Nana, Émile Zola [reading list txt] 📗

on the O.P. side

ever since Bordenave had forbidden him the other, came and

buttonholed the count in order to keep himself in countenance and

offered at the same time to show him the dressing rooms. An

increasing sense of languor had left Muffat without any power of

resistance, and after looking round for the Marquis de Chouard, who

had disappeared, he ended by following the journalist. He

experienced a mingled feeling of relief and anxiety as he left the

wings whence he had been listening to Nana’s songs.

 

Fauchery had already preceded him up the staircase, which was closed

on the first and second floors by low-paneled doors. It was one of

those stairways which you find in miserable tenements. Count Muffat

had seen many such during his rounds as member of the Benevolent

Organization. It was bare and dilapidated: there was a wash of

yellow paint on its walls; its steps had been worn by the incessant

passage of feet, and its iron balustrade had grown smooth under the

friction of many hands. On a level with the floor on every

stairhead there was a low window which resembled a deep, square

venthole, while in lanterns fastened to the walls flaring gas jets

crudely illuminatcd the surrounding squalor and gave out a glowing

heat which, as it mounted up the narrow stairwell, grew ever more

intense.

 

When he reached the foot of the stairs the count once more felt the

hot breath upon his neck and shoulders. As of old it was laden with

the odor of women, wafted amid floods of light and sound from the

dressing rooms above, and now with every upward step he took the

musky scent of powders and the tart perfume of toilet vinegars

heated and bewildered him more and more. On the first floor two

corridors ran backward, branching sharply off and presenting a set

of doors to view which were painted yellow and numbered with great

white numerals in such a way as to suggest a hotel with a bad

reputation. The tiles on the floor had been many of them unbedded,

and the old house being in a state of subsidence, they stuck up like

hummocks. The count dashed recklessly forward, glanced through a

half-open door and saw a very dirty room which resembled a barber’s

shop in a poor part of the town. In was furnished with two chairs,

a mirror and a small table containing a drawer which had been

blackened by the grease from brushes and combs. A great perspiring

fellow with smoking shoulders was changing his linen there, while in

a similar room next door a woman was drawing on her gloves

preparatory to departure. Her hair was damp and out of curl, as

though she had just had a bath. But Fauchery began calling the

count, and the latter was rushing up without delay when a furious

“damn!” burst from the corridor on the right. Mathilde, a little

drab of a miss, had just broken her washhand basin, the soapy water

from which was flowing out to the stairhead. A dressing room door

banged noisily. Two women in their stays skipped across the

passage, and another, with the hem of her shift in her mouth,

appeared and immediately vanished from view. Then followed a sound

of laughter, a dispute, the snatch of a song which was suddenly

broken off short. All along the passage naked gleams, sudden

visions of white skin and wan underlinen were observable through

chinks in doorways. Two girls were making very merry, showing each

other their birthmarks. One of them, a very young girl, almost a

child, had drawn her skirts up over her knees in order to sew up a

rent in her drawers, and the dressers, catching sight of the two

men, drew some curtains half to for decency’s sake. The wild

stampede which follows the end of a play had already begun, the

grand removal of white paint and rouge, the reassumption amid clouds

of rice powder of ordinary attire. The strange animal scent came in

whiffs of redoubled intensity through the lines of banging doors.

On the third story Muffat abandoned himself to the feeling of

intoxication which was overpowering him. For the chorus girls’

dressing room was there, and you saw a crowd of twenty women and a

wild display of soaps and flasks of lavender water. The place

resembled the common room in a slum lodging house. As he passed by

he heard fierce sounds of washing behind a closed door and a perfect

storm raging in a washhand basin. And as he was mounting up to the

topmost story of all, curiosity led him to risk one more little peep

through an open loophole. The room was empty, and under the flare

of the gas a solitary chamber pot stood forgotten among a heap of

petticoats trailing on the floor. This room afforded him his

ultimate impression. Upstairs on the fourth floor he was well-nigh

suffocated. All the scents, all the blasts of heat, had found their

goal there. The yellow ceiling looked as if it had been baked, and

a lamp burned amid fumes of russet-colored fog. For some seconds he

leaned upon the iron balustrade which felt warm and damp and well-nigh human to the touch. And he shut his eyes and drew a long

breath and drank in the sexual atmosphere of the place. Hitherto he

had been utterly ignorant of it, but now it beat full in his face.

 

“Do come here,” shouted Fauchery, who had vanished some moments ago.

“You’re being asked for.”

 

At the end of the corridor was the dressing room belonging to

Clarisse and Simonne. It was a long, ill-built room under the roof

with a garret ceiling and sloping walls. The light penetrated to it

from two deep-set openings high up in the wall, but at that hour of

the night the dressing room was lit by flaring gas. It was papered

with a paper at seven sous a roll with a pattern of roses twining

over green trelliswork. Two boards, placed near one another and

covered with oilcloth, did duty for dressing tables. They were

black with spilled water, and underneath them was a fine medley of

dinted zinc jugs, slop pails and coarse yellow earthenware crocks.

