy eyes saying nothing; but the red hairs on his moustache bristled at times of their own accord in an odd way, which might have troubled a man less sure of his position than the hatter was.

  That rogue Lantier had the cool nerve that appeals to women. When Poisson turned his back, he had the jolly idea of giving Mme Poisson a kiss on her right eyelid. Usually, he was sly and prudent, but when he had been arguing about politics, he would take any risk: it was a question of imposing his will on the woman. These greedy kisses, brazenly pilfered behind the constable’s back, were his revenge for the Empire, which had turned France into a brothel. This time, however, he had overlooked the presence of Gervaise. She had washed down and wiped the shop and was standing by the counter, waiting for someone to give her her thirty sous. The kiss on Virginie’s eyelid left her quite unmoved, like something natural that did not concern her. Virginie seemed a little put out, though. She threw the thirty sous down on the counter in front of Gervaise, who did not move, but seemed to be waiting for something else. She was still shaken by the effort, soaking and ugly like a cat pulled out of a drain.

  ‘So, didn’t she say anything to you?’ she eventually asked the hatter.

  ‘Who?’ he exclaimed. ‘Oh, yes, Nana! No, nothing else. That little tramp has a mouth on her! A proper strawberry-pot!’

  Gervaise left with the thirty sous in her hand. Her worn slippers were spitting out water, like pumps, real musical shoes, playing a tune as they left the damp impressions of their wide soles behind her on the pavement.

  Around the area, her fellow-drunkards said that she was drinking to console herself over her daughter’s disgrace. She herself, while sipping at her glass of the hard stuff at the counter, would adopt a tragic air and chuck it down her throat, saying that she hoped it would kill her. And, on days when she was stinking drunk, she would mutter about her sorrows. But respectable folk shrugged their shoulders: they knew that old one – blaming the drinking den and its mother’s ruin on grief. In any case, it should be called grief in a bottle. Of course, to start with, she couldn’t get over Nana’s running away. All the decency that was left in her rebelled; because, generally speaking, no mother likes to think that her daughter, at that very moment, may be becoming acquainted on intimate terms with the first man to run across her. But she was already too deade
ned, sick at heart and weary, to feel such shame for long. With her, it was like water off a duck’s back. She could easily go for a whole week without thinking of her wayward child, then suddenly she would be seized by a feeling of affection or anger, sometimes sober, sometimes dead drunk, when she would have an overwhelming need to get Nana in a corner where she might either have covered her in kisses or in blows, according to the impulse of the moment. In the end, she no longer had any clear idea of what was decent and what was not. Despite that, Nana was hers, wasn’t she? Well, when you own something, you don’t like to see it fade away.

  When such thoughts assailed her, Gervaise searched the streets like a policeman. Oh, if she had seen her piece of trash, she would have gone straight back home with her! The neighbourhood was being turned upside-down that year.4 They were building the Boulevard Magenta and the Boulevard Ornano, which meant knocking down the old Barrière Poissonnière and cutting through the outer boulevard. You couldn’t tell where you were. The whole of one side of the Rue des Poissonnièrs was flattened. Now, from the Rue de la Goutte-d’Or, you could see a vast panorama, a blast of sunshine and fresh air; and, in place of the slum housing that had blocked the view on that side, they were installing a real monument, a six-storey house, sculpted like a church with embroidered curtains in the wide clear windows, dripping with opulence. This house, entirely white, placed right opposite the street, seemed to illuminate it with a mass of lights. It was even the cause of a daily argument between Lantier and Poisson. The hatter never stopped talking about the demolition of Paris, accusing the Emperor of putting up palaces everywhere, so as to drive the workers back to the provinces; and the constable, pale with fury, retorted that, on the contrary, the Emperor was thinking of the workers above all, that he would raze Paris to the ground if necessary, for no other reason than to provide them with work. Gervaise, too, was bothered by all these embellishments: she was used to her dark corner of the city and the improvements were disrupting it. When you are down in the dirt, you don’t like a bright ray of sunshine falling directly on your head. So, on days when she was looking for Nana, she would grouse about having to step over building materials, wading along unmade pavements and bumping into wooden fences. The fine new building on the Boulevard Ornano raised her hackles. Places like that were for sluts like Nana.

  Meanwhile, she was getting quite a lot of news of the girl. There are always wagging tongues only too pleased to tell you the worst. So they informed her that the child had just broken off with her old man, a fine thing for a girl who knew nothing of the world. She could have been well off with him, spoiled, adored and even free, had she known how to manage him. But young people are so silly; she must have gone off with some young swell, though no one was sure. What was certain was that one afternoon, on the Place de la Bastille, she had asked her old man for three sous to go to the toilet and the old man was still waiting for her to come back. In some circles this is known as ‘taking an English leak’.5 Others swore that they had seen her since dancing a chahut at the Grand Salon de la Folie in the Rue de la Chapelle. This was when Gervaise got the idea of going round the dives in the neighbourhood. She no longer passed the door of a dance-hall without going in. Coupeau would accompany her. At first they simply walked round the rooms, staring at the girls as they wiggled their bottoms. Then one evening, as they had some small change, they sat down and drank a large pitcher of wine, à la française, just to cool themselves down while waiting to see if Nana dropped in. After a month, they had forgotten Nana and were going to dance-halls for their own amusement; they enjoyed looking at the dancers. For hours, saying nothing, they stayed leaning on their elbows, haggard, and no doubt secretly entertained, watching with misted eyes the low-class streetwalkers, the floor shaking all around in the stifling heat and the red glare of the hall.

