The neighborhood seemed decent enough to him, except for a gang of drunkards that ought to be cleaned out of the gutters.
Coupeau was not a bad sort of fellow.

He sometimes had really sensible things to say.

He was something of a dandy with his Parisian working man's gift for banter, a regular gift of gab, and besides, he was attractive.
They had ended by rendering each other all sorts of services at the Hotel Boncoeur.

Coupeau fetched her milk, ran her errands, carried her bundles of clothes; often of an evening, as he got home first from work, he took the children for a walk on the exterior Boulevard.

Gervaise, in return for his polite attentions, would go up into the narrow room at the top of the house where he slept, and see to his clothes, sewing buttons on his blue linen trousers, and mending his linen jackets.