It was a very nice shop in the very house of which they had so often thought. There was the shop itself--a back room--and two others. They were small, to be sure, but convenient and well arranged; only she thought it dear--five hundred francs. "You asked the price then?" "Yes, I asked it just out of curiosity," she answered with an air of indifference, "but it is too dear, decidedly too dear. It would be unwise, I think, to take it." But she could talk of nothing else the whole evening. She drew the plan of the rooms on the margin of a newspaper, and as she talked she measured the furniture, as if they were to move the next day. Then Coupeau, seeing her great desire to have the place, declared he would see the owner the next morning, for it was possible he would take less than five hundred francs, but how would she like to live so near his sister, whom she detested? Gervaise was displeased at this and said she detested no one and even defended the Lorilleuxs, declaring they were not so bad, after all. And when Coupeau was asleep her busy brain was at work arranging the rooms which as yet they had not decided to hire. The next day when she was alone she lifted the shade from the clock and opened her bankbook. Just to think that her shop and future prosperity lay between those dirty leaves! Before going to her work she consulted Mme Goujet, who approved of the plan. With a husband like hers, who never drank, she could not fail of success. At noon she called on her sister-in-law to ask her advice, for she did not wish to have the air of concealing anything from the family. Mme Lorilleux was confounded. What, did Wooden Legs think of having an establishment of her own? And with an envious heart she stammered out that it would be very well, certainly, but when she had recovered herself a little she began to talk of the dampness of the courtyard and of the darkness of the _rez-de-chaussee_. Oh yes, it was a capital place for rheumatism, but of course if her mind was made up anything she could say would make no difference. That night Gervaise told her husband that if he had thrown any obstacles in the way of her taking the shop she believed she should have fallen sick and died, so great was her longing. But before they came to any decision they must see if a diminution of the rent could be obtained. "We can go tomorrow if you say so," was her husband's reply; "you can call for me at six o'clock." Coupeau was then completing the roof of a three-storied house and was laying the very last sheets of zinc. It was May and a cloudless evening. The sun was low in the horizon, and against the blue sky the figure of Coupeau was clearly defined as he cut his zinc as quietly as a tailor might have cut out a pair of breeches in his workshop. His assistant, a lad of seventeen, was blowing up the furnace with a pair of bellows, and at each puff a great cloud of sparks arose. "Put in the irons, Zidore!" shouted Coupeau.