The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [39]
They were surprised by twilight. Lisa suddenly blushed at finding herself lying next to a man. They had messed up the bed, the sheets were hanging off, and the gold made dents in the pillow between them, looking like the imprints of two heads that had rolled there in hot passion.
They got up awkwardly with the confused look of two lovers who had just committed their first transgression. The unmade bed covered in money stood like an accusation of forbidden pleasure behind a closed door. That was the moment of their fall. Lisa, who straightened out her clothes as though covering up her guilt, started looking for her ten thousand francs. Quenu wanted her to add them to his uncle's eighty-five thousand. Laughing, he mixed the two sums, saying that the money too should marry, and it was agreed that Lisa should keep “the stash” in her dressing table. When she had locked it up and remade the bed, they went calmly downstairs. They were man and wife.
The wedding took place the following month. The neighborhood considered it a completely suitable match. They heard vague stories of a treasure, and Lisa's honesty was a subject of endless eulogies. After all, she could have said nothing to Quenu and kept it all for herself. The fact that she had said something was testimony to her impeccable honesty. She was certainly a worthy mate for Quenu. This Quenu was a lucky man. He was not very good-looking, and he had found himself a pretty woman who had dug up a fortune. Admiration for her went so far that people ended up saying that Lisa was stupid to have done it. Lisa smiled when people hinted at this. She and her husband lived as they had before, in a close and contented friendship. She helped him, touched his hand over the ground meat, leaned over his shoulder to examine the pots. And still it was only the enormous fire in the kitchen that could bring heat to their blood.
But Lisa was an intelligent woman who quickly understood the folly of leaving ninety-five thousand francs in a dressing table drawer. Quenu would have gladly returned the money to the bottom of the salting tub until he had earned an equal amount and they would have enough to retire to Suresnes, an outlying area they both loved. But she had other ambitions. Rue Pirouette wounded her sense of cleanliness, did not fulfill her need for fresh air, light, and a healthy environment. The shop where Uncle Gradelle had amassed his fortune, penny by penny, was a sort of black pit, one of those questionable charcuteries that old neighborhoods have, where the worn stones of the floor, despite frequent washing, retained the strong smell of meat. The young woman dreamed of a light, modern shop, luxurious as a drawing room and with a sparkling window bordering the sidewalk of some broad street. This was not a latent desire to play the grande dame behind the counter. She had a very clear concept of the prerequisite niceties of a modern business. Quenu was frightened the first time she spoke of moving and spending part of their money on decorating the new shop. Softly shrugging her shoulders, she smiled.
One day, as nightfall was blackening the charcuterie, the couple heard a woman by the shop door say to another woman, “Well, I wouldn't buy there anymore, not so much as a piece of boudin. You see, dear, they had a corpse in the kitchen.”
Quenu wept. The story of the death in the kitchen had gotten around. Now he blushed in front of his customers anytime he saw them bend down and sniff his foods. So he went to his wife and brought