Nana, Émile Zola [reading list txt] 📗

used to drive him wild with delight,

as with pussycat caresses she kissed him all round his face and

whiskers and vowed that he was her own dear pet and the only little

man she adored. He was no longer afraid of Georges, whom his mother

kept down at Les Fondettes. There was only fat Steiner to reckon

with, and he believed he was really ousting him, but he did not dare

provoke an explanation on his score. He knew he was once more in an

extraordinary financial scrape and on the verge of being declared

bankrupt on ‘change, so much so that he was clinging fiercely to the

shareholders in the Landes Salt Pits and striving to sweat a final

subscription out of them. Whenever he met him at Nana’s she would

explain reasonably enough that she did not wish to turn him out of

doors like a dog after all he had spent on her. Besides, for the

last three months he had been living in such a whirl of sensual

excitement that, beyond the need of possessing her, he had felt no

very distinct impressions. His was a tardy awakening of the fleshly

instinct, a childish greed of enjoyment, which left no room for

either vanity or jealousy. Only one definite feeling could affect

him now, and that was Nana’s decreasing kindness. She no longer

kissed him on the beard! It made him anxious, and as became a man

quite ignorant of womankind, he began asking himself what possible

cause of offense he could have given her. Besides, he was under the

impression that he was satisfying all her desires. And so he harked

back again and again to the letter he had received that morning with

its tissue of falsehoods, invented for the extremely simple purpose

of passing an evening at her own theater. The crowd had pushed him

forward again, and he had crossed the passage and was puzzling his

brain in front of the entrance to a restaurant, his eyes fixed on

some plucked larks and on a huge salmon laid out inside the window.

 

At length he seemed to tear himself away from this spectacle. He

shook himself, looked up and noticed that it was close on nine

o’clock. Nana would soon be coming out, and he would make her tell

the truth. And with that he walked on and recalled to memory the

evenings he once passed in that region in the days when he used to

meet her at the door of the theater.

 

He knew all the shops, and in the gas-laden air he recognized their

different scents, such, for instance, as the strong savor of Russia

leather, the perfume of vanilla emanating from a chocolate dealer’s

basement, the savor of musk blown in whiffs from the open doors of

the perfumers. But he did not dare linger under the gaze of the

pale shopwomen, who looked placidly at him as though they knew him

by sight. For one instant he seemed to be studying the line of

little round windows above the shops, as though he had never noticed

them before among the medley of signs. Then once again he went up

to the boulevard and stood still a minute or two. A fine rain was

now falling, and the cold feel of it on his hands calmed him. He

thought of his wife who was staying in a country house near Macon,

where her friend Mme de Chezelles had been ailing a good deal since

the autumn. The carriages in the roadway were rolling through a

stream of mud. The country, he thought, must be detestable in such

vile weather. But suddenly he became anxious and re-entered the

hot, close passage down which he strode among the strolling people.

A thought struck him: if Nana were suspicious of his presence there

she would be off along the Galerie Montmartre.

 

After that the count kept a sharp lookout at the very door of the

theater, though he did not like this passage end, where he was

afraid of being recognized. It was at the corner between the

Galerie des Varietes and the Galerie Saint-Marc, an equivocal corner

full of obscure little shops. Of these last one was a shoemaker’s,

where customers never seemed to enter. Then there were two or three

upholsterers’, deep in dust, and a smoky, sleepy reading room and

library, the shaded lamps in which cast a green and slumberous light

all the evening through. There was never anyone in this corner save

well-dressed, patient gentlemen, who prowled about the wreckage

peculiar to a stage door, where drunken sceneshifters and ragged

chorus girls congregate. In front of the theater a single gas jet

in a ground-glass globe lit up the doorway. For a moment or two

Muffat thought of questioning Mme Bron; then he grew afraid lest

Nana should get wind of his presence and escape by way of the

boulevard. So he went on the march again and determined to wait

till he was turned out at the closing of the gates, an event which

had happened on two previous occasions. The thought of returning

home to his solitary bed simply wrung his heart with anguish. Every

time that golden-haired girls and men in dirty linen came out and

stared at him he returned to his post in front of the reading room,

where, looking in between two advertisements posted on a windowpane,

he was always greeted by the same sight. It was a little old man,

sitting stiff and solitary at the vast table and holding a green

newspaper in his green hands under the green light of one of the

lamps. But shortly before ten o’clock another gentleman, a tall,

good-looking, fair man with well-fitting gloves, was also walking up

and down in front of the stage door. Thereupon at each successive

turn the pair treated each other to a suspicious sidelong glance.

The count walked to the corner of the two galleries, which was

adorned with a high mirror, and when he saw himself therein, looking

grave and elegant, he was both ashamed and nervous.

