Nana, Émile Zola [reading list txt] 📗

“Oh, the dirty old thing! Just you bloody well leave me alone!”

It was the Marquis de Chouard who was tumbling down over Satin. The

girl had decidedly had enough of the fashionable world! Nana had

certainly introduced her to Bordenave, but the necessity of standing

with sealed lips for fear of allowing some awkward phrase to escape

her had been too much for her feelings, and now she was anxious to

regain her freedom, the more so as she had run against an old flame

of hers in the wings. This was the super, to whom the task of

impersonating Pluto had been entrusted, a pastry cook, who had

already treated her to a whole week of love and flagellation. She

was waiting for him, much irritated at the things the marquis was

saying to her, as though she were one of those theatrical ladies!

And so at last she assumed a highly respectable expression and

jerked out this phrase:

“My husband’s coming! You’ll see.”

Meanwhile the worn-looking artistes were dropping off one after the

other in their outdoor coats. Groups of men and women were coming

down the little winding staircase, and the outlines of battered hats

and wornout shawls were visible in the shadows. They looked

colorless and unlovely, as became poor play actors who have got rid

of their paint. On the stage, where the side lights and battens

were being extinguished, the prince was listening to an anecdote

Bordenave was telling him. He was waiting for Nana, and when at

length she made her appearance the stage was dark, and the fireman

on duty was finishing his round, lantern in hand. Bordenave, in

order to save His Highness going about by the Passage des Panoramas,

had made them open the corridor which led from the porter’s lodge to

the entrance hall of the theater. Along this narrow alley little

women were racing pell-mell, for they were delighted to escape from

the men who were waiting for them in the other passage. They went

jostling and elbowing along, casting apprehensive glances behind

them and only breathing freely when they got outside. Fontan, Bosc

and Prulliere, on the other hand, retired at a leisurely pace,

joking at the figure cut by the serious, paying admirers who were

striding up and down the Galerie des Varietes at a time when the

little dears were escaping along the boulevard with the men of their

hearts. But Clarisse was especially sly. She had her suspicions

about La Faloise, and, as a matter of fact, he was still in his

place in the lodge among the gentlemen obstinately waiting on Mme

Bron’s chairs. They all stretched forward, and with that she passed

brazenly by in the wake of a friend. The gentlemen were blinking in

bewilderment over the wild whirl of petticoats eddying at the foot

of the narrow stairs. It made them desperate to think they had

waited so long, only to see them all flying away like this without

being able to recognize a single one. The litter of little black

cats were sleeping on the oilcloth, nestled against their mother’s

belly, and the latter was stretching her paws out in a state of

beatitude while the big tortoise-shell cat sat at the other end of

the table, her tail stretched out behind her and her yellow eyes

solemnly following the flight of the women.

“If His Highness will be good enough to come this way,” said

Bordenave at the bottom of the stairs, and he pointed to the

passage.

Some chorus girls were still crowding along it. The prince began

following Nana while Muffat and the marquis walked behind.

It was a long, narrow passage lying between the theater and the

house next door, a kind of contracted by-lane which had been covered

with a sloping glass roof. Damp oozed from the walls, and the

footfall sounded as hollow on the tiled floor as in an underground

vault. It was crowded with the kind of rubbish usually found in a

garret. There was a workbench on which the porter was wont to plane

such parts of the scenery as required it, besides a pile of wooden

barriers which at night were placed at the doors of the theater for

the purpose of regulating the incoming stream of people. Nana had

to pick up her dress as she passed a hydrant which, through having

been carelessly turned off, was flooding the tiles underfoot. In

the entrance hall the company bowed and said good-by. And when

Bordenave was alone he summed up his opinion of the prince in a

shrug of eminently philosophic disdain.

“He’s a bit of a duffer all the same,” he said to Fauchery without

entering on further explanations, and with that Rose Mignon carried

the journalist off with her husband in order to effect a

reconciliation between them at home.

Muffat was left alone on the sidewalk. His Highness had handed Nana

quietly into his carriage, and the marquis had slipped off after

Satin and her super. In his excitement he was content to follow

this vicious pair in vague hopes of some stray favor being granted

him. Then with brain on fire Muffat decided to walk home. The

struggle within him had wholly ceased. The ideas and beliefs of the

last forty years were being drowned in a flood of new life. While

he was passing along the boulevards the roll of the last carriages

deafened him with the name of Nana; the gaslights set nude limbs

dancing before his eyes—the nude limbs, the lithe arms, the white

shoulders, of Nana. And he felt that he was hers utterly: he would

have abjured everything, sold everything, to possess her for a

single hour that very night. Youth, a lustful puberty of early

manhood, was stirring within him at last, flaming up suddenly in the

chaste heart of the Catholic and amid the dignified traditions of

middle age.