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her side, as though she had just let go of his arm to avoid the pair of them going together into the harsh glare of the globe lights above the doorway.
    When Gervaise woke up, at about five o’clock, with a backache, she burst into tears. Lantier had not come home. It was the first time he had stayed out all night. She sat there on the bed, under the scrap of faded chintz that hung from a rod tied to the ceiling with a piece of string and slowly, through her tears, looked round the dingy furnished room that they rented, its walnut chest with one drawer missing, its three wicker chairs and the little stained table, which had a cracked water jug standing on it. For the children, they had brought in an iron bedstead that blocked the chest and filled two thirds of the room. Gervaise and Lantier had a trunk, wide open in one corner to reveal its empty sides and, at the very bottom, a man’s old hat buried under dirty shirts and socks; while around the walls or on the backs of thechairs, hung a moth-eaten shawl and a pair of trousers thick with mud – the last remaining rags that even the old-clothes’ men wouldn’t touch. In the centre of the mantelpiece, between two cheap metal candlesticks (not a pair), lay a heap of slips from the pawnbroker’s, soft pink in colour. Theirs was the best room in the lodging-house, the first-floor front, overlooking the main thoroughfare.
    All this time, the two children were sleeping, their heads side by side on the same pillow. Claude, who was eight, was breathing slowly, with his hands on top of the blanket, while Etienne, still only four, had one arm round his brother and a smile on his face. When their mother’s tearful eyes lighted on them, she was overcome by another fit of weeping and patted her mouth with a handkerchief to stifle her low sobs. Barefoot, without bothering to put on the slippers lying on the floor, she went back to the window-sill and leaned against it, as she had done the night before, waiting, looking up and down the distant pavements.
    The boarding-house stood on the Boulevard de la Chapelle, to the left of the Barrière Poissonnière. 2 It was a dump, three storeys high, painted reddish purple as far as the second floor, with wooden shutters rotted by the rain. Above a lantern with cracked panes, one could just make out the words: HÔTEL BONCOEUR, OWNER MARSOULLIER, between the two windows, in large yellow letters, though bits of this inscription had fallen away with the decaying plaster. The lantern got in Gervaise’s way and she stood on tiptoe with her handkerchief to her lips, looking to the right, towards the Boulevard de Rochechouart, where the butchers stood in groups, in their blood-stained aprons, in front of the slaughterhouses, and, from time to time, the cold wind brought a foul odour, the crude smell of slaughtered animals. Then she looked to the left, her eyes threading along the ribbon of the avenue that came to a halt almost exactly in front of her in the white mass of the Lariboisière Hospital, at that time still being built. Slowly, her eyes traced the boundary wall as far as it could be seen in both directions; sometimes, at night, she could hear the screams of people being murdered behind it; and now she searched its far recesses and dark corners, stained with damp and filth, afraid that she might come across Lantier’s body, his belly punctured with knife wounds. When shelooked up beyond the endless grey wall that circled the city with its strip of wasteland, she saw a great glow, a sprinkling of sunlight, already humming with the early-morning sounds of Paris. But her gaze always returned to the Barrière Poissonière and she craned her neck, bemused by the sight of the uninterrupted stream of men, animals and carts pouring down from the heights of Montmartre and La Chapelle between the two squat tollbooths at the entrance to the city. It was like the tramping of a herd of animals, this crowd that