Even so, Gervaise and Coupeau do sluice a huge amount of it. At Gervaise's birthday dinner there are some dozen at table, and the consumption of wine is prodigious:

And as for the wine, well, friends, the wine flowed round that table like water down the Seine, or like a stream when it's been raining and the ground is parched...In a corner of the shop, the pile of dead men was growing bigger, making a cemetery of bottles...Glasses were being emptied in one go: you could hear the liquid flowing straight down people's throats, sounding like rainwater pouring down drainpipes on a stormy day.

When wine is consumed in this way, the distinction between wine and spirits is meaningless. Wine, which can be a healthy drink, has become merely an induction for spirit-drinkers.

Coupeau succumbs to delirium tremens, and Zola gives an unflinching description of the final phase of alcoholic poisoning: the shaking, convulsive body, the tormenting visions, the undignified distress. Gervaise collapses into utter destitution, living in a cupboard in the building where she had once had her laundry business: "There, on some old straw, her belly empty, frozen to the marrow, she lay and starved to death...One morning there was a bad smell in the corridor and people remembered that she hadn't been seen for two days; they found her in her hole, already green."

Zola is a master of endings — think of the conclusion of Nana, the novel about Gervaise and Coupeau's courtesan daughter, who lies rotting of smallpox in an upstairs room, while on the street below the Paris mob is impelling France towards the debacle of Sedan with cries of "A Berlin!" These were pages which drew a gasp of admiration from no less a judge than Flaubert. But Zola wrote nothing more sobering than the final pages of L'Assommoir.