Then the flow subsided, the groups became fewer and farther between, the working classes had gone home; and as the gas blazed now that the day's toil was over, idleness and amusement seemed to wake up.
Ah! yes; Gervaise had finished her day! She was wearier even than all this mob of toilers who had jostled her as they went by.

She might lie down there and croak, for work would have nothing more to do with her, and she had toiled enough during her life to say: "Whose turn now?
I've had enough." At present everyone was eating.

It was really the end, the sun had blown out its candle, the night would be a long one.

_Mon Dieu!_ To stretch one's self at one's ease and never get up again; to think one had put one's tools by for good and that one could ruminate like a cow forever! That's what is good, after tiring one's self out for twenty years! And Gervaise, as hunger twisted her stomach, thought in spite of herself of the fete days, the spreads and the revelry of her life.

Of one occasion especially, an awfully cold day, a mid-Lent Thursday.