d as long as possible.

It was to Coupeau especially that Gervaise behaved nicely. Never an
angry word, never a complaint behind her husband's back. The zinc-worker
had at length resumed work; and as the job he was engaged on was at
the other side of Paris, she gave him every morning forty sous for his
luncheon, his glass of wine and his tobacco. Only, two days out of every
six, Coupeau would stop on the way, spend the forty sous in drink with
a friend, and return home to lunch, with some cock-and-bull story. Once
even he did not take the trouble to go far; he treated himself, My-Boots
and three others to a regular feast--snails, roast meat, and some sealed
bottles of wine--at the "Capuchin," on the Barriere de la Chapelle.
Then, as his forty sous were not sufficient, he had sent the waiter
to his wife with the bill and the information that he was in pawn. She
laughed and shrugged her shoulders. Where was the harm if her old man
amused himself a bit? You must give men a long rein if you want to live
peaceably at home. From one word to another, one soon arrived at blows.
_Mon Dieu_! It was easy to understand. Coupeau still suffered from his
leg; besides, he was led astray. He was obliged to do as the others did,
or else he would be thought a cheap skate. And it was really a matter of
no consequence. If he came home a bit elevated, he went to bed, and two
hours afterwards he was all right again.

It was now the warm time of the year. One June afternoon, a Saturday
when there was a lot of work to get through, Gervaise herself had piled
the coke into the stove, around which ten irons were heating, whilst a
rumbling sound issued from the chimney. At that hour the sun was shining
full on the shop front, and the pavement reflected the heat waves,
causing all sorts of quaint shadows to dance over the ceiling, and that
blaze of light which assumed a bluish tinge from the color of the
paper on the shelves and against the window, was almost blinding in the
intensity with which it shone over the ironing-table, like a golden dust
shaken among the fine linen. The atmosphere was stifling. The shop door
was thrown wide open, but not a breath of air entered; the clothes
which were hung up on brass wires to dry, steamed and became as stiff as
shavings in less than three quarters of an hour. For some little while
past an oppressive silence had reigned in that furnace-like heat,
interrupted only by the smothered sound of the banging down o