L'assommoir by Émile Zola

Four years of hard and incessant toil followed this day. Gervaise and Coupeau were wise and prudent. They worked hard and took a little relaxation on Sundays. The wife worked twelve hours of the twenty-four with Mme Fauconnier and yet found time to keep her own home like waxwork. The husband was never known to be tipsy but brought home his wages and smoked his pipe at his own window at night before going to bed. They were the bright and shining lights, the good example of the whole _Quartier_, and as they made jointly about nine francs per day, it was easy to see they were putting by money.

But in the first few months of their married life they were obliged to trim their sails closely and had some trouble to make both ends meet. They took a great dislike to the Hotel Boncœur. They longed for a home of their own with their own furniture. They estimated the cost over and over again and decided that for three hundred and fifty francs they could venture, but they had little hope of saving such a sum in less than two years, when a stroke of good luck befell them.