by Emile Zola
‘More of your tricks! I suspected as much! Quiet, you villains! Yes, you’re having me on. You’re drinking and yelling in there with your whores, just to annoy me! I’ll take you all to pieces, that I will, you in your chalet. In God’s name, won’t you leave me alone!’
He clenched his fists, then gave a harsh cry and tripped over as he ran. He was stammering, his teeth chattering with terror:
‘You want me to kill myself! No, I won’t jump! All that water means I haven’t got the heart for it. No, I’m not going to throw myself into it!’
The cascades of water, which went away as he approached, came forward when he moved backwards. Suddenly, he looked around him in stupefaction and stammered in a barely audible voice:
‘It’s not possible! They’ve brought in doctors against me!’
‘I’m off, Monsieur,’ said Gervaise. ‘Good-night. This is upsetting me too much. I’ll come back later.’
She was ashen. Coupeau continued his one-man performance, from the window to the mattress, from the mattress to the window, sweating, twisting around, always marking the same time. So she left. But even though she dashed down the stairs, she could hear the terrible noise made by her husband right down to the bottom. Oh, my God! How good it was outside! You could breathe.
That evening, the whole of the house in the Rue de la Goutte-d’Or was talking about old Coupeau’s strange sickness. The Boches, who looked on Tip-Tap nowadays with utter contempt, actually offered her a cassis in their lodge, so that they could hear the details. Mme Lorilleux came in, so did Mme Poisson. There were endless discussions. Boche knew a cabinet-maker who had stripped naked in the Rue Saint-Martin and died as he danced the polka; he used to drink absinthe. The ladies crumpled up with laughter, because they thought this was funny, even though it was sad. Then, as they didn’t understand exactly, Gervaise pushed everyone back and shouted for them to give her room; and, in the middle of the lodge, while the others watched, she did Coupeau, braying, leaping and falling around with frightful expressions on his face. Yes, on my word, that’s just how it was! So the others looked amazed: impossible! A man would not last three hours at that kind of thing. No? She swore by everything that was most sacred to her: Coupeau had been at it since the day before, thirty-six hours already. Anyway, they could go and have a look if they didn’t believe her. But Mme Lorilleux said: ‘No thank you!’ She’d had quite enough of Sainte-Anne; she wouldn’t even let Lorilleux set foot there. As for Virginie, whose business was going from bad to worse, she went around with a mournful look on her face nowadays. She merely remarked that life was not always much fun, by God, no, it wasn’t! They finished off the cassis and Gervaise wished them all good-night. When she stopped speaking, her face immediately adopted the expression of a madwoman from Chaillot, with staring eyes. No doubt she could see her man leaping around. The following day, when she got up, she promised herself that she would not go there again. What was the point? She didn’t want to go off her head herself. Yet every ten minutes she would relapse into her thoughts; she was gone, as they say. Wouldn’t it be odd if he was still jumping about? When midday struck, she could bear it no longer; she didn’t even notice the length of the journey because her mind was so preoccupied with the desire to go and the fear of what was awaiting her.
Well, she had no need to ask for news of him. As soon as she reached the bottom of the staircase, she heard Coupeau’s song: still the same tune, still the same dance. She could well believe she had just come down and was now turning round to go back. The warder from the day before, who was carrying pots of camomile tea along the corridor, gave her a wink when they met, to be friendly.
‘Still the same?’ she asked.
‘Yes, still the same,’ he replied, without stopping.
She went in, but stayed standing in the doorway, because Coupeau was not alone. The pink-faced, blond doctor was on his feet, having relinquished his chair to an old, bald gentleman with a face like a ferret, who was wearing a decoration. Naturally, this was the head doctor: his eyes were narrow and piercing as gimlets. All such sudden-death merchants look at you in this way.
