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Gervaise, looking enormous, her elbows on the table, ate great pieces of breast, without uttering a word, for fear of losing a mouthful, and merely felt slightly ashamed and annoyed at exhibiting herself thus, as gluttonous as a cat before Goujet. Goujet, however, was too busy stuffing himself to notice that she was all red with eating.
Bibi-the-Smoker had taken his girl to an aunt's at Montrouge on the previous Sunday. Coupeau asked for the news of the "Indian Mail," a washerwoman of Chaillot who was known in the establishment. They were about to drink, when My-Boots loudly called to Goujet and Lorilleux who were passing by. They came just to the door, but would not enter. The blacksmith did not care to take anything.
She said nothing of this to anyone, deterred only by the fear of seeming to regret the money she had spent for her husband during his illness. She was pale and dispirited at the thought that she must work five years at least before she could save that much money. One evening Gervaise was alone. Goujet entered, took a chair in silence and looked at her as he smoked his pipe.
If it is Goujet you wish to see go to the left." Gervaise obeyed his instructions and found herself in a large room with the forge at the farther end. She spoke to the first man she saw, when suddenly the whole room was one blaze of light.
Big tears coursed down her cheeks and fell onto her bread. She still ate, gluttonously devouring this bread thus moistened by her tears, and breathing very hard all the while. Goujet compelled her to drink to prevent her from stifling, and her glass chinked, as it were, against her teeth. "Will you have some more bread?" he asked in an undertone.
"Madame will be judge," said he, turning towards the young woman. "Enough chattering," cried Goujet. "Now then, Zouzou, show your muscle! It's not hot enough, my lad." But Salted-Mouth, otherwise Drink-without-Thirst, asked: "So we strike together?" "Not a bit of it! each his own bolt, my friend!"
Gervaise sat for an hour with her neighbor, watching her at work with her cushion, its numberless pins and the pretty lace. The more she saw of her new friends the better Gervaise liked them. They were frugal but not parsimonious. They were the admiration of the neighborhood. Goujet was never seen with a hole or a spot on his garments.
Coupeau was, however, less scrupulous and said with a laugh that if she kissed her friend occasionally in the corner it would keep things straight and pay him well. Then Gervaise, with eyes blazing with indignation, would ask if he really meant that. Had he fallen so low? Nor should he speak of Goujet in that way in her presence.
Goujet, wishing to save Etienne from Coupeau's rough treatment, had taken him to the place where he was employed to blow the bellows, with the prospect of becoming an apprentice as soon as he was old enough, and Etienne thus became another tie between the clearstarcher and the blacksmith. All their little world laughed and told Gervaise that her friend worshiped the very ground she trod upon.
"Her gun has not been fired; the breech is clean; she has evidently not hunted." "Oh! that's neither here nor there," said the abbe. "Bah?" cried Mademoiselle Goujet; "when I was twenty-three and saw I should be an old maid all my life, I rushed about and fatigued myself in a dozen ways. I understand how the countess can scour the country for hours without thinking of the game.
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