Nana, Émile Zola [reading list txt] 📗

she was anxious

to prove that she appreciated the old man’s compliment and therefore

made a little swinging movement with her hips.

 

Silence reigned. Mme Jules had noticed a tear in the right leg of

her drawers. She took a pin from over her heart and for a second or

so knelt on the ground, busily at work about Nana’s leg, while the

young woman, without seeming to notice her presence, applied the

rice powder, taking extreme pains as she did so, to avoid putting

any on the upper part of her cheeks. But when the prince remarked

that if she were to come and sing in London all England would want

to applaud her, she laughed amiably and turned round for a moment

with her left cheek looking very white amid a perfect cloud of

powder. Then she became suddenly serious, for she had come to the

operation of rouging. And with her face once more close to the

mirror, she dipped her finger in a jar and began applying the rouge

below her eyes and gently spreading it back toward her temples. The

gentlemen maintained a respectful silence.

 

Count Muffat, indeed, had not yet opened his lips. He was thinking

perforce of his own youth. The bedroom of his childish days had

been quite cold, and later, when he had reached the age of sixteen

and would give his mother a good-night kiss every evening, he used

to carry the icy feeling of the embrace into the world of dreams.

One day in passing a half-open door he had caught sight of a

maidservant washing herself, and that was the solitary recollection

which had in any way troubled his peace of mind from the days of

puberty till the time of marriage. Afterward he had found his wife

strictly obedient to her conjugal duties but had himself felt a

species of religious dislike to them. He had grown to man’s estate

and was now aging, in ignorance of the flesh, in the humble

observance of rigid devotional practices and in obedience to a rule

of life full of precepts and moral laws. And now suddenly he was

dropped down in this actress’s dressing room in the presence of this

undraped courtesan.

 

He, who had never seen the Countess Muffat putting on her garters,

was witnessing, amid that wild disarray of jars and basins and that

strong, sweet perfume, the intimate details of a woman’s toilet.

His whole being was in turmoil; he was terrified by the stealthy,

all-pervading influence which for some time past Nana’s presence had

been exercising over him, and he recalled to mind the pious accounts

of diabolic possession which had amused his early years. He was a

believer in the devil, and, in a confused kind of way, Nana was he,

with her laughter and her bosom and her hips, which seemed swollen

with many vices. But he promised himself that he would be strong—

nay, he would know how to defend himself.

 

“Well then, it’s agreed,” said the prince, lounging quite

comfortably on the divan. “You will come to London next year, and

we shall receive you so cordially that you will never return to

France again. Ah, my dear Count, you don’t value your pretty women

enough. We shall take them all from you!”

 

“That won’t make much odds to him,” murmured the Marquis de Chouard

wickedly, for he occasionally said a risky thing among friends.

“The count is virtue itself.”

 

Hearing his virtue mentioned, Nana looked at him so comically that

Muffat felt a keen twinge of annoyance. But directly afterward he

was surprised and angry with himself. Why, in the presence of this

courtesan, should the idea of being virtuous embarrass him? He

could have struck her. But in attempting to take up a brush Nana

had just let it drop on the ground, and as she stooped to pick it up

he rushed forward. Their breath mingled for one moment, and the

loosened tresses of Venus flowed over his hands. But remorse

mingled with his enjoyment, a kind of enjoyment, moreover, peculiar

to good Catholics, whom the fear of hell torments in the midst of

their sin.

 

At this moment Father Barillot’s voice was heard outside the door.

 

“May I give the knocks, madame? The house is growing impatient.”

 

“All in good time,” answered Nana quietly.

 

She had dipped her paint brush in a pot of kohl, and with the point

of her nose close to the glass and her left eye closed she passed it

delicately along between her eyelashes. Muffat stood behind her,

looking on. He saw her reflection in the mirror, with her rounded

shoulders and her bosom half hidden by a rosy shadow. And despite

all his endeavors he could not turn away his gaze from that face so

merry with dimples and so worn with desire, which the closed eye

rendered more seductive. When she shut her right eye and passed the

brush along it he understood that he belonged to her.

 

“They are stamping their feet, madame,” the callboy once more cried.

“They’ll end by smashing the seats. May I give the knocks?”

 

“Oh, bother!” said Nana impatiently. “Knock away; I don’t care! If

I’m not ready, well, they’ll have to wait for me!”

 

She grew calm again and, turning to the gentlemen, added with a

smile:

 

“It’s true: we’ve only got a minute left for our talk.”

 

Her face and arms were now finished, and with her fingers she put

two large dabs of carmine on her lips. Count Muffat felt more

excited than ever. He was ravished by the perverse transformation

wrought by powders and paints and filled by a lawless yearning for

those young painted charms, for the too-red mouth and the too-white

face and the exaggerated eyes, ringed round with black and burning

and dying for very love. Meanwhile Nana went behind the curtain for

a second or two in order to take off her drawers and slip on Venus’

tights. After which, with tranquil immodesty, she came out and

undid her little linen stays and held out her arms to Mme Jules, who

drew the short-sleeved tunic over them.