Gervaise, however, had not come for this gentleman; she stood on tiptoe behind him, staring at Coupeau. The lunatic was jumping around and yelling even louder than the previous day. In the past, she had seen dances in mid Lent when sturdy lads from the wash-house had danced for a whole night; but never, never in her life, would she have imagined that a man could enjoy himself for such a long time – when she said ‘enjoy himself’ that was a manner of speaking, because there is no enjoyment to be had from leaping about involuntarily, like a fish out of water or as if one had swallowed a powder-keg. Coupeau, bathed in sweat, was steaming more, that was all. His mouth seemed larger from shouting. A pregnant woman had better stay away. He had walked so much from the mattress to the window that one could see his path on the ground: the straw matting was marked by his slippers.
No, honestly, there was nothing attractive about it; and Gervaise, shaking, wondered why she had come back. Just think: last night at the Boches, she had been accused of exaggerating. Well, she hadn’t shown them the half of it! Now she had a better view of what Coupeau was doing and she would never forget that glimpse into the abyss. Meanwhile, she caught the odd phrase exchanged between the young doctor and the older one. The former was describing what had happened overnight, using words that she could not understand. Basically, what it meant was that all night her man had chatted away and whirled around. Then the bald old man, who incidentally was not very polite, seemed suddenly to notice that she was there. And when the young man told him that she was the patient’s wife, he started to question her, with the nasty manner of a police commissioner.
‘Did this man’s father drink?’
‘Yes, Monsieur, a little, as everyone does… He died by falling off a roof one day, when he was drunk.’
‘Did his mother drink?’
‘Gracious, Monsieur! Like anyone else. You know: a drop here, a drop there… Oh, it’s a very good family… There was a brother, who died very young, in convulsions.’
The doctor looked at her with his piercing eyes, then asked in his rough manner:
‘And do you drink, too?’
Gervaise stammered, denying it and putting her hand on her heart to give her word.
‘Yes, you drink! Look out, you can see where drink leads… One day or another, you’ll die like this.’
She stayed pressed against the wall. The doctor had turned his back on her. He was squatting down, not worried about picking up the dust from the matting on his frock-coat. For a long time, he studied Coupeau’s trembling, waiting for him to go past, following him with his eyes. That day, the trembling had gone down from the hands into the feet and the legs were jumping in their turn; he was like a real puppet, with someone pulling his strings, his limbs flying this way and that while the trunk remained stiff as a board. Little by little, the sickness was gaining ground. It was like a musical beat under the skin; it would start up every three or four seconds and throb for a moment; then it would stop before starting up again, just that little shudder that goes through a lost dog sheltering in a doorway in winter, when it’s cold. Already the belly and the shoulders were simmering like water about to boil.
Even so, it was an odd sort of collapse, to be taken off, twisting around like a girl succumbing to being tickled.
Meanwhile, Coupeau was groaning in a dull voice. He seemed to be in much greater pain than the day before. His broken moans suggested every kind of discomfort. Thousands of pins were digging into him. There was something heavy weighing on every part of his skin; a cold, wet creature was hanging on his thighs and digging its fangs into his flesh. Then there were other creatures, hanging on his shoulders, tearing his back apart with their claws.
‘I’m thirsty! I’m thirsty!’ he complained constantly.
The junior doctor took a jar of lemonade from a low shelf and gave it to him. He grasped the jar in both hands and greedily drew in a mo
uthful, spilling half the liquid on himself. But he at once spat out the mouthful in disgust and anger, yelling:
‘In God’s name! It’s brandy!’
So the young man, at a sign from the older doctor, tried to make Coupeau drink some water without letting go of the jar. This time, he swallowed a mouthful, screaming as though he had swallowed fire.
‘It’s brandy! In God’s name! It’s brandy!’
Since the previous day, everything that he’d drunk had been brandy. This made his thirst twice as bad and he could drink nothing, because everything burned him. They had brought him soup, but they were surely trying to poison him because it smelled of spirits. The bread was sour and stale. Everything around him was poison. The cell stank of sulphur. He even accused people of striking matches under his nose to poison the air.
The doctor had just got up and was listening to Coupeau, who could now see ghosts again in the middle of the day. He thought he could see spiders’ webs on the walls as big as ships’ sails. Then the sails became nets with meshes that got wider and smaller – a most peculiar toy! Black balls drifted through the meshes, jugglers’ balls, now the size of marbles, then as big as cannon-balls; they would expand or shrink, just to annoy him. Suddenly, he shouted out:
‘Oh! The rats! We’ve got the rats now!’
