This beast of a Lantier had the quiet cheek which pleases ladies. As Poisson turned his back he was seized with the idea of printing a kiss on Madame Poisson’s left eye. As a rule he was stealthily prudent, but when he had been disputing about politics he risked everything, so as to show the wife his superiority. These gloating caresses, cheekily stolen behind the policeman’s back, revenged him on the Empire which had turned France into a house of quarrels. Only on this occasion he had forgotten Gervaise’s presence. She had just finished rinsing and wiping the shop, and she stood near the counter waiting for her thirty sous. However, the kiss on Virginie’s eye left her perfectly calm, as being quite natural, and as part of a business she had no right to mix herself up in. Virginie seemed rather vexed. She threw the thirty sous on to the counter in front of Gervaise. The latter did not budge but stood there waiting, still palpitating with the effort she had made in scrubbing, and looking as soaked and as ugly as a dog fished out of the sewer. “Then she didn’t tell you anything?” she asked the hatter at last. “Who?” he cried. “Ah, yes; you mean Nana. No, nothing else. What a tempting mouth she has, the little hussy! Real strawberry jam!” Gervaise went off with her thirty sous in her hand. The holes in her shoes spat water forth like pumps; they were real musical shoes, and played a tune as they left moist traces of their broad soles along the pavement. In the neighborhood the feminine tipplers of her own class now related that she drank to console herself for her daughter’s misconduct. She herself, when she gulped down her dram of spirits on the counter, assumed a dramatic air, and tossed the liquor into her mouth, wishing it would “do” for her. And on the days when she came home boozed she stammered that it was all through grief. But honest folks shrugged their shoulders. They knew what that meant: ascribing the effects of the peppery fire of l’Assommoir to grief, indeed! At all events, she ought to have called it bottled grief. No doubt at the beginning she couldn’t digest Nana’s flight. All the honest feelings remaining in her revolted at the thought, and besides, as a rule a mother doesn’t like to have to think that her daughter, at that very moment, perhaps, is being familiarly addressed by the first chance comer. But Gervaise was already too stultified with a sick head and a crushed heart, to think of the shame for long. With her it came and went. She remained sometimes for a week together without thinking of her daughter, and then suddenly a tender or an angry feeling seized hold of her, sometimes when she had her stomach empty, at others when it was full, a furious longing to catch Nana in some corner, where she would perhaps have kissed her or perhaps have beaten her, according to the fancy of the moment.