Germinal - Emile Zola [69]
‘Oh, you really shouldn’t have bothered!’ La Pierronne exclaimed when La Maheude handed her the coffee. ‘There was no hurry.’
She was twenty-eight and considered the prettiest woman in the village, with brown hair, a low forehead, big eyes and a small mouth – and always well turned out, as clean and dainty as a cat. Moreover, since she had not had any children she still had a fine bust. Her mother, La Bruúlé, the widow of a hewer who had been killed in the mine, had sent her daughter to work in a factory, determined that she should not marry a collier; and so she had still not got over her fury that, rather late in the day, this same daughter had gone and married Pierron, who was a widower to boot and already had a girl of eight. And yet it was a happy marriage, despite all the stories and gossip about the husband’s obliging ways and the lovers his wife had taken: they had not a penny of debt, they ate meat twice a week, and their house was so spick and span that you could have seen your face in the saucepans. As if that were not enough, they knew the right people, and the Company had authorized La Pierronne to sell sweets and biscuits, which she displayed in jars along two shelves behind her window. This made her a profit of six or seven sous a day, and sometimes twelve on Sundays. The only exceptions to this general felicity were La Bruúlé herself, a revolutionary of the old school who ranted and raved and demanded revenge on the bosses for killing her husband, and little Lydie, who got smacked rather too often as a consequence of the family’s more lively exchanges.
‘What a big girl we are already!’ said La Pierronne, cooing at Estelle.
‘Oh, the trouble they cause! Don’t get me started!’ La Maheude said. ‘You’re lucky you don’t have any. At least you can keep things clean and tidy.’
Even though everything was tidy in her own house and she did the washing every Saturday, she cast an envious housewifely eye round this room that was so bright and cheerful, stylish even, with its gilt vases on the sideboard, its mirror and its three framed prints.
She had found La Pierronne drinking coffee on her own, since the rest of her family was at the pit.
‘You will stay and have a glass with me, won’t you?’ she said.
‘No, thanks, I’ve just had mine.’
‘What does that matter?’
And nor did it matter. Quietly the women sipped their coffee. As they looked out between the jars of biscuits and sweets, their gaze fell on the houses opposite and on the row of windows, each with its own little curtains, whose varying degrees of whiteness bespoke differing degrees of domestic virtue. The Levaques’ curtains were very dirty and looked more like tea-towels that had been used to clean the saucepans.
‘How can people live in such filth!’ muttered La Pierronne.
That was enough for La Maheude: there was no stopping her now. Oh, if she’d had a lodger like Bouteloup, she’d soon have shown them how to make ends meet! As long as you went about it the right way, having a lodger could be a great advantage. Except that you should never sleep with them. Though in this case the husband drank and beat his wife and was forever chasing the girls who sang at the cafés in Montsou.
La Pierronne assumed an expression of profound disgust. You could catch all sorts of things from those singers. There was one at Joiselle who’d infected an entire pit.
‘But I’m surprised you’ve let your son go with their daughter.’
‘Well, I know, but you try and stop them!…Their garden is right next to ours. Every summer Zacharie was always behind the lilac with Philoméne, or else on top of the shed and not caring a blind bit who saw them. You couldn’t draw water from the well without catching them at it.’
In a crowded village where everyone lived cheek by jowl it was a common story. Flung together at a young age, its boys and girls soon went to the bad, having their end away, as they put it,1 on the low sloping roof of the shed as soon as darkness fell. This was where the putters conceived their first baby,