his
ravaged face, and stammered with an idiotic laugh:

"Well, my little lamb, I'm not stopping you. You're not yet so bad
looking when you wash yourself. As folks say, however old a pot may be,
it ends by finding its lid. And, after all, I wouldn't care if it only
buttered our bread."

CHAPTER XII

It must have been the Saturday after quarter day, something like the
12th or 13th of January--Gervaise didn't quite know. She was losing
her wits, for it was centuries since she had had anything warm in her
stomach. Ah! what an infernal week! A complete clear out. Two loaves of
four pounds each on Tuesday, which had lasted till Thursday; then a dry
crust found the night before, and finally not a crumb for thirty-six
hours, a real dance before the cupboard! What did she know, by the way,
what she felt on her back, was the frightful cold, a black cold, the sky
as grimy as a frying-pan, thick with snow which obstinately refused to
fall. When winter and hunger are both together in your guts, you may
tighten your belt as much as you like, it hardly feeds you.

Perhaps Coupeau would bring back some money in the evening. He said that
he was working. Anything is possible, isn't it? And Gervaise, although
she had been caught many and many a time, had ended by relying on this
coin. After all sorts of incidents, she herself couldn't find as much as
a duster to wash in the whole neighborhood; and even an old lady, whose
rooms she did, had just given her the sack, charging her with swilling
her liqueurs. No one would engage her, she was washed up everywhere;
and this secretly suited her, for she had fallen to that state of
indifference when one prefers to croak rather than move one's fingers.
At all events, if Coupeau brought his pay home they would have something
warm to eat. And meanwhile, as it wasn't yet noon, she remained
stretched on the mattress, for one doesn't feel so cold or so hungry
when one is lying down.

The bed was nothing but a pile of straw in a corner. Bed and bedding had
gone, piece by piece, to the second-hand dealers of the neighborhood.
First she had ripped open the mattress to sell handfuls of wool at ten
sous a pound. When the mattress was empty she got thirty sous for the
sack so as to be able to have coffee. Everything else had followed.
Well, wasn't the straw good enough for them?

Gervaise bent herself like a gun-trigger on the heap of straw, with her
clothes on and her feet drawn up under her rag