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When they reached the Hotel Boncoeur, the two couples wished each other good-night, with an angry air; and as Coupeau pushed the two women into each other's arms, calling them a couple of ninnies, a drunken fellow, who seemed to want to go to the right, suddenly slipped to the left and came tumbling between them. "Why, it's old Bazouge!" said Lorilleux. "He's had his fill to-day."
I. The Lodgers of the Hôtel Boncoeur Gervaise had waited up for Lantier until two in the morning, exposed in a thin loose jacket to the night air at the window. Then, chilled and drowsy, she had thrown herself across the bed, bathed in tears. For a week he had not appeared till late, alleging that he had been in search of work.
She went in several steps and breathed that heavy odor of the homes of the poor an odor of old dust, of rancid dirt and grease but as the acridity of the smells from the dyehouse predominated, she decided it to be far better than the Hotel Boncoeur.
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.
He never thought of Claude, who was away. He embraced Etienne every night but soon forgot he was in the room and amused himself with Clemence. Then Gervaise began to realize that the past was dead. Lantier had brought back to her the memory of Plassans and the Hotel Boncoeur. But this faded away again, and, seeing him constantly, the past was absorbed in the present.
They had ended by rendering each other all sorts of services at the Hotel Boncoeur. Coupeau fetched her milk, ran her errands, carried her bundles of clothes; often of an evening, as he got home first from work, he took the children for a walk on the exterior Boulevard.
On the mantelpiece was a bundle of pawn tickets. It was the best room of the lodging house, the Hôtel Boncoeur, in the Boulevard de la Chapelle. The two children were sleeping side by side. Claude was eight years of age, while Étienne was only four. The bedewed gaze of their mother rested upon them and she burst into a fresh fit of sobbing.
Also, they detested the Hotel Boncoeur as they didn't like the other occupants. Their dream was to have a home of their own with their own furniture. They were always figuring how much they would need and decided three hundred and fifty francs at least, in order to be able to buy little items that came up later.
Gervaise took a few more steps into the courtyard, inhaling the characteristic odor of the slums, comprised of dust and rotten garbage. But the sharp odor of the waste water from the dye shop was strong, and Gervaise thought it smelled better here than at the Hotel Boncoeur. She chose a window for herself, the one at the far left with a small window box planted with scarlet runners.
She went slowly away, and in the street she turned and looked up. How well she remembered when Coupeau was at work on those gutters, cheerily singing in the morning air! He did not drink in those days, and she, at her window in the Hotel Boncoeur, had watched his athletic form against the sky, and both had waved their handkerchiefs.
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