She had taken out her notebook and was crossing off the various items. Everything was in order. She noticed that Gervaise was charging six sous for each bonnet. She protested, but had to agree that it was in line with present prices. Men’s shirts were five sous, women’s underdrawers four sous, pillow-cases a sou and a half, and aprons one sou. No, the prices weren’t high. Some laundresses charged a sou more for each item.
Gervaise was now calling out the soiled clothes, as she packed them in her basket, for Madame Goujet to list. Then she lingered on, embarrassed by a request which she wished to make.
“Madame Goujet,” she said at length, “if it does not inconvenience you, I would like to take the money for the month’s washing.”
It so happened that that month was a very heavy one, the account they had made up together amounting to ten francs, seven sous. Madame Goujet looked at her a moment in a serious manner, then she replied:
“My child, it shall be as you wish. I will not refuse you the money as you are in need of it. Only it’s scarcely the way to pay off your debt; I say that for your sake, you know. Really now, you should be careful.”
Gervaise received the lecture with bowed head and stammering excuses. The ten francs were to make up the amount of a bill she had given her coke merchant. But on hearing the word “bill,” Madame Goujet became severer still. She gave herself as an example; she had reduced her expenditure ever since Goujet’s wages had been lowered from twelve to nine francs a day. When one was wanting in wisdom whilst young, one dies of hunger in one’s old age. But she held back and didn’t tell Gervaise that she gave her their laundry only in order to help her pay off the debt. Before that she had done all her own washing, and she would have to do it herself again if the laundry continued taking so much cash out of her pocket. Gervaise spoke her thanks and left quickly as soon as she had received the ten francs seven sous. Outside on the landing she was so relieved she wanted to dance. She was becoming used to the annoying, unpleasant difficulties caused by a shortage of money and preferred to remember not the embarrassment but the joy in escaping from them.
It was also on that Saturday that Gervaise met with a rather strange adventure as she descended the Goujets’ staircase. She was obliged to stand up close against the stair-rail with her basket to make way for a tall bare-headed woman who was coming up, carrying in her hand a very fresh mackerel, with bloody gills, in a piece of paper. She recognized Virginie, the girl whose face she had slapped at the wash-house. They looked each other full in the face. Gervaise shut her eyes. She thought for a moment that she was going to be hit in the face with the fish. But no, Virginie even smiled slightly. Then, as her basket was blocking the staircase, the laundress wished to show how polite she, too, could be.
“I beg your pardon,” she said.
“You are completely excused,” replied the tall brunette.
And they remained conversing together on the stairs, reconciled at once without having ventured on a single allusion to the past. Virginie, then twenty-nine years old, had become a superb woman of strapping proportions, her face, however, looking rather long between her two plaits of jet black hair. She at once began to relate her history just to show off. She had a husband now; she had married in the spring an ex-journeyman cabinetmaker, who recently left the army, and who had applied to be admitted into the police, because a post of that kind is more to be depended upon and more respectable. She had been out to buy the mackerel for him.