Nana, Émile Zola [reading list txt] 📗

round table the countess

followed the Count de Vandeuvres with her eyes. She still smiled

that vague smile which slightly disclosed her white teeth, and as

the count passed she questioned him.

 

“What ARE you plotting, Monsieur de Vandeuvres?”

 

“What am I plotting, madame?” he answered quietly. “Nothing at

all.”

 

“Really! I saw you so busy. Pray, wait, you shall make yourself

useful!”

 

She placed an album in his hands and asked him to put it on the

piano. But he found means to inform Fauchery in a low whisper that

they would have Tatan Nene, the most finely developed girl that

winter, and Maria Blond, the same who had just made her first

appearance at the Folies-Dramatiques. Meanwhile La Faloise stopped

him at every step in hopes of receiving an invitation. He ended by

offering himself, and Vandeuvres engaged him in the plot at once;

only he made him promise to bring Clarisse with him, and when La

Faloise pretended to scruple about certain points he quieted him by

the remark:

 

“Since I invite you that’s enough!”

 

Nevertheless, La Faloise would have much liked to know the name of

the hostess. But the countess had recalled Vandeuvres and was

questioning him as to the manner in which the English made tea. He

often betook himself to England, where his horses ran. Then as

though he had been inwardly following up quite a laborious train of

thought during his remarks, he broke in with the question:

 

“And the marquis, by the by? Are we not to see him?”

 

“Oh, certainly you will! My father made me a formal promise that he

would come,” replied the countess. “But I’m beginning to be

anxious. His duties will have kept him.”

 

Vandeuvres smiled a discreet smile. He, too, seemed to have his

doubts as to the exact nature of the Marquis de Chouard’s duties.

Indeed, he had been thinking of a pretty woman whom the marquis

occasionally took into the country with him. Perhaps they could get

her too.

 

In the meantime Fauchery decided that the moment had come in which

to risk giving Count Muff his invitation. The evening, in fact,

was drawing to a close.

 

“Are you serious?” asked Vandeuvres, who thought a joke was

intended.

 

“Extremely serious. If I don’t execute my commission she’ll tear my

eyes out. It’s a case of landing her fish, you know.”

 

“Well then, I’ll help you, dear boy.”

 

Eleven o’clock struck. Assisted by her daughter, the countess was

pouring out the tea, and as hardly any guests save intimate friends

had come, the cups and the platefuls of little cakes were being

circulated without ceremony. Even the ladies did not leave their

armchairs in front of the fire and sat sipping their tea and

nibbling cakes which they held between their finger tips. From

music the talk had declined to purveyors. Boissier was the only

person for sweetmeats and Catherine for ices. Mme Chantereau,

however, was all for Latinville. Speech grew more and more

indolent, and a sense of lassitude was lulling the room to sleep.

Steiner had once more set himself secretly to undermine the deputy,

whom he held in a state of blockade in the corner of a settee. M.

Venot, whose teeth must have been ruined by sweet things, was eating

little dry cakes, one after the other, with a small nibbling sound

suggestive of a mouse, while the chief clerk, his nose in a teacup,

seemed never to be going to finish its contents. As to the

countess, she went in a leisurely way from one guest to another,

never pressing them, indeed, only pausing a second or two before the

gentlemen whom she viewed with an air of dumb interrogation before

she smiled and passed on. The great fire had flushed all her face,

and she looked as if she were the sister of her daughter, who

appeared so withered and ungainly at her side. When she drew near

Fauchery, who was chatting with her husband and Vandeuvres, she

noticed that they grew suddenly silent; accordingly she did not stop

but handed the cup of tea she was offering to Georges Hugon beyond

them.

 

“It’s a lady who desires your company at supper,” the journalist

gaily continued, addressing Count Muffat.

 

The last-named, whose face had worn its gray look all the evening,

seemed very much surprised. What lady was it?

 

“Oh, Nana!” said Vandeuvres, by way of forcing the invitation.

 

The count became more grave than before. His eyelids trembled just

perceptibly, while a look of discomfort, such as headache produces,

hovered for a moment athwart his forehead.

 

“But I’m not acquainted with that lady,” he murmured.

 

“Come, come, you went to her house,” remarked Vandeuvres.

 

“What d’you say? I went to her house? Oh yes, the other day, in

behalf of the Benevolent Organization. I had forgotten about it.

But, no matter, I am not acquainted with her, and I cannot accept.”

 

He had adopted an icy expression in order to make them understand

that this jest did not appear to him to be in good taste. A man of

his position did not sit down at tables of such women as that.

Vandeuvres protested: it was to be a supper party of dramatic and

artistic people, and talent excused everything. But without

listening further to the arguments urged by Fauchery, who spoke of a

dinner where the Prince of Scots, the son of a queen, had sat down

beside an ex-music-hall singer, the count only emphasized his

refusal. In so doing, he allowed himself, despite his great

politeness, to be guilty of an irritated gesture.

 

Georges and La Faloise, standing in front of each other drinking

their tea, had overheard the two or three phrases exchanged in their

immediate neighborhood.