  As it happened, one November evening, they went into the Grand Salon de la Folie to get warm. Outside, a brisk little wind was cutting into the faces of passers-by; but the hall was packed. There was an unholy rumble in there, people at every table, people in the middle of the floor, people in the air, a real pile of meat; anyone who liked tripe would have had a field-day. When they had been round twice without finding a table, they settled for standing, until some group had left the floor. Coupeau was swaying about on his feet, in a dirty smock and an old cloth cap without a peak, flattened down on the top of his head. And, as he was blocking the way, he saw a small, thin young man wiping the sleeve of his coat after elbowing him to get past.

  ‘I say there!’ he exclaimed in fury, taking his pipe out of his black mouth. ‘Can’t you apologize? And on top of that he pretends to be squeamish because I’m wearing a smock.’

  The young man had turned round and was eyeing the roofer, who went on:

  ‘Let me tell you, you little pipsqueak, that the smock is the finest garment – yes! It’s what the worker wears. I’ll wipe you, if you like – wipe the floor with you. Has anyone seen anything like it, insulting a working man!’

  Gervaise was trying in vain to calm him down. He was showing off his rags and banging on his smock, yelling:

  ‘There’s a real man’s chest inside here!’

  At this, the young man drifted off into the crowd, muttering:

  ‘What a filthy lout!’

  Coupeau wanted to go after him. It wasn’t often that he let himself be insulted by a stuck-up type in a topcoat – which probably wasn’t even paid for in this case; some second-hand rubbish for picking up a woman without paying a penny. If he saw him again, he’d make him kneel down and do homage to the worker’s smock. But the throng was too dense, you couldn’t walk. Gervaise and he moved slowly round the outside of the dancers. There was a three-deep row of onlookers, crushed together, their faces brightening whenever a man performed some showy manoeuvre or a woman kicked up her leg, exhibiting everything she had. And, since they were both short, they had to stand on tiptoe to see anything, the hair and hats jumping up and down. The band, with its cracked brass instruments, was energetically playing a quadrille, creating a storm that shook the hall, while the dancers, thumping their feet, raised a cloud of dust that obscured the blazing gaslights. The heat was killing.

  ‘Look!’ Gervaise exclaimed suddenly.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘That velvet hat, over there.’

  They made themselves tall. There, on the left, was an old black velvet hat with two tattered feathers jumping around – an ornament for a hearse. But all they could see was this hat, dancing a devilish jig, capering, whirling, diving and leaping. They lost it in the crazy whirl of heads, then found it again, hovering above the rest with such odd effrontery that the people around them were laughing just at seeing the hat dance, without knowing what was underneath.

  ‘Well?’ asked Coupeau.

  ‘Don’t you recognize that hair?’ Gervaise murmured in a strangled voice. ‘I’d stake my life on it: it’s her!’

  The roofer, with a single thrust, divided the crowd. Good heavens, yes! It was Nana! And in a pretty state, too. All she had on her was an old silk dress, all sticky from having been wiped against tables in cabarets, and with the seams undone, hanging around on all sides. What’s more, she had no coat, not even a piece of a scarf over her shoulders, showing her bare bodice with its torn buttonholes. To think that this slut had had an old man who was all over her, and had descended to this so she could run after some punk who must be beating her! Despite that, she was still very fresh and enticing, her hair all over the place, like a poodle, and her lips pink under that ridiculous great hat…

  ‘Just wait, I’ll make you dance!’ Coupeau said.

  Nana, of course, suspected nothing. She was whirling round. You should have seen her! Poking her bottom out to the left, then to the right, bending double in a curtsy and waving her feet in the face of her partner, as though she was going to split in half! People had made a circle round her and were applauding, while she picked up her skirts, lifting them as far as her knees, caught up in the rhythm of
the chahut, whirling and turning like a spinning-top, collapsing on the floor to do the splits, then resuming a modest little dance with a swaying of the hips and the bosom, which was really stunning. You wanted to whisk her off into a corner and smother her with kisses.

  But Coupeau, plunging right into the middle of the dance, was spoiling the movement and taking a punch or two.

  ‘I tell you, she’s my daughter!’ he shouted. ‘Let me through!’

  Nana at that moment was moving backwards, sweeping the floor with her feathers, rounding her posterior and giving it little shakes, to make it prettier. She got a prize kick right on the spot, got up, and went quite pale when she recognized her father and mother. What a bit of bad luck!

  ‘Out! Out!’ yelled the dancers.

  But Coupeau, who had just discovered that his daughter’s partner was the thin young man in the topcoat, didn’t give a fig for them.

  ‘Yes, it’s us!’ he yelled. ‘Huh! You didn’t expect us, did you? And this is where we find you – and with a nincompoop who insulted me just now!’

  Gervaise clenched her teeth and pushed him, saying:

  ‘Quiet! There’s no need to explain.’

  She stepped forward and gave Nana two well-aimed slaps. The first knocked the feather hat sideways, the second left a red mark on her ashen cheek. Nana, bewildered, took them without crying or trying to resist. The band played on, the crowd started to lose its temper and shouted loudly:

  ‘Out! Out! Out!’

  ‘Come on, get moving!’ said Gervaise. ‘You walk in front. And don’t try to escape or I’ll have you thrown in jail.’

  The short young man had wisely vanished. So Nana marched out, very stiffly, still amazed at her bad luck. When she appeared to be on the point of arguing, a clip round the ear from behind kept her moving towards the door. In this way all three of them left, amid the jokes and booing of the crowd, while the band finished its pastourelle with such force that the trombones seemed to be spitting cannon-balls.