Nana, Émile Zola [reading list txt] 📗

the balcony and stalls, but

these were lost, as it were, among the ranges of seats whose

coverings of cardinal velvet loomed in the subdued light of the

dimly burning luster. A shadow enveloped the great red splash of

the curtain, and not a sound came from the stage, the unlit

footlights, the scattered desks of the orchestra. It was only high

overhead in the third gallery, round the domed ceiling where nude

females and children flew in heavens which had turned green in the

gaslight, that calls and laughter were audible above a continuous

hubbub of voices, and heads in women’s and workmen’s caps were

ranged, row above row, under the wide-vaulted bays with their gilt-surrounding adornments. Every few seconds an attendant would make

her appearance, bustling along with tickets in her hand and piloting

in front of her a gentleman and a lady, who took their seats, he in

his evening dress, she sitting slim and undulant beside him while

her eyes wandered slowly round the house.

 

Two young men appeared in the stalls; they kept standing and looked

about them.

 

“Didn’t I say so, Hector?” cried the elder of the two, a tall fellow

with little black mustaches. “We’re too early! You might quite

well have allowed me to finish my cigar.”

 

An attendant was passing.

 

“Oh, Monsieur Fauchery,” she said familiarly, “it won’t begin for

half an hour yet!”

 

“Then why do they advertise for nine o’clock?” muttered Hector,

whose long thin face assumed an expression of vexation. “Only this

morning Clarisse, who’s in the piece, swore that they’d begin at

nine o’clock punctually.”

 

For a moment they remained silent and, looking upward, scanned the

shadowy boxes. But the green paper with which these were hung

rendered them more shadowy still. Down below, under the dress

circle, the lower boxes were buried in utter night. In those on the

second tier there was only one stout lady, who was stranded, as it

were, on the velvet-covered balustrade in front of her. On the

right hand and on the left, between lofty pilasters, the stage

boxes, bedraped with long-fringed scalloped hangings, remained

untenanted. The house with its white and gold, relieved by soft

green tones, lay only half disclosed to view, as though full of a

fine dust shed from the little jets of flame in the great glass

luster.

 

“Did you get your stage box for Lucy?” asked Hector.

 

“Yes,” replied his companion, “but I had some trouble to get it.

Oh, there’s no danger of Lucy coming too early!”

 

He stifled a slight yawn; then after a pause:

 

“You’re in luck’s way, you are, since you haven’t been at a first

night before. The Blonde Venus will be the event of the year.

People have been talking about it for six months. Oh, such music,

my dear boy! Such a sly dog, Bordenave! He knows his business and

has kept this for the exhibition season.” Hector was religiously

attentive. He asked a question.

 

“And Nana, the new star who’s going to play Venus, d’you know her?”

 

“There you are; you’re beginning again!” cried Fauchery, casting up

his arms. “Ever since this morning people have been dreeing me with

Nana. I’ve met more than twenty people, and it’s Nana here and Nana

there! What do I know? Am I acquainted with all the light ladies

in Paris? Nana is an invention of Bordenave’s! It must be a fine

one!”

 

He calmed himself, but the emptiness of the house, the dim light of

the luster, the churchlike sense of self-absorption which the place

inspired, full as it was of whispering voices and the sound of doors

banging—all these got on his nerves.

 

“No, by Jove,” he said all of a sudden, “one’s hair turns gray here.

I—I’m going out. Perhaps we shall find Bordenave downstairs.

He’ll give us information about things.”

 

Downstairs in the great marble-paved entrance hall, where the box

office was, the public were beginning to show themselves. Through

the three open gates might have been observed, passing in, the

ardent life of the boulevards, which were all astir and aflare under

the fine April night. The sound of carriage wheels kept stopping

suddenly; carriage doors were noisily shut again, and people began

entering in small groups, taking their stand before the ticket

bureau and climbing the double flight of stairs at the end of the

hall, up which the women loitered with swaying hips. Under the

crude gaslight, round the pale, naked walls of the entrance hall,

which with its scanty First Empire decorations suggested the

peristyle of a toy temple, there was a flaring display of lofty

yellow posters bearing the name of “Nana” in great black letters.

Gentlemen, who seemed to be glued to the entry, were reading them;

others, standing about, were engaged in talk, barring the doors of

the house in so doing, while hard by the box office a thickset man

with an extensive, close-shaven visage was giving rough answers to

such as pressed to engage seats.

 

“There’s Bordenave,” said Fauchery as he came down the stairs. But

the manager had already seen him.

 

“Ah, ah! You’re a nice fellow!” he shouted at him from a distance.

“That’s the way you give me a notice, is it? Why, I opened my

Figaro this morning—never a word!”

 

“Wait a bit,” replied Fauchery. “I certainly must make the

acquaintance of your Nana before talking about her. Besides, I’ve

made no promises.”

 

Then to put an end to the discussion, he introduced his cousin, M.

Hector de la Faloise, a young man who had come to finish his

education in Paris. The manager took the young man’s measure at a

glance. But Hector returned his scrutiny with deep interest. This,

then, was that Bordenave, that showman of the sex who treated women

like a convict overseer, that clever fellow who was always at full

steam over some advertising dodge, that shouting, spitting, thigh-slapping fellow, that cynic with the soul of a policeman! Hector

was under the impression that he ought to discover some amiable

observation for the occasion.

