Page:Germinal - Zola - 1925.djvu/100

GERMINAL descent, was digging up his patch of vegetable ground without raising his head. But as Maheude arrived opposite the other block of buildings, she was surprised to see a gentleman and two ladies in front of the church. She stopped a moment and recognised them; it was Madame Hennebeau bringing her guests, the decorated gentleman and the lady in the fur mantle, to see the settlement.

"Oh! why did you take this trouble!" exclaimed Pierronne, when Maheude had returned the coffee. "There was no hurry."

She was twenty-eight, and was considered the beauty of the settlement, dark, with a low forehead, large eyes, straight mouth, and coquettish as well; with the neatness of a cat, and with a good figure, for she had had no children. Her mother, Brûlé, widow of a pikeman who died in the mine, after having sent her daughter to work in a factory, swearing that she should never marry a collier, had never ceased to be angry since she had married, somewhat late, Pierron, a widower with a girl of eight. However, the household lived very happily, in the midst of chatter, of scandals which circulated concerning the husband's complacency and the wife's lovers. No debts, meat twice a week, a house kept so clean that one could see one's self in the sauce-pans. As an additional piece of luck, thanks to favours, the Company had authorized her to sell bon-bons and biscuits, jars of which she exhibited, on two boards, behind the window-panes. This was six or seven sous profit a day, and sometimes twelve on Sundays. The drawback to all this happiness, was only Mother Brûlé, who screamed with all the rage of an old revolutionary, having to avenge the death of her man on the masters, and little Lydie, who pocketed, in the shape of frequent blows, the passions of the family.

"How big she is already!" said Pierronne, simpering at Estelle.

"Oh! the trouble that it gives! Don't talk of it!" said Maheude. "You are lucky not to have any. At least you can keep clean."

Although everything was in order in her house, and she scrubbed every Saturday, she glanced with a jealous housekeeper's eye over this clean room, in which there was even a [88]