On special occasions, she would get waste scraps of meat from the butcher for four sous a pound. Blacked and dried out meat that couldn’t find a purchaser. She would mix this with potatoes for a stew. On other occasions, when she had some wine, she treated herself to a sop, a true parrot’s pottage. Two sous’ worth of Italian cheese, bushels of white potatoes, quarts of dry beans, cooked in their own juice, these also were dainties she was not often able to indulge in now. She came down to leavings from low eating dens, where for a sou she had a pile of fish-bones, mixed with the parings of moldy roast meat. She fell even lower—she begged a charitable eating-house keeper to give her his customers’ dry crusts, and she made herself a bread soup, letting the crusts simmer as long as possible on a neighbor’s fire. On the days when she was really hungry, she searched about with the dogs, to see what might be lying outside the tradespeople’s doors before the dustmen went by; and thus at times she came across rich men’s food, rotten melons, stinking mackerel and chops, which she carefully inspected for fear of maggots. Yes, she had come to this. The idea may be a repugnant one to delicate-minded folks, but if they hadn’t chewed anything for three days running, we should hardly see them quarreling with their stomachs; they would go down on all fours and eat filth like other people. Ah! the death of the poor, the empty entrails, howling hunger, the animal appetite that leads one with chattering teeth to fill one’s stomach with beastly refuse in this great Paris, so bright and golden! And to think that Gervaise used to fill her belly with fat goose! Now the thought of it brought tears to her eyes. One day, when Coupeau bagged two bread tickets from her to go and sell them and get some liquor, she nearly killed him with the blow of a shovel, so hungered and so enraged was she by this theft of a bit of bread.