s threadbare and eaten away by sweat. The strong odor which slapped
her in the face as she sorted the piles of clothes made her feel drowsy.
She seemed to be intoxicating herself with this stench of humanity as
she sat on the edge of a stool, bending far over, smiling vaguely, her
eyes slightly misty. It was as if her laziness was started by a kind
of smothering caused by the dirty clothes which poisoned the air in the
shop. Just as she was shaking out a child's dirty diaper, Coupeau came
in.

"By Jove!" he stuttered, "what a sun! It shines full on your head!"

The zinc-worker caught hold of the ironing-table to save himself from
falling. It was the first time he had been so drunk. Until then he
had sometimes come home slightly tipsy, but nothing more. This time,
however, he had a black eye, just a friendly slap he had run up against
in a playful moment. His curly hair, already streaked with grey, must
have dusted a corner in some low wineshop, for a cobweb was hanging to
one of his locks over the back of his neck. He was still as attractive
as ever, though his features were rather drawn and aged, and his under
jaw projected more; but he was always lively, as he would sometimes say,
with a complexion to be envied by a duchess.

"I'll just explain it to you," he resumed, addressing Gervaise.

"It was Celery-Root, you know him, the bloke with a wooden leg. Well,
as he was going back to his native place, he wanted to treat us. Oh! We
were all right, if it hadn't been for that devil of a sun. In the street
everybody looks shaky. Really, all the world's drunk!"

And as tall Clemence laughed at his thinking that the people in the
street were drunk, he was himself seized with an intense fit of gaiety
which almost strangled him.

"Look at them! The blessed tipplers! Aren't they funny?" he cried. "But
it's not their fault. It's the sun that's causing it."

All the shop laughed, even Madame Putois, who did not like drunkards.
That squint-eyed Augustine was cackling like a hen, suffocating with her
mouth wide open. Gervaise, however, suspected Coupeau of not having come
straight home, but of having passed an hour with the Lorilleuxs who were
always filling his head with unpleasant ideas. When he swore he had
not been near them she laughed also, full of indulgence and not even
reproaching him with having wasted another day.

"_Mon Dieu!_ What nonsense he does talk," she murmured. "How does he
manage to say such stupid thing