flashed across her mind, she remembered the plum
she had taken with Coupeau, near the door, in the old days, when he
was courting her. At that time, she used to leave the juice of fruits
preserved in brandy. And now, here was she going back to liqueurs. Oh!
she knew herself well, she had not two thimblefuls of will. One would
only have had to have given her a walloping across the back to have made
her regularly wallow in drink. The anisette even seemed to be very good,
perhaps rather too sweet and slightly sickening. She went on sipping as
she listened to Salted-Mouth, otherwise Drink-without-Thirst, tell of
his affair with fat Eulalie, a fish peddler and very shrewd at locating
him. Even if his comrades tried to hide him, she could usually sniff
him out when he was late. Just the night before she had slapped his
face with a flounder to teach him not to neglect going to work.
Bibi-the-Smoker and My-Boots nearly split their sides laughing. They
slapped Gervaise on the shoulder and she began to laugh also, finding it
amusing in spite of herself. They then advised her to follow Eulalie's
example and bring an iron with her so as to press Coupeau's ears on the
counters of the wineshops.

"Ah, well, no thanks," cried Coupeau as he turned upside down the glass
his wife had emptied. "You pump it out pretty well. Just look, you
fellows, she doesn't take long over it."

"Will madame take another?" asked Salted-Mouth, otherwise
Drink-without-Thirst.

No, she had had enough. Yet she hesitated. The anisette had slightly
bothered her stomach. She should have taken straight brandy to settle
her digestion.

She cast side glances at the drunkard manufacturing machine behind her.
That confounded pot, as round as the stomach of a tinker's fat wife,
with its nose that was so long and twisted, sent a shiver down her back,
a fear mingled with a desire. Yes, one might have thought it the metal
pluck of some big wicked woman, of some witch who was discharging drop
by drop the fire of her entrails. A fine source of poison, an operation
which should have been hidden away in a cellar, it was so brazen and
abominable! But all the same she would have liked to have poked her nose
inside it, to have sniffed the odor, have tasted the filth, though the
skin might have peeled off her burnt tongue like the rind off an orange.

"What's that you're drinking?" asked she slyly of the men, her eyes
lighted up by the beautiful golden color of their glass