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Then, he spent the rest of the twenty sous at old Francois's, at the corner of the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or, where there was a famous wine, quite young, which tickled your gullet. This was an old-fashioned place with a low ceiling. There was a smoky room to one side where soup was served.
The feast spread, extending from one to another, to the degree that the entire neighborhood of the Goutte-d'Or sniffed the grub, and held its stomach, amidst a rumpus worthy of the devil and all his demons. For some minutes, Madame Vigouroux, the charcoal-dealer, had been passing to and fro before the door. "Hi! Madame Vigouroux! Madame Vigouroux!" yelled the party.
"Ah, well!" said Madame Lorilleux all over the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or, "my fool of a brother is seeing some funny things! All that was wanting was that Clump-clump should go about so haughty. It becomes her well, doesn't it?" The Lorilleuxs had declared a feud to the death against Gervaise. To begin with, they had almost died of rage during the time while the repairs were being done to the shop.
They had there a troop of convicts and impressed laborers, under escort of riflemen and convoys to the quarries in the South. In part, rogues in uniform, from the jails of Algiers and Douara, without arms, of course; the others civilians such civilians! this year's recruits, the young bullies of the Chapelle and the Goutte-d'Or. "They left before we did. Then the diligence caught up with them.
She was allowed twenty minutes to go from the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or to the Rue du Caire, and it was enough, for these young hussies have the legs of racehorses. Sometimes she arrived exactly on time but so breathless and flushed that she must have covered most of the distance at a run after dawdling along the way. More often she was a few minutes late.
It was scarcely eleven o'clock. On the Boulevard de la Chapelle, and in the entire neighborhood of the Goutte-d'Or, the fortnight's pay, which fell due on that Saturday, produced an enormous drunken uproar. Madame Lorilleux was waiting beneath a gas-lamp about twenty paces from the Silver Windmill.
That was where she had met her husband while he was still in the army. But she got tired of it, and wanted to come back to the Goutte-d'Or neighborhood where she knew everyone. She had only been living in the rooms opposite the Goujets for two weeks. Oh! everything was still a mess, but they were slowly getting it in order. Then, still on the staircase, they finally told each other their names.
She did not like to think such an unkind thing, but, really, the Lorilleuxs now seemed to be very pleased at Coupeau's accident, as it prevented her setting up as a laundress in the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or. Then she also wished to laugh, and show them how willingly she parted with the money for the sake of curing her husband.
Still, the Lorilleuxs delighted in talking sympathetically to Gervaise about the affair between Lantier and Virginie. The Boches maintained they had never seen a more handsome couple. The odd thing in all this was that the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or seemed to have no objection to this new arrangement which everyone thought was progressing nicely.
She forgave the wine, because wine nourishes the workman; all kinds of spirit, on the contrary, were filth, poisons which destroyed in the workman the taste for bread. Ah! the government ought to prevent the manufacture of such horrid stuff! On arriving at the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or, she found the whole house upset. Her workwomen had left the shop, and were in the courtyard looking up above.
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