c! What a Balthazar's feast! They're smashing the
crockery in there. Awfully swell! Now it's being lit up; red balls in
the air, and it jumps, and it flies! Oh! oh! what a lot of lanterns in
the trees! It's confoundedly pleasant! There's water flowing everywhere,
fountains, cascades, water which sings, oh! with the voice of a
chorister. The cascades are grand!"

And he drew himself up, as though the better to hear the delicious song
of the water; he sucked in forcibly, fancying he was drinking the fresh
spray blown from the fountains. But, little by little, his face resumed
an agonized expression. Then he crouched down and flew quicker than ever
around the walls of the cell, uttering vague threats.

"More traps, all that! I thought as much. Silence, you set of swindlers!
Yes, you're making a fool of me. It's for that that you're drinking and
bawling inside there with your viragoes. I'll demolish you, you and your
cottage! Damnation! Will you leave me in peace?"

He clinched his fists; then he uttered a hoarse cry, stooping as he ran.
And he stuttered, his teeth chattering with fright.

"It's so that I may kill myself. No, I won't throw myself in! All that
water means that I've no heart. No, I won't throw myself in!"

The cascades, which fled at his approach, advanced when he retired. And
all of a sudden, he looked stupidly around him, mumbling, in a voice
which was scarcely audible:

"It isn't possible, they set conjurers against me!"

"I'm off, sir. I've got to go. Good-night!" said Gervaise to the house
surgeon. "It upsets me too much; I'll come again."

She was quite white. Coupeau was continuing his breakdown from the
window to the mattress and from the mattress to the window, perspiring,
toiling, always beating the same rhythm. Then she hurried away. But
though she scrambled down the stairs, she still heard her husband's
confounded jig until she reached the bottom. Ah! _Mon Dieu!_ how
pleasant it was out of doors, one could breathe there!

That evening everyone in the tenement was discussing Coupeau's strange
malady. The Boches invited Gervaise to have a drink with them, even
though they now considered Clump-clump beneath them, in order to hear
all the details. Madame Lorilleux and Madame Poisson were there also.
Boche told of a carpenter he had known who had been a drinker of
absinthe. The man shed his clothes, went out in the street and danced
the polka until he died. That rather struck the ladies as com