The balls were turning into rats. The filthy beasts swelled up and came through the net, then jumped on the mattress, where they faded away. There was also a monkey, which came out of the wall, then went back into the wall, each time coming so close to him that he shrank back, afraid that it would bite off his nose. Then, without warning, it changed again. The walls must have been jumping around, because he kept saying, in a voice choked with terror and fury:
‘That’s it, then! Shake me, I don’t care! Oh, my! The room! Oh, my! It’s coming down! Yes, sound the bells, you flock of crows! Play the organ to stop me calling out the guard! They’ve put a machine behind the walls, these louts! I can hear it, it’s humming, they’re going to blow us up! Fire, fire! Help, fire! Someone’s shouting: “fire!” Look, it’s burning! Oh, it’s getting lighter, it’s getting lighter! The whole sky is burning, with red flames, green flames, yellow flames! Help me! Help! Fire!’
His yells trailed off into a croak. Now he was simply mouthing disconnected words, foaming at the mouth, his chin dripping with saliva. The doctor rubbed his nose with a finger, a gesture that must have been a habit when confronted with a serious case. He turned to the junior doctor and asked in an undertone:
‘And his temperature: still forty degrees, is it?’
‘Yes, Monsieur.’
The doctor pulled a face. He stayed there for another minute or two, staring at Coupeau. Then he shrugged his shoulders and said:
‘The same treatment: broth, milk, lemonade, weak extract of cinchona as medicine. Don’t leave him, and call for me.’
He went out. Gervaise followed him, to ask if there was not some hope. But he strode so briskly down the corridor that she did not dare stop him. She stayed there, standing, for a while, unwilling to go back and look at her man. She felt that she had already been through a rough enough time; she could still hear him, shouting that the lemonade smelled of brandy. Good Lord! She had had enough with one performance. In the streets, the galloping of the horses and the noise of the carriages made her think that Sainte-Anne was following at her heels. And that doctor who threatened her: she felt as though she already had the illness.
Of course, the Boches and the others were waiting for her in the Rue de la Goutte-d’Or. As soon as she appeared in the doorway, they called her into the lodge. Well, was old Coupeau still hanging on? My God, yes, he was still hanging on. Boche seemed amazed and disturbed, because he had bet a bottle of wine that Coupeau wouldn’t last until nightfall. What! He was still going on! And everyone was amazed, slapping their thighs. He was a tough old bugger! Mme Lorilleux worked it out: thirty-six hours, plus twenty-four, made sixty hours. Sweet Jesus! That was sixty hours now that he’d been dancing and yelling! Nothing like it had ever been seen. But Boche, wearing a sour expression because of his bottle of wine, interrogated Gervaise suspiciously, asking if she was quite sure that he hadn’t snuffed it while her back was turned. Oh, no, he was leaping around, without wanting to. So Boche, insisting, asked her to show them again what he was doing, just so they could see. Yes, yes, give us a bit more! General request! The company said it would be really good of her, because two neighbours happened to have come in who hadn’t seen it yesterday and had come down especially for the performance. The concierge called out to everyone to stand back and they cleared the centre of the floor, elbowing each other in a tremor of anticipation. But Gervaise hung her head. Actually, she was afraid of making herself ill. However, so they wouldn’t think she was just being coy, she gave a little jump or two; but she started to feel odd and fell back. Honestly, she couldn’t do it. A murmur of disappointment ran around the room: what a pity, she did it really well; but, if she couldn’t… And, since Virginie had gone back to her shop, they forgot old Coupeau to talk eagerly about the Poissons, which was a real bear garden nowadays. The previous day, the bailiffs had come, the constable was going to lose his job; and as for Lantier, he was hanging around the daughter of the people from the restaurant next door, a splendid woman, who was talking about setting up a tripe shop. Ha! What a joke: they could already imagine a tripe shop there: after the sweets, the main course. That cuckold Poisson looked a real idiot in all this: how on earth could a man whose job was to keep his eyes open to what was going on be such an oaf in his own home? But they suddenly fell quiet on seeing Gervaise: no one had been paying attention to her, and she was rehearsing all alone at the back of the room, trembling from head to foot, doing Coupeau. Bravo! That was it, they couldn’t ask for more. She stood there, bemused, looking as though she had just awoken from a dream. Then she quickly went out. Good-night, everybody! She was going upstairs to try and get some sleep.
