At first, all goes well. Coupeau is affectionate and hard-working. Gervaise, who has been trained as a laundrywoman, sets up her own business. Her standards are high, and the business thrives: "There was pots of money to be made if they were sensible." But after an accident, Coupeau is off work for a long time, and their savings are eaten away. Gervaise begins to take less trouble over her laundry: clients desert her, takings drop. At the same time she falls prey to idleness and gluttony. Coupeau turns to drink, spending more and more time in the drinking den round the corner from Gervaise's shop, Père Colombe's "Assommoir" (the word means a "stunner" or a "cosh", and evokes the stupefying potency of the coarse spirits on sale there). Previously, Coupeau had set his face against such rotgut drinks:
He drank nothing but wine; always wine, never spirits; wine made you live longer, it didn't upset you, it didn't make you drunk...a workman couldn't get along without wine, and old man Noah must have planted the vine specially for roofers, tailors and blacksmiths. Wine cleaned you up and refreshed you after work, and put fire in your guts when you didn't feel like doing anything.
But as he degenerates so he slides down the scale of drink. One evening Gervaise is walking past the bar:
...she thought she recognised Coupeau...knocking back rounds of rotgut...yes, it really was Coupeau, tossing his little glass of rotgut down his throat with a very practised air. So he was lying, he was on spirits now! She went home in despair, filled afresh with all her former horror of spirits. Wine she could excuse, because wine makes a workman strong; spirits on the other hand were vile things, poisons that destroyed a man's appetite for food. Oh, surely the government ought to prevent people producing that filth!
Does Zola himself endorse Gervaise's separation of alcoholic drink into health-giving wine and death-dealing spirits? Such attitudes are not unusual — for instance, Kingsley Amis, when reckoning up his alcoholic consumption, excluded wine and beer on the grounds that they didn't count. Such distinctions fly in the face of today's health advice, which focuses simply on units and is indifferent to the degree of dilution in the beverage.
There is no doubt that Gervaise and Coupeau get through a great deal of wine, even during the early years of their marriage before Coupeau's accident, and when Gervaise's laundry business is doing well. We are told that the local wine merchant delivers the household's wine to them in 50-litre crates. But this would have been much less strong than modern table wine. It would be the kind of thing one used until quite recently to see in French supermarkets on the lowest shelves in the wine section, in litre bottles with three stars embossed round the neck: "vin rouge ordinaire", a generic wine marketed under a trade name, with no specified vintage and a provenance usually no more closely defined than "Produit de France". The alcoholic strength of these wines would usually come in around 11 per cent, sometimes as little as 10 per cent.
