One autumnal afternoon Gervaise, who had been to carry a basket of clothes home to a customer who lived a good way off, found herself in La Rue des Poissonniers just as it was growing dark. It had rained in the morning, and the air was close and warm. She was tired with her walk and felt a great desire for something good to eat. Just then she lifted her eyes and, seeing the name of the street, she took it into her head that she would call on Goujet at his forge. But she would ask for Etienne, she said to herself. She did not know the number, but she could find it, she thought. She wandered along and stood bewildered, looking toward Montmartre; all at once she heard the measured click of hammers and concluded that she had stumbled on the place at last. She did not know where the entrance to the building was, but she caught a gleam of a red light in the distance; she walked toward it and was met by a workman. "Is it here, sir," she said timidly, "that my child--a little boy, that is to say--works? A little boy by the name of Etienne?" "Etienne! Etienne!" repeated the man, swaying from side to side. The wind brought from him to her an intolerable smell of brandy, which caused Gervaise to draw back and say timidly: "Is it here that Monsieur Goujet works?" "Ah, Goujet, yes. If it is Goujet you wish to see go to the left." Gervaise obeyed his instructions and found herself in a large room with the forge at the farther end. She spoke to the first man she saw, when suddenly the whole room was one blaze of light. The bellows had sent up leaping flames which lit every crevice and corner of the dusty old building, and Gervaise recognized Goujet before the forge with two other men. She went toward him. "Madame Gervaise!" he exclaimed in surprise, his face radiant with joy, and then seeing his companions laugh and wink, he pushed Etienne toward his mother. "You came to see your boy," he said; "he does his duty like a hero. "I am glad of it," she answered, "but what an awful place this is to get at!" And she described her journey, as she called it, and then asked why no one seemed to know Etienne there. "Because," said the blacksmith, "he is called Zou Zou here, as his hair is cut short as a Zouave's." This visit paid by Gervaise to the forge was only the first of many others. She often went on Saturdays when she carried the clean linen to Mme Goujet, who still resided in the same house as before. The first year Gervaise had paid them twenty francs each month, or rather the difference between the amount of their washing, seven or eight francs, and the twenty which she agreed upon. In this way she had paid half the money she had borrowed, when one quarter day, not knowing to whom to turn, as she had not been able to collect her bills punctually, she ran to the Goujets' and borrowed the amount of her rent from them. Twice since she had asked a similar favor, so that the amount of her indebtedness now stood at four hundred and twenty-five francs.