 

“Your theater—” he began in dulcet tones.

 

Bordenave interrupted him with a savage phrase, as becomes a man who

dotes on frank situations.

 

“Call it my brothel!”

 

At this Fauchery laughed approvingly, while La Faloise stopped with

his pretty speech strangled in his throat, feeling very much shocked

and striving to appear as though he enjoyed the phrase. The manager

had dashed off to shake hands with a dramatic critic whose column

had considerable influence. When he returned La Faloise was

recovering. He was afraid of being treated as a provincial if he

showed himself too much nonplused.

 

“I have been told,” he began again, longing positively to find

something to say, “that Nana has a delicious voice.”

 

“Nana?” cried the manager, shrugging his shoulders. “The voice of a

squirt!”

 

The young man made haste to add:

 

“Besides being a first-rate comedian!”

 

“She? Why she’s a lump! She has no notion what to do with her

hands and feet.”

 

La Faloise blushed a little. He had lost his bearings. He

stammered:

 

“I wouldn’t have missed this first representation tonight for the

world. I was aware that your theater—”

 

“Call it my brothel,” Bordenave again interpolated with the frigid

obstinacy of a man convinced.

 

Meanwhile Fauchery, with extreme calmness, was looking at the women

as they came in. He went to his cousin’s rescue when he saw him all

at sea and doubtful whether to laugh or to be angry.

 

“Do be pleasant to Bordenave—call his theater what he wishes you

to, since it amuses him. And you, my dear fellow, don’t keep us

waiting about for nothing. If your Nana neither sings nor acts

you’ll find you’ve made a blunder, that’s all. It’s what I’m afraid

of, if the truth be told.”

 

“A blunder! A blunder!” shouted the manager, and his face grew

purple. “Must a woman know how to act and sing? Oh, my chicken,

you’re too STOOPID. Nana has other good points, by heaven!—

something which is as good as all the other things put together.

I’ve smelled it out; it’s deuced pronounced with her, or I’ve got

the scent of an idiot. You’ll see, you’ll see! She’s only got to

come on, and all the house will be gaping at her.”

 

He had held up his big hands which were trembling under the

influence of his eager enthusiasm, and now, having relieved his

feelings, he lowered his voice and grumbled to himself:

 

“Yes, she’ll go far! Oh yes, s’elp me, she’ll go far! A skin—oh,

what a skin she’s got!”

 

Then as Fauchery began questioning him he consented to enter into a

detailed explanation, couched in phraseology so crude that Hector de

la Faloise felt slightly disgusted. He had been thick with Nana,

and he was anxious to start her on the stage. Well, just about that

time he was in search of a Venus. He—he never let a woman encumber

him for any length of time; he preferred to let the public enjoy the

benefit of her forthwith. But there was a deuce of a row going on

in his shop, which had been turned topsy-turvy by that big damsel’s

advent. Rose Mignon, his star, a comic actress of much subtlety and

an adorable singer, was daily threatening to leave him in the lurch,

for she was furious and guessed the presence of a rival. And as for

the bill, good God! What a noise there had been about it all! It

had ended by his deciding to print the names of the two actresses in

the same-sized type. But it wouldn’t do to bother him. Whenever

any of his little women, as he called them—Simonne or Clarisse, for

instance—wouldn’t go the way he wanted her to he just up with his

foot and caught her one in the rear. Otherwise life was impossible.

Oh yes, he sold ‘em; HE knew what they fetched, the wenches!

 

“Tut!” he cried, breaking off short. “Mignon and Steiner. Always

together. You know, Steiner’s getting sick of Rose; that’s why the

husband dogs his steps now for fear of his slipping away.”

 

On the pavement outside, the row of gas jets flaring on the cornice

of the theater cast a patch of brilliant light. Two small trees,

violently green, stood sharply out against it, and a column gleamed

in such vivid illumination that one could read the notices thereon

at a distance, as though in broad daylight, while the dense night of

the boulevard beyond was dotted with lights above the vague outline

of an ever-moving crowd. Many men did not enter the theater at once

but stayed outside to talk while finishing their cigars under the

rays of the line of gas jets, which shed a sallow pallor on their

faces and silhouetted their short black shadows on the asphalt.

Mignon, a very tall, very broad fellow, with the square-shaped head

of a strong man at a fair, was forcing a passage through the midst

of the groups and dragging on his arm the banker Steiner, an

exceedingly small man with a corporation already in evidence and a

round face framed in a setting of beard which was already growing

gray.

 

“Well,” said Bordenave to the banker, “you met her yesterday in my

office.”

 

“Ah! It was she, was it?” ejaculated Steiner. “I suspected as

much. Only I was coming out as she was going in, and I scarcely

caught a glimpse of her.”

 

Mignon was listening with half-closed eyelids and nervously twisting

a great diamond ring round his finger. He had quite understood that

Nana was in question. Then as Bordenave was drawing a portrait of

his new star, which