und his voice
failing him.

Then when he could no longer speak, he madly continued to kick with
a dull sound, rigid in his ragged blue blouse and overalls, his face
turned purple beneath his dirty beard, and his bald forehead streaked
with big red blotches. The neighbors on the landing related that he
was beating her because she had refused him twenty sous that morning.
Boche's voice was heard at the foot of the staircase. He was calling
Madame Boche, saying:

"Come down; let them kill each other, it'll be so much scum the less."

Meanwhile, Pere Bru had followed Gervaise into the room. Between them
they were trying to get him towards the door. But he turned round,
speechless and foaming at the lips, and in his pale eyes the alcohol was
blazing with a murderous glare. The laundress had her wrist injured; the
old workman was knocked against the table. On the floor, Madame Bijard
was breathing with greater difficulty, her mouth wide open, her eyes
closed. Now Bijard kept missing her. He had madly returned to the
attack, but blinded by rage, his blows fell on either side, and at
times he almost fell when his kicks went into space. And during all this
onslaught, Gervaise beheld in a corner of the room little Lalie, then
four years old, watching her father murdering her mother. The child
held in her arms, as though to protect her, her sister Henriette, only
recently weaned. She was standing up, her head covered with a cotton
cap, her face very pale and grave. Her large black eyes gazed with a
fixedness full of thought and were without a tear.

When at length Bijard, running against a chair, stumbled onto the tiled
floor, where they left him snoring, Pere Bru helped Gervaise to raise
Madame Bijard. The latter was now sobbing bitterly; and Lalie, drawing
near, watched her crying, being used to such sights and already resigned
to them. As the laundress descended the stairs, in the silence of the
now quieted house, she kept seeing before her that look of this child of
four, as grave and courageous as that of a woman.

"Monsieur Coupeau is on the other side of the street," called out
Clemence as soon as she caught sight of her. "He looks awfully drunk."

Coupeau was just then crossing the street. He almost smashed a pane
of glass with his shoulder as he missed the door. He was in a state of
complete drunkenness, with his teeth clinched and his nose inflamed. And
Gervaise at once recognized the vitriol of l'Assommoir in the