There were four years of hard work after this.  Gervaise worked twelve hours a day at Madame Fauconnier’s, the laundress, and still found means to keep their lodging clean and bright as a son.  Coupeau never got drunk and brought his wages home regularly from the zinc-works.  During the earlier days especially, they had to work slavishly to make ends meet.  The marriage had burdened them with a two-hundred-franc debt.  Then, too, they hated the Hotel Boncoeur.  It was a disgusting place and they dreamed of a home of their own.  Then there came a piece of good luck.  Claude was taken off their hands by an old gentleman who had been struck by some of his sketches.  Eight months later they were able to furnish a room and a kitchen in a house nearly facing Madame Fauconnier’s.  There, soon after, Nana was born.  They had two good friends in Jean Goujet, a blacksmith, and his mother.  They went out nearly every Sunday with the Goujes.

III.—­Starting on the Down Road

No great change took place in their affairs until one day Coupeau fell from the roof of a house and was laid up for three months.  Lying idle so long he lost the habit of work, and as he grew stronger again, he wasted his time and Gervaise’s earnings in drinking shops.  But he slapped his chest as he boasted that he never drank anything but wine, always wine, never brandy.  Money grew scarcer and Gervaise’s one ambition—­a laundry of her own—­seemed to fade away.  But the Goujets came to her aid, and lent her five hundred francs to begin business with.  Engaging three assistants, Gervaise was able, with her industry and beautiful work and her cheerful face and manner, to obtain plenty of custom and to lay up money again.

Never before had Gervaise shown so much complaisance.  She was as quiet as a lamb and as good as bread.  In her slight gluttonous forgetfulness, when she had lunched well and taken her coffee, she yielded to the necessity for a general indulgence all round.  Her common saying was “One must forgive one another if one does not wish to live like savages.”  When people talked of her kindness she laughed.  It would never have suited her to have been cruel.  She protested, she said, no merit was due to her for being kind.  Had not all her dreams been realised?  Had she any other ambition in life?

It was to Coupeau especially that Gervaise behaved so well.  Never an angry word, never a complaint behind her husband’s back.  The zinc-worker had at last resumed work, and as his employment was at the other side of Paris, she gave him every morning forty sous for his luncheon, his drink and his tobacco.  Only two days out of every six Coupeau would stop on the way, drink the forty sous with a friend, and return home to lunch with some grand story or other.  Once even he did not take the trouble to go far, he treated himself and four others to a regular feast at the “Capuchin,” on the Barriere de la Chapelle.  Then, as his forty sous were not