The next day, the Boches saw her leave at midday, as on the two previous days. They wished her a pleasant visit. That day, in Sainte-Anne, the corridor was trembling with Coupeau’s bellowing and stamping. She still had her hand on the banisters when she heard him scream:
‘Now it’s the bugs! Come back here a bit, and I’ll fillet you! Ah, they’re trying to gobble me up! Ah, the bugs! I’m smarter than you are, all of you! Be off with you, in God’s name!’
For a moment, she stood at the door, getting her breath back. Was he fighting a whole army, now? When she went in, what she found was bigger and better than ever: Coupeau was a raging lunatic, a refugee from Charenton.2 He was marching around in the middle of the cell, punching his hands in every direction, against himself, against the walls, on the ground, falling over, boxing the air. He wanted to open the window, then he hid himself, protested, called out and answered himself, all alone as he performed this hellish ritual with the exasperated manner of a man tormented by nightmarish hordes. Then Gervaise realized that he was imagining himself on a roof, laying zinc plates. He was blowing through his lips, stirring irons in a brazier and going down on his knees to run his thumb along the edges of the matting, with the idea that he was soldering it. Yes, his profession was coming back to him, at the point of death; he was shouting so loudly and grasping the roof so hard, it was because some louts were preventing him from doing his work correctly. There were scoundrels on all the roofs around and about, jeering at him. What’s more, the devils were sending hordes of rats to run around his legs. Ugh, the filthy creatures, he could still see them! Even though he was crushing them, rubbing his foot against the ground with all his strength, fresh swarms of them kept coming, the roof was black with them. And weren’t there spiders, too? He tightened his trousers roughly against his thigh to crush the big spiders that had crawled up there. Thunder and lightning! He would never finish his day’s work, they were trying to ruin him, his boss would send him to Mazas.3 So, working as fast as possible, he thought he had a steam-engine in his belly; with his
mouth wide open, he was blowing out smoke, a thick smoke that filled the cell and poured out of the window. And, leaning out, still blowing, he looked out at the stream of smoke drifting out, rising into the sky, obscuring the sun.
‘Hey!’ he cried. ‘It’s the gang from the Chaussée Clignancourt, disguised as bears, dancing a jig.’
He stayed crouched in front of the window, as though following a procession down a street from the top of a roof.
‘Here’s the cavalcade, lions and panthers, snarling… There are children dressed up as dogs and cats… And there’s tall Clémence with her hair full of feathers. Oh, by golly! She’s rolling over, she’s showing everything she’s got. I say, sweetie, we’d better be off. Hey, you lousy cops, don’t take her away. Don’t shoot, damn it, don’t shoot!’
His voice got higher; it was hoarse and terrified. He ducked down quickly, repeating that the cops and soldiers were downstairs – men aiming at him with rifles. He saw the barrel of a pistol coming out of the wall, aimed at his chest. They were coming to take back the girl.
‘Don’t shoot, in God’s name, don’t shoot!’
Then the houses crumbled and he made the noise of a whole neighbourhood crashing down. Everything vanished, everything was whisked away. But he had no time to draw breath, because other pictures came by, with astonishing rapidity. A desperate need to speak filled his mouth with words that he poured out in no particular order, with a bubbling in his throat. His voice kept on rising.
‘Well, if it isn’t you! Hallo! Don’t mess around! Stop making me eat your hair!’
And he put a hand in front of his face, blowing to get rid of some hairs. The doctor asked:
‘What can you see?’
‘My wife, by golly!’
He was staring at the wall, with his back to Gervaise.
This gave her a nasty feeling and she too stared at the wall in case she could see herself. He carried on talking.
