He raised his pale face, and blinked his red eye-lids.

"Twenty-six thousand feet, do you hear? Two leagues! That's something!
A herring-bone chain two leagues long! It's enough to twist round the
necks of all the women of the neighborhood. And you know, it's still
increasing. I hope to make it long enough to reach from Paris to
Versailles."

Gervaise had returned to her seat, disenchanted and thinking everything
very ugly. She smiled to be polite to the Lorilleuxs. The complete
silence about her marriage bothered her. It was the sole reason for her
having come. The Lorilleuxs were treating her as some stranger brought
in by Coupeau. When a conversation finally did get started, it concerned
the building's tenants. Madame Lorilleux asked her husband if he had
heard the people on the fourth floor having a fight. They fought every
day. The husband usually came home drunk and the wife had her faults
too, yelling in the filthiest language. Then they spoke of the designer
on the first floor, an uppity show-off with a mound of debts, always
smoking, always arguing loudly with his friends. Monsieur Madinier's
cardboard business was barely surviving. He had let two girl workers go
yesterday. The business ate up all his money, leaving his children to
run around in rags. And that Madame Gaudron was pregnant again; this was
almost indecent at her age. The landlord was going to evict the Coquets
on the fifth floor. They owed nine months' rent, and besides, they
insisted on lighting their stove out on the landing. Last Saturday the
old lady on the sixth floor, Mademoiselle Remanjou, had arrived just in
time to save the Linguerlot child from being badly burned. Mademoiselle
Clemence, one who took in ironing, well, she lived life as she pleased.
She was so kind to animals though and had such a good heart that you
couldn't say anything against her. It was a pity, a fine girl like her,