but in the day-time, as there
was no one to keep her company from morning to night, she grumbled and
cried and repeated to herself for hours together, as she rolled her head
on the pillow:

"Good heavens! What a miserable creature I am! Good heavens! What a
miserable creature I am! They'll leave me to die in prison, yes, in
prison!"

As soon as anyone called, Virginie or Madame Boche, to ask after her
health, she would not reply directly, but immediately started on her
list of complaints: "Oh, I pay dearly for the food I eat here. I'd be
much better off with strangers. I asked for a cup of tisane and they
brought me an entire pot of hot water. It was a way of saying that I
drank too much. I brought Nana up myself and she scurries away in her
bare feet every morning and I never see her again all day. Then at night
she sleeps so soundly that she never wakes up to ask me if I'm in pain.
I'm just a nuisance to them. They're waiting for me to die. That will
happen soon enough. I don't even have a son any more; that laundress has
taken him from me. She'd beat me to death if she wasn't afraid of the
law."

Gervaise was indeed rather hasty at times. The place was going to the
dogs, everyone's temper was getting spoilt and they sent each other to
the right about for the least word. Coupeau, one morning that he had a
hangover, exclaimed: "The old thing's always saying she's going to die,
and yet she never does!" The words struck mother Coupeau to the heart.
They frequently complained of how much she cost them, observing that
they would save a lot of money when she was gone.

When at her worst that winter, one afternoon, when Madame Lorilleux and
Madame Lerat had met at her bedside, mother Coupeau winked her eye as
a signal to them to lean over her. She could scarcely speak. She rather
hissed than said in a low voice:

"It's becoming indecent. I heard them last night. Yes, Clump-clump and
the hatter. And they were kicking up such a row together! Coupeau's too
decent for her."

And she related in short sentences, coughing and choking between each,
that her son had come home dead drunk the night before. Then, as she
was not asleep, she was easily able to account for all the noises, of
Clump-clump's bare feet tripping over the tiled floor, the hissing voice
of the hatter calling her, the door between the two rooms gently closed,
and the rest. It must have lasted till daylight. She could not tell the
exact time, because, in s