 

“Jove, it’s at Nana’s then,” murmured La Faloise. “I might have

expected as much!”

 

Georges said nothing, but he was all aflame. His fair hair was in

disorder; his blue eyes shone like tapers, so fiercely had the vice,

which for some days past had surrounded him, inflamed and stirred

his blood. At last he was going to plunge into all that he had

dreamed of!

 

“I don’t know the address,” La Faloise resumed.

 

“She lives on a third floor in the Boulevard Haussmann, between the

Rue de l’Arcade and the Rue Pesquier,” said Georges all in a breath.

 

And when the other looked at him in much astonishment, he added,

turning very red and fit to sink into the ground with embarrassment

and conceit:

 

“I’m of the party. She invited me this morning.”

 

But there was a great stir in the drawing room, and Vandeuvres and

Fauchery could not continue pressing the count. The Marquis de

Chouard had just come in, and everyone was anxious to greet him. He

had moved painfully forward, his legs failing under him, and he now

stood in the middle of the room with pallid face and eyes blinking,

as though he had just come out of some dark alley and were blinded

by the brightness of the lamps.

 

“I scarcely hoped to see you tonight, Father,” said the countess.

“I should have been anxious till the morning.”

 

He looked at her without answering, as a man might who fails to

understand. His nose, which loomed immense on his shorn face,

looked like a swollen pimple, while his lower lip hung down. Seeing

him such a wreck, Mme Hugon, full of kind compassion, said pitying

things to him.

 

“You work too hard. You ought to rest yourself. At our age we

ought to leave work to the young people.”

 

“Work! Ah yes, to be sure, work!” he stammered at last. “Always

plenty of work.”

 

He began to pull himself together, straightening up his bent figure

and passing his hand, as was his wont, over his scant gray hair, of

which a few locks strayed behind his ears.

 

“At what are you working as late as this?” asked Mme du Joncquoy.

“I thought you were at the financial minister’s reception?”

 

But the countess intervened with:

 

“My father had to study the question of a projected law.”

 

“Yes, a projected law,” he said; “exactly so, a projected law. I

shut myself up for that reason. It refers to work in factories, and

I was anxious for a proper observance of the Lord’s day of rest. It

is really shameful that the government is unwilling to act with

vigor in the matter. Churches are growing empty; we are running

headlong to ruin.”

 

Vandeuvres had exchanged glances with Fauchery. They both happened

to be behind the marquis, and they were scanning him suspiciously.

When Vandeuvres found an opportunity to take him aside and to speak

to him about the good-looking creature he was in the habit of taking

down into the country, the old man affected extreme surprise.

Perhaps someone had seen him with the Baroness Decker, at whose

house at Viroflay he sometimes spent a day or so. Vandeuvres’s sole

vengeance was an abrupt question:

 

“Tell me, where have you been straying to? Your elbow is covered

with cobwebs and plaster.”

 

“My elbow,” he muttered, slightly disturbed. “Yes indeed, it’s

true. A speck or two, I must have come in for them on my way down

from my office.”

 

Several people were taking their departure. It was close on

midnight. Two footmen were noiselessly removing the empty cups and

the plates with cakes. In front of the hearth the ladies had reformed and, at the same time, narrowed their circle and were

chatting more carelessly than before in the languid atmosphere

peculiar to the close of a party. The very room was going to sleep,

and slowly creeping shadows were cast by its walls. It was then

Fauchery spoke of departure. Yet he once more forgot his intention

at sight of the Countess Sabine. She was resting from her cares as

hostess, and as she sat in her wonted seat, silent, her eyes fixed

on a log which was turning into embers, her face appeared so white

and so impassable that doubt again possessed him. In the glow of

the fire the small black hairs on the mole at the corner of her lip

became white. It was Nana’s very mole, down to the color of the

hair. He could not refrain from whispering something about it in

Vandeuvres’s ear. Gad, it was true; the other had never noticed it

before. And both men continued this comparison of Nana and the

countess. They discovered a vague resemblance about the chin and

the mouth, but the eyes were not at all alike. Then, too, Nana had

a good-natured expression, while with the countess it was hard to

decide—she might have been a cat, sleeping with claws withdrawn and

paws stirred by a scarce-perceptible nervous quiver.

 

“All the same, one could have her,” declared Fauchery.

 

Vandeuvres stripped her at a glance.

 

“Yes, one could, all the same,” he said. “But I think nothing of

the thighs, you know. Will you bet she has no thighs?”

 

He stopped, for Fauchery touched him briskly on the arm and showed

him Estelle, sitting close to them on her footstool. They had

raised their voices without noticing her, and she must have

overheard them. Nevertheless, she continued sitting there stiff and

motionless, not a hair having lifted on her thin neck, which was

that of a girl who has shot up all too quickly. Thereupon they

retired three or four paces, and Vandeuvres vowed that the countess

was a very honest woman. Just then voices were raised in front of

the hearth. Mme du Joncquoy was saying:

 

“I was willing to grant you that Monsieur de Bismarck was perhaps a

witty man.