They might take him and never bring him back; she would thank them heartily.

Yet, when the litter arrived and Coupeau was put into it like an article of furniture, she became all pale and bit her lips; and if she grumbled and still said it was a good job, her heart was no longer in her words.

Had she but ten francs in her drawer she would not have let him go.
She accompanied him to the Lariboisiere Hospital, saw the nurses put him to bed at the end of a long hall, where the patients in a row, looking like corpses, raised themselves up and followed with their eyes the comrade who had just been brought in.

It was a veritable death chamber.
There was a suffocating, feverish odor and a chorus of coughing.

The long hall gave the impression of a small cemetery with its double row of white beds looking like an aisle of marble tombs.