That evening, while she was waiting for him to return, she thought she had seen him going into the Grand Balcon,1 the dance-hall with its ten brightly lit windows, which bathed the dark stream of the outer boulevards in a sheet of flames; and, coming after him, she saw little Adèle, who worked as a polisher and dined in their restaurant, walking five or six steps behind and dangling her hands by her side, as though she had just let go of his arm to avoid the pair of them going together into the harsh glare of the globe lights above the doorway.

When Gervaise woke up, at about five o’clock, with a backache, she burst into tears. Lantier had not come home. It was the first time he had stayed out all night. She sat there on the bed, under the scrap of faded chintz that hung from a rod tied to the ceiling with a piece of string and slowly, through her tears, looked round the dingy furnished room that they rented, its walnut chest with one drawer missing, its three wicker chairs and the little stained table, which had a cracked water jug standing on it. For the children, they had brought in an iron bedstead that blocked the chest and filled two thirds of the room. Gervaise and Lantier had a trunk, wide open in one corner to reveal its empty sides and, at the very bottom, a man’s old hat buried under dirty shirts and socks; while around the walls or on the backs of the chairs, hung a moth-eaten shawl and a pair of trousers thick with mud – the last remaining rags that even the old-clothes’ men wouldn’t touch. In the centre of the mantelpiece, between two cheap metal candlesticks (not a pair), lay a heap of slips from the pawnbroker’s, soft pink in colour. Theirs was the best room in the lodging-house, the first-floor front, overlooking the main thoroughfare.

All this time, the two children were sleeping, their heads side by side on the same pillow. Claude, who was eight, was breathing slowly, with his hands on top of the blanket, while Etienne, still only four, had one arm round his brother and a smile on his face. When their mother’s tearful eyes lighted on them, she was overcome by another fit of weeping and patted her mouth with a handkerchief to stifle her low sobs. Barefoot, without bothering to put on the slippers lying on the floor, she went back to the window-sill and leaned against it, as she had done the night before, waiting, looking up and down the distant pavements.

The boarding-house stood on the Boulevard de la Chapelle, to the left of the Barrière Poissonnière.2 It was a dump, three storeys high, painted reddish purple as far as the second floor, with wooden shutters rotted by the rain. Above a lantern with cracked panes, one could just make out the words: HÔTEL BONCOEUR, OWNER MARSOULLIER, between the two windows, in large yellow letters, though bits of this inscription had fallen away with the decaying plaster. The lantern got in Gervaise’s way and she stood on tiptoe with her handkerchief to her lips, looking to the right, towards the Boulevard de Rochechouart, where the butchers stood in groups, in their blood-stained aprons, in front of the slaughterhouses, and, from time to time, the cold wind brought a foul odour, the crude smell of slaughtered animals. Then she looked to the left, her eyes threading along the ribbon of the avenue that came to a halt almost exactly in front of her in the white mass of the Lariboisière Hospital, at that time still being built. Slowly, her eyes traced the boundary wall as far as it could be seen in both directions; sometimes, at night, she could hear the screams of people being murdered behind it; and now she searched its far recesses and dark corners, stained with damp and filth, afraid that she might come across Lantier’s body, his belly punctured with knife wounds. When she looked up beyond the endless grey wall that circled the city with its strip of wasteland, she saw a great glow, a sprinkling of sunlight, already humming with the early-morning sounds of Paris. But her gaze always returned to the Barrière Poissonière and she craned her neck, bemused by the sight of the uninterrupted stream of men, animals and carts pouring down from the heights of Montmartre and La Chapelle between the two squat tollbooths at the entrance to the city. It was like the tramping of a herd of animals, this crowd that would suddenly halt, then spill out in pools across the roadway, this endless procession of labourers on their way to work, carrying their tools on their backs and a loaf of bread under their arms, a throng that poured past, to be sucked into Paris, unceasingly. Whenever Gervaise thought that she could make out the figure of Lantier among all these people, she leaned further out, at the risk of falling; and afterwards pressed her handkerchief more firmly against her mouth, as though to drive back her pain.

A cheerful young voice called her away from the window:

‘The boss isn’t in then, Madame Lantier?’

‘No, Monsieur Coupeau, he isn’t,’ she replied, forcing a smile.

Coupeau was a roofing-worker, who had a ten-franc room at the top of the house. Finding the key in the door, and being a friend, he came in with his bag slung over his shoulder.

‘I’m working over there, you know,’ he went on. ‘At the hospital… Fine month of May we’re having, I must say! It’s a bit nippy this morning.’

He looked at Gervaise, her face red from crying. When he saw that the bed had not been slept in, he gently shook his head; then he went over to the children, still sleeping, with their pink cherubs’ cheeks, and said, in a whisper:

‘What about that! The old man’s been misbehaving, has he? Don’t you fret, Madame Lantier. He’s been taking a lot of interest in politics. He was acting quite crazy the other day, when they were voting for Eugène Sue,3 who’s meant to be a decent sort. Perhaps he spent the night with some friends saying what he thought of that rotter Bonaparte.’4

She forced herself to say: ‘No, no, it’s not what you think. I know where Lantier is… We’ve got problems, like everyone else, heaven knows!’

Coupeau winked, to show that he was not taken in by the lie, and then left, offering to fetch the milk for her if she didn’t want to go out: she was a fine, plucky woman, who could count on him if she was ever in trouble. As soon as he had gone, Gervaise went back to the window.

The herd was still pouring through the city gate in the cold of early morning. You could pick out the locksmiths in their blue dungarees, the bricklayers in their white jerkins and the painters by their short jackets with long smocks underneath. From the distance, the crowd had a muddy uniformity, a neutral colour in which the dominant tones were washed-out blue and dirty grey. From time to time, a workman would stop in his tracks to relight his pipe, while the others went on walking around him, without a smile, not exchanging a single word with a friend, their pasty faces fixed on Paris, which sucked them in, one by one, through the gaping mouth of the Faubourg-Poissonnière.