 

“Make haste; they’re growing angry!” she muttered.

 

The prince with half-closed eyes marked the swelling lines of her

bosom with an air of connoisseurship, while the Marquis de Chouard

wagged his head involuntarily. Muffat gazed at the carpet in order

not to see any more. At length Venus, with only her gauze veil over

her shoulders, was ready to go on the stage. Mme Jules, with

vacant, unconcerned eyes and an expression suggestive of a little

elderly wooden doll, still kept circling round her. With brisk

movements she took pins out of the inexhaustible pincushion over her

heart and pinned up Venus’ tunic, but as she ran over all those

plump nude charms with her shriveled hands, nothing was suggested to

her. She was as one whom her sex does not concern.

 

“There!” said the young woman, taking a final look at herself in the

mirror.

 

Bordenave was back again. He was anxious and said the third act had

begun.

 

“Very well! I’m coming,” replied Nana. “Here’s a pretty fuss!

Why, it’s usually I that waits for the others.”

 

The gentlemen left the dressing room, but they did not say good-by,

for the prince had expressed a desire to assist behind the scenes at

the performance of the third act. Left alone, Nana seemed greatly

surprised and looked round her in all directions.

 

“Where can she be?” she queried.

 

She was searching for Satin. When she had found her again, waiting

on her trunk behind the curtain, Satin quietly replied:

 

“Certainly I didn’t want to be in your way with all those men

there!”

 

And she added further that she was going now. But Nana held her

back. What a silly girl she was! Now that Bordenave had agreed to

take her on! Why, the bargain was to be struck after the play was

over! Satin hesitated. There were too many bothers; she was out of

her element! Nevertheless, she stayed.

 

As the prince was coming down the little wooden staircase a strange

sound of smothered oaths and stamping, scuffling feet became audible

on the other side of the theater. The actors waiting for their cues

were being scared by quite a serious episode. For some seconds past

Mignon had been renewing his jokes and smothering Fauchery with

caresses. He had at last invented a little game of a novel kind and

had begun flicking the other’s nose in order, as he phrased it, to

keep the flies off him. This kind of game naturally diverted the

actors to any extent.

 

But success had suddenly thrown Mignon off his balance. He had

launched forth into extravagant courses and had given the journalist

a box on the ear, an actual, a vigorous, box on the ear. This time

he had gone too far: in the presence of so many spectators it was

impossible for Fauchery to pocket such a blow with laughing

equanimity. Whereupon the two men had desisted from their farce,

had sprung at one another’s throats, their faces livid with hate,

and were now rolling over and over behind a set of side lights,

pounding away at each other as though they weren’t breakable.

 

“Monsieur Bordenave, Monsieur Bordenave!” said the stage manager,

coming up in a terrible flutter.

 

Bordenave made his excuses to the prince and followed him. When he

recognized Fauchery and Mignon in the men on the floor he gave vent

to an expression of annoyance. They had chosen a nice time,

certainly, with His Highness on the other side of the scenery and

all that houseful of people who might have overheard the row! To

make matters worse, Rose Mignon arrived out of breath at the very

moment she was due on the stage. Vulcan, indeed, was giving her the

cue, but Rose stood rooted to the ground, marveling at sight of her

husband and her lover as they lay wallowing at her feet, strangling

one another, kicking, tearing their hair out and whitening their

coats with dust. They barred the way. A sceneshifter had even

stopped Fauchery’s hat just when the devilish thing was going to

bound onto the stage in the middle of the struggle. Meanwhile

Vulcan, who had been gagging away to amuse the audience, gave Rose

her cue a second time. But she stood motionless, still gazing at

the two men.

 

“Oh, don’t look at THEM!” Bordenave furiously whispered to her. “Go

on the stage; go on, do! It’s no business of yours! Why, you’re

missing your cue!”

 

And with a push from the manager, Rose stepped over the prostrate

bodies and found herself in the flare of the footlights and in the

presence of the audience. She had quite failed to understand why

they were fighting on the floor behind her. Trembling from head to

foot and with a humming in her ears, she came down to the

footlights, Diana’s sweet, amorous smile on her lips, and attacked

the opening lines of her duet with so feeling a voice that the

public gave her a veritable ovation.

 

Behind the scenery she could hear the dull thuds caused by the two

men. They had rolled down to the wings, but fortunately the music

covered the noise made by their feet as they kicked against them.

 

“By God!” yelled Bordenave in exasperation when at last he had

succeeded in separating them. “Why couldn’t you fight at home? You

know as well as I do that I don’t like this sort of thing. You,

Mignon, you’ll do me the pleasure of staying over here on the prompt

side, and you, Fauchery, if you leave the O.P. side I’ll chuck you