ilth, poisons which destroyed in the workman the taste
for bread. Ah! the government ought to prevent the manufacture of such
horrid stuff!

On arriving at the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or, she found the whole house
upset. Her workwomen had left the shop, and were in the courtyard
looking up above. She questioned Clemence.

"It's old Bijard who's giving his wife a hiding," replied the ironer.
"He was in the doorway, as drunk as a trooper, watching for her
return from the wash-house. He whacked her up the stairs, and now he's
finishing her off up there in their room. Listen, can't you hear her
shrieks?"

Gervaise hastened to the spot. She felt some friendship for her
washer-woman, Madame Bijard, who was a very courageous woman. She had
hoped to put a stop to what was going on. Upstairs, on the sixth floor
the door of the room was wide open, some lodgers were shouting on the
landing, whilst Madame Boche, standing in front of the door, was calling
out:

"Will you leave off? I shall send for the police; do you hear?"

No one dared to venture inside the room, because it was known that
Bijard was like a brute beast when he was drunk. As a matter of fact, he
was scarcely ever sober. The rare days on which he worked, he placed a
bottle of brandy beside his blacksmith's vise, gulping some of it down
every half hour. He could not keep himself going any other way. He would
have blazed away like a torch if anyone had placed a lighted match close
to his mouth.

"But we mustn't let her be murdered!" said Gervaise, all in a tremble.

And she entered. The room, an attic, and very clean, was bare and cold,
almost emptied by the drunken habits of the man, who took the very
sheets from the bed to turn them into liquor. During the struggle the
table had rolled away to the window, the two chairs, knocked over, had
fallen with their legs in the air. In the middle of the room, on the
tile floor, lay Madame Bijard, all bloody, her skirts, still soaked with
the water of the wash-house, clinging to her thighs, her hair straggling
in disorder. She was breathing heavily, with a rattle in her throat, as
she muttered prolonged ohs! each time she received a blow from the heel
of Bijard's boot. He had knocked her down with his fists, and now he
stamped upon her.

"Ah, strumpet! Ah, strumpet! Ah strumpet!" grunted he in a choking
voice, accompanying each blow with the word, taking a delight in
repeating it, and striking all the harder the more he fo