mason, the carpenter
and the painter. All these people commenced to grumble, and she was no
longer greeted with the same politeness at the shops.

She was as though intoxicated by a mania for getting into debt; she
tried to drown her thoughts, ordered the most expensive things, and gave
full freedom to her gluttony now that she no longer paid for anything;
she remained withal very honest at heart, dreaming of earning from
morning to night hundreds of francs, though she did not exactly know
how, to enable her to distribute handfuls of five-franc pieces to her
tradespeople. In short, she was sinking, and as she sank lower and lower
she talked of extending her business. Instead she went deeper into
debt. Clemence left around the middle of the summer because there was
no longer enough work for two women and she had not been paid in several
weeks.

During this impending ruin, Coupeau and Lantier were, in effect,
devouring the shop and growing fat on the ruin of the establishment.
At table they would challenge each other to take more helpings and slap
their rounded stomachs to make more room for dessert.

The great subject of conversation in the neighborhood was as to whether
Lantier had really gone back to his old footing with Gervaise. On this
point opinions were divided. According to the Lorilleuxs, Clump-Clump
was doing everything she could to hook Lantier again, but he would no
longer have anything to do with her because she was getting old and
faded and he had plenty of younger girls that were prettier. On the
other hand, according to the Boches, Gervaise had gone back to her
former mate the very first night, just as soon as poor Coupeau had gone
to sleep. The picture was not pretty, but there were a lot of worse
things in life, so folks ended by accepting the threesome as altogether
natural. In fact, they thought them rather nice since there were never
any fights and the outward decencies remained. Certainly if you stuck
your nose into some of the other neighborhood households you could smell
far worse things. So what if they slept together like a nice little
family. It never kept the neighbors awake. Besides, everyone was still
very much impressed by Lantier's good manners. His charm helped greatly
to keep tongues from wagging. Indeed, when the fruit dealer insisted to
the tripe seller that there had been no intimacies, the latter appeared
to feel that this was really too bad, because it made the Coupeaus less
int