stance. During the night he was seized with
a confounded fit of coughing. He was very flushed, suffering from a
violent fever and panting like a broken bellows. When the Boches' doctor
saw him in the morning and listened against his back he shook his head,
and drew Gervaise aside to advise her to have her husband taken to the
hospital. Coupeau was suffering from pneumonia.

Gervaise did not worry herself, you may be sure. At one time she
would have been chopped into pieces before trusting her old man to the
saw-bones. After the accident in the Rue de la Nation she had spent
their savings in nursing him. But those beautiful sentiments don't last
when men take to wallowing in the mire. No, no; she did not intend to
make a fuss like that again. They might take him and never bring him
back; she would thank them heartily. Yet, when the litter arrived and
Coupeau was put into it like an article of furniture, she became all
pale and bit her lips; and if she grumbled and still said it was a good
job, her heart was no longer in her words. Had she but ten francs in her
drawer she would not have let him go.

She accompanied him to the Lariboisiere Hospital, saw the nurses put him
to bed at the end of a long hall, where the patients in a row, looking
like corpses, raised themselves up and followed with their eyes the
comrade who had just been brought in. It was a veritable death chamber.
There was a suffocating, feverish odor and a chorus of coughing. The
long hall gave the impression of a small cemetery with its double row of
white beds looking like an aisle of marble tombs. When Coupeau remained
motionless on his pillow, Gervaise left, having nothing to say, nor
anything in her pocket that could comfort him.

Outside, she turned to look up at the monumental structure of the
hospital and recalled the days when Coupeau was working there, putting
on the zinc roof, perched up high and singing in the sun. He wasn't
drinking in those days. She used to watch for him from her window in the
Hotel Boncoeur and they would both wave their handkerchiefs in greeting.
Now, instead of being on the roof like a cheerful sparrow, he was down
below. He had built his own place in the hospital where he had come to
die. _Mon Dieu!_ It all seemed so far way now, that time of young love.

On the day after the morrow, when Gervaise called to obtain news of him,
she found the bed empty. A Sister of Charity told her that they had been
obliged to remove h