 

Ten o’clock struck, and suddenly it occurred to Muffat that it would

be very easy to find out whether Nana were in her dressing room or

not. He went up the three steps, crossed the little yellow-painted

lobby and slipped into the court by a door which simply shut with a

latch. At that hour of the night the narrow, damp well of a court,

with its pestiferous water closets, its fountain, its back view ot

the kitchen stove and the collection of plants with which the

portress used to litter the place, was drenched in dark mist; but

the two walls, rising pierced with windows on either hand, were

flaming with light, since the property room and the firemen’s office

were situated on the ground floor, with the managerial bureau on the

left, and on the right and upstairs the dressing rooms of the

company. The mouths of furnaces seemed to be opening on the outer

darkness from top to bottom of this well. The count had at once

marked the light in the windows of the dressing room on the first

floor, and as a man who is comforted and happy, he forgot where he

was and stood gazing upward amid the foul mud and faint decaying

smell peculiar to the premises of this antiquated Parisian building.

Big drops were dripping from a broken waterspout, and a ray of

gaslight slipped from Mme Bron’s window and cast a yellow glare over

a patch of moss-clad pavement, over the base of a wall which had

been rotted by water from a sink, over a whole cornerful of nameless

filth amid which old pails and broken crocks lay in fine confusion

round a spindling tree growing mildewed in its pot. A window

fastening creaked, and the count fled.

 

Nana was certainly going to come down. He returned to his post in

front of the reading room; among its slumbering shadows, which

seemed only broken by the glimmer of a night light, the little old

man still sat motionless, his side face sharply outlined against his

newspaper. Then Muffat walked again and this time took a more

prolonged turn and, crossing the large gallery, followed the Galerie

des Varietes as far as that of Feydeau. The last mentioned was cold

and deserted and buried in melancholy shadow. He returned from it,

passed by the theater, turned the corner of the Galerie Saint-Marc

and ventured as far as the Galerie Montmartre, where a sugar-chopping machine in front of a grocer’s interested him awhile. But

when he was taking his third turn he was seized with such dread lest

Nana should escape behind his back that he lost all self-respect.

Thereupon he stationed himself beside the fair gentleman in front of

the very theater. Both exchanged a glance of fraternal humility

with which was mingled a touch of distrust, for it was possible they

might yet turn out to be rivals. Some sceneshifters who came out

smoking their pipes between the acts brushed rudely against them,

but neither one nor the other ventured to complain. Three big

wenches with untidy hair and dirty gowns appeared on the doorstep.

They were munching apples and spitting out the cores, but the two

men bowed their heads and patiently braved their impudent looks and

rough speeches, though they were hustled and, as it were, soiled by

these trollops, who amused themselves by pushing each other down

upon them.

 

At that very moment Nana descended the three steps. She grew very

pale when she noticed Muffat.

 

“Oh, it’s you!” she stammered.

 

The sniggering extra ladies were quite frightened when they

recognized her, and they formed in line and stood up, looking as

stiff and serious as servants whom their mistress has caught

behaving badly. The tall fair gentleman had moved away; he was at

once reassured and sad at heart.

 

“Well, give me your arm,” Nana continued impatiently.

 

They walked quietly off. The count had been getting ready to

question her and now found nothing to say.

 

It was she who in rapid tones told a story to the effect that she

had been at her aunt’s as late as eight o’clock, when, seeing

Louiset very much better, she had conceived the idea of going down

to the theater for a few minutes.

 

“On some important business?” he queried.

 

‘Yes, a new piece,” she replied after some slight hesitation. “They

wanted my advice.”

 

He knew that she was not speaking the truth, but the warm touch of

her arm as it leaned firmly on his own, left him powerless. He felt

neither anger nor rancor after his long, long wait; his one thought

was to keep her where she was now that he had got hold of her.

Tomorrow, and not before, he would try and find out what she had

come to her dressing room after. But Nana still appeared to

hesitate; she was manifestly a prey to the sort of secret anguish

that besets people when they are trying to regain lost ground and to

initiate a plan of action. Accordingly, as they turned the corner

of the Galerie des Varietes, she stopped in front of the show in a

fan seller’s window.

 

“I say, that’s pretty,” she whispered; “I mean that mother-of-pearl

mount with the feathers.”

 

Then, indifferently:

 

“So you’re seeing me home?”

 

“Of course,” he said, with some surprise, “since your child’s

better.”

 

She was sorry she had told him that story. Perhaps Louiset was

passing through another crisis! She talked of returning to the

Batignolles. But when he offered to accompany her she did not

insist on going. For a second or two she was possessed with the

kind of white-hot fury which a woman experiences when she feels

herself