There was an array of fancy articles in the room—a battered, soiled

and well-worn array of chipped basins, of toothless combs, of all

those manifold untidy trifles which, in their hurry and

carelessness, two women will leave scattered about when they undress

and wash together amid purely temporary surroundings, the dirty

aspect of which has ceased to concern them.

 

“Do come here,” Fauchery repeated with the good-humored familiarity

which men adopt among their fallen sisters. “Clarisse is wanting to

kiss you.”

 

Muffat entered the room at last. But what was his surprise when he

found the Marquis de Chouard snugly enscounced on a chair between

the two dressing tables! The marquis had withdrawn thither some

time ago. He was spreading his feet apart because a pail was

leaking and letting a whitish flood spread over the floor. He was

visibly much at his ease, as became a man who knew all the snug

corners, and had grown quite merry in the close dressing room, where

people might have been bathing, and amid those quietly immodest

feminine surroundings which the uncleanness of the little place

rendered at once natural and poignant.

 

“D’you go with the old boy?” Simonne asked Clarisse in a whisper.

 

“Rather!” replied the latter aloud.

 

The dresser, a very ugly and extremely familiar young girl, who was

helping Simonne into her coat, positively writhed with laughter.

The three pushed each other and babbled little phrases which

redoubled their merriment.

 

“Come, Clarisse, kiss the gentleman,” said Fauchery. “You know,

he’s got the rhino.”

 

And turning to the count:

 

“You’ll see, she’s very nice! She’s going to kiss you!”

 

But Clarisse was disgusted by the men. She spoke in violent terms

of the dirty lot waiting at the porter’s lodge down below. Besides,

she was in a hurry to go downstairs again; they were making her miss

her last scene. Then as Fauchery blocked up the doorway, she gave

Muffat a couple of kisses on the whiskers, remarking as she did so:

 

“It’s not for you, at any rate! It’s for that nuisance Fauchery!”

 

And with that she darted off, and the count remained much

embarrassed in his father-in-law’s presence. The blood had rushed

to his face. In Nana’s dressing room, amid all the luxury of

hangings and mirrors, he had not experienced the sharp physical

sensation which the shameful wretchedness of that sorry garret

excited within him, redolent as it was of these two girls’ self-abandonment. Meanwhile the marquis had hurried in the rear of

Simonne, who was making off at the top of her pace, and he kept

whispering in her ear while she shook her head in token of refusal.

Fauchery followed them, laughing. And with that the count found

himself alone with the dresser, who was washing out the basins.

Accordingly he took his departure, too, his legs almost failing

under him. Once more he put up flights of half-dressed women and

caused doors to bang as he advanced. But amid the disorderly,

disbanded troops of girls to be found on each of the four stories,

he was only distinctly aware of a cat, a great tortoise-shell cat,

which went gliding upstairs through the ovenlike place where the air

was poisoned with musk, rubbing its back against the banisters and

keeping its tail exceedingly erect.

 

“Yes, to be sure!” said a woman hoarsely. “I thought they’d keep us

back tonight! What a nuisance they are with their calls!”

 

The end had come; the curtain had just fallen. There was a

veritable stampede on the staircase—its walls rang with

exclamations, and everyone was in a savage hurry to dress and be

off. As Count Muffat came down the last step or two he saw Nana and

the prince passing slowly along the passage. The young woman halted

and lowered her voice as she said with a smile:

 

“All right then—by and by!”

 

The prince returned to the stage, where Bordenave was awaiting him.

And left alone with Nana, Muffat gave way to an impulse of anger and

desire. He ran up behind her and, as she was on the point of

entering her dressing room, imprinted a rough kiss on her neck among

little golden hairs curling low down between her shoulders. It was

as though he had returned the kiss that had been given him upstairs.

Nana was in a fury; she lifted her hand, but when she recognized the

count she smiled.

 

“Oh, you frightened me,” she said simply.

 

And her smile was adorable in its embarrassment and submissiveness,

as though she had despaired of this kiss and were happy to have

received it. But she could do nothing for him either that evening

or the day after. It was a case of waiting. Nay, even if it had

been in her power she would still have let herself be desired. Her

glance said as much. At length she continued:

 

“I’m a landowner, you know. Yes, I’m buying a country house near

Orleans, in a part of the world to which you sometimes betake

yourself. Baby told me you did—little Georges Hugon, I mean. You

know him? So come and see me down there.”

 

The count was a shy man, and the thought of his roughness had

frightened him; he was ashamed of what he had done and he bowed

ceremoniously, promising at the same time to take advantage of her

invitation. Then he walked off as one who dreams.

 

He was rejoining the prince when, passing in front of the foyer, he

heard Satin screaming out: