Nana, Émile Zola [reading list txt] 📗

sanguine, uncontaminated nature. The

grave man, the chamberlain who was wont to tread the state

apartments at the Tuileries with slow and dignified step, was now

nightly driven to plunge his teeth into his bolster, while with sobs

of exasperation he pictured to himself a sensual shape which never

changed. But this time he was determined to make an end of the

torture. Coming along the highroad in the deep quiet of the

gloaming, he had meditated a fierce course of action. And the

moment he had finished his opening remarks he tried to take hold of

Nana with both hands.

 

“No, no! Take care!” she said simply. She was not vexed; nay, she

even smiled.

 

He caught her again, clenching his teeth as he did so. Then as she

struggled to get free he coarsely and crudely reminded her that he

had come to stay the night. Though much embarrassed at this, Nana

did not cease to smile. She took his hands and spoke very

familiarly in order to soften her refusal.

 

“Come now, darling, do be quiet! Honor bright, I can’t: Steiner’s

upstairs.”

 

But he was beside himself. Never yet had she seen a man in such a

state. She grew frightened and put her hand over his mouth in order

to stifle his cries. Then in lowered tones she besought him to be

quiet and to let her alone. Steiner was coming downstairs. Things

were getting stupid, to be sure! When Steiner entered the room he

heard Nana remarking:

 

“I adore the country.”

 

She was lounging comfortably back in her deep easy chair, and she

turned round and interrupted herself.

 

“It’s Monsieur le Comte Muffat, darling. He saw a light here while

he was strolling past, and he came in to bid us welcome.”

 

The two men clasped hands. Muffat, with his face in shadow, stood

silent for a moment or two. Steiner seemed sulky. Then they

chatted about Paris: business there was at a standstill; abominable

things had been happening on ‘change. When a quarter of an hour had

elapsed Muffat took his departure, and, as the young woman was

seeing him to the door, he tried without success to make an

assignation for the following night. Steiner went up to bed almost

directly afterward, grumbling, as he did so, at the everlasting

little ailments that seemed to afflict the genus courtesan. The two

old boys had been packed off at last! When she was able to rejoin

him Nana found Georges still hiding exemplarily behind the curtain.

The room was dark. He pulled her down onto the floor as she sat

near him, and together they began playfully rolling on the ground,

stopping now and again and smothering their laughter with kisses

whenever they struck their bare feet against some piece of

furniture. Far away, on the road to Gumieres, Count Muffat walked

slowly home and, hat in hand, bathed his burning forehead in the

freshness and silence of the night.

 

During the days that followed Nana found life adorable. In the

lad’s arms she was once more a girl of fifteen, and under the

caressing influence of this renewed childhood love’s white flower

once more blossomed forth in a nature which had grown hackneyed and

disgusted in the service of the other sex. She would experience

sudden fits of shame, sudden vivid emotions, which left her

trembling. She wanted to laugh and to cry, and she was beset by

nervous, maidenly feelings, mingled with warm desires that made her

blush again. Never yet had she felt anything comparable to this.

The country filled her with tender thoughts. As a little girl she

had long wished to dwell in a meadow, tending a goat, because one

day on the talus of the fortifications she had seen a goat bleating

at the end of its tether. Now this estate, this stretch of land

belonging to her, simply swelled her heart to bursting, so utterly

had her old ambition been surpassed. Once again she tasted the

novel sensations experienced by chits of girls, and at night when

she went upstairs, dizzy with her day in the open air and

intoxicated by the scent of green leaves, and rejoined her Zizi

behind the curtain, she fancied herself a schoolgirl enjoying a

holiday escapade. It was an amour, she thought, with a young cousin

to whom she was going to be married. And so she trembled at the

slightest noise and dread lest parents should hear her, while making

the delicious experiments and suffering the voluptuous terrors

attendant on a girl’s first slip from the path of virtue.

 

Nana in those days was subject to the fancies a sentimental girl

will indulge in. She would gaze at the moon for hours. One night

she had a mind to go down into the garden with Georges when all the

household was asleep. When there they strolled under the trees,

their arms round each other’s waists, and finally went and laid down

in the grass, where the dew soaked them through and through. On

another occasion, after a long silence up in the bedroom, she fell

sobbing on the lad’s neck, declaring in broken accents that she was

afraid of dying. She would often croon a favorite ballad of Mme

Lerat’s, which was full of flowers and birds. The song would melt

her to tears, and she would break off in order to clasp Georges in a

passionate embrace and to extract from him vows of undying

affection. In short she was extremely silly, as she herself would

admit when they both became jolly good fellows again and sat up

smoking cigarettes on the edge of the bed, dangling their bare legs

over it the while and tapping their heels against its wooden side.

