For a fortnight past it had been the Coupeaus’ dream to crush the Lorilleuxs. Was it not true that those sly ones, the man and his wife, a truly pretty couple, shut themselves up whenever they had anything nice to eat as though they had stolen it? Yes, they covered up the window with a blanket to hide the light and make believe that they were already asleep in bed. This stopped anyone from coming up, and so the Lorilleuxs could stuff everything down, just the two of them. They were even careful the next day not to throw the bones into the garbage so that no one would know what they had eaten. Madame Lorilleux would walk to the end of the street to toss them into a sewer opening. One morning Gervaise surprised her emptying a basket of oyster shells there. Oh, those penny-pinchers were never open-handed, and all their mean contrivances came from their desire to appear to be poor. Well, we’d show them, we’d prove to them that we weren’t mean. Gervaise would have laid her table in the street, had she been able to, just for the sake of inviting each passer-by. Money was not invented that it should be allowed to grow moldy, was it? It is pretty when it shines all new in the sunshine. She resembled them so little now, that on the days when she had twenty sous she arranged things to let people think that she had forty. Mother Coupeau and Gervaise talked of the Lorilleuxs whilst they laid the cloth about three o’clock. They had hung some big curtains at the windows; but as it was very warm the door was left open and the whole street passed in front of the little table. The two women did not place a decanter, or a bottle, or a salt-cellar, without trying to arrange them in such a way as to annoy the Lorilleuxs. They had arranged their seats so as to give them a full view of the superbly laid cloth, and they had reserved the best crockery for them, well knowing that the porcelain plates would create a great effect. “No, no, mamma,” cried Gervaise; “don’t give them those napkins! I’ve two damask ones.” “Ah, good!” murmured the old woman; “that’ll break their hearts, that’s certain.” And they smiled to each other as they stood up on either side of that big white table on which the fourteen knives and forks, placed all round, caused them to swell with pride. It had the appearance of the altar of some chapel in the middle of the shop. “That’s because they’re so stingy themselves!” resumed Gervaise. “You know they lied last month when the woman went about everywhere saying that she had lost a piece of gold chain as she was taking the work home. The idea! There’s no fear of her ever losing anything! It was simply a way of making themselves out very poor and of not giving you your five francs.” “As yet I’ve only seen my five francs twice,” said mother Coupeau.