 

But what utterly melted the young woman’s heart was Louiset’s

arrival. She had an access of maternal affection which was as

violent as a mad fit. She would carry off her boy into the sunshine

outside to watch him kicking about; she would dress him like a

little prince and roll with him in the grass. The moment he arrived

she decided that he was to sleep near her, in the room next hers,

where Mme Lerat, whom the country greatly affected, used to begin

snoring the moment her head touched the pillow. Louiset did not

hurt Zizi’s position in the least. On the contrary, Nana said that

she had now two children, and she treated them with the same wayward

tenderness. At night, more than ten times running, she would leave

Zizi to go and see if Louiset were breathing properly, but on her

return she would re-embrace her Zizi and lavish on him the caresses

that had been destined for the child. She played at being Mamma

while he wickedly enjoyed being dandled in the arms of the great

wench and allowed himself to be rocked to and fro like a baby that

is being sent to sleep. It was all so delightful, and Nana was so

charmed with her present existence, that she seriously proposed to

him never to leave the country. They would send all the other

people away, and he, she and the child would live alone. And with

that they would make a thousand plans till daybreak and never once

hear Mme Lerat as she snored vigorously after the fatigues of a day

spent in picking country flowers.

 

This charming existence lasted nearly a week. Count Muffat used to

come every evening and go away again with disordered face and

burning hands. One evening he was not even received, as Steiner had

been obliged to run up to Paris. He was told that Madame was not

well. Nana grew daily more disgusted at the notion of deceiving

Georges. He was such an innocent lad, and he had such faith in her!

She would have looked on herself as the lowest of the low had she

played him false. Besides, it would have sickened her to do so!

Zoe, who took her part in this affair in mute disdain, believed that

Madame was growing senseless.

 

On the sixth day a band of visitors suddenly blundered into Nana’s

idyl. She had, indeed, invited a whole swarm of people under the

belief that none of them would come. And so one fine afternoon she

was vastly astonished and annoyed to see an omnibus full of people

pulling up outside the gate of La Mignotte.

 

“It’s us!” cried Mignon, getting down first from the conveyance and

extracting then his sons Henri and Charles.

 

Labordette thereupon appeared and began handing out an interminable

file of ladies—Lucy Stewart, Caroline Hequet, Tatan Nene, Maria

Blond. Nana was in hopes that they would end there, when La Faloise

sprang from the step in order to receive Gaga and her daughter

Amelie in his trembling arms. That brought the number up to eleven

people. Their installation proved a laborious undertaking. There

were five spare rooms at La Mignotte, one of which was already

occupied by Mme Lerat and Louiset. The largest was devoted to the

Gaga and La Faloise establishment, and it was decided that Amelie

should sleep on a truckle bed in the dressing room at the side.

Mignon and his two sons had the third room. Labordette the fourth.

There thus remained one room which was transformed into a dormitory

with four beds in it for Lucy, Caroline, Tatan and Maria. As to

Steiner, he would sleep on the divan in the drawing room. At the

end of an hour, when everyone was duly settled, Nana, who had begun

by being furious, grew enchanted at the thought of playing hostess

on a grand scale. The ladies complimented her on La Mignotte.

“It’s a stunning property, my dear!” And then, too, they brought

her quite a whiff of Parisian air, and talking all together with

bursts of laughter and exclamation and emphatic little gestures,

they gave her all the petty gossip of the week just past. By the

by, and how about Bordenave? What had he said about her prank? Oh,

nothing much! After bawling about having her brought back by the

police, he had simply put somebody else in her place at night.

Little Violaine was the understudy, and she had even obtained a very

pretty success as the Blonde Venus. Which piece of news made Nana

rather serious.

 

It was only four o’clock in the afternoon, and there was some talk

of taking a stroll around.

 

“Oh, I haven’t told you,” said Nana, “I was just off to get up

potatoes when you arrived.”

 

Thereupon they all wanted to go and dig potatoes without even

changing their dresses first. It was quite a party. The gardener

and two helpers were already in the potato field at the end of the

grounds. The ladies knelt down and began fumbling in the mold with

their beringed fingers, shouting gaily whenever they discovered a

potato of exceptional size. It struck them as so amusing! But

Tatan Nene was in a state of triumph! So many were the potatoes she

had gathered in her youth that she forgot herself entirely and gave

the others much good advice, treating them like geese the while.

The gentlemen toiled less strenuously. Mignon looked every inch the

good citizen and father and made his stay in the country an occasion

for completing his boys’ education. Indeed, he spoke to them of

Parmentier!

 

Dinner that evening was wildly hilarious. The company ate

ravenously. Nana, in a state of great elevation, had a warm

disagreement with her butler, an individual who had been in service

at the bishop’s palace in Orleans. The ladies smoked over their

coffee. An earsplitting noise of merrymaking issued from the open

windows and died out far away under the serene evening sky while

peasants, belated in the lanes, turned and looked at the