Nana, Émile Zola [reading list txt] 📗

any goose

and slavering over everything that he had respected for forty years

back. The moon had come out, and the empty street was bathed in

white light. He felt afraid, and he burst into a great fit of

sobbing, for he had grown suddenly hopeless and maddened as though

he had sunk into a fathomless void.

 

“My God!” he stuttered out. “It’s finished! There’s nothing left

now!”

 

Along the boulevards belated people were hurrying. He tried hard to

be calm, and as the story told him by that courtesan kept recurring

to his burning consciousness, he wanted to reason the matter out.

The countess was coming up from Mme de Chezelles’s country house

tomorrow morning. Yet nothing, in fact, could have prevented her

from returning to Paris the night before and passing it with that

man. He now began recalling to mind certain details of their stay

at Les Fondettes. One evening, for instance, he had surprised

Sabine in the shade of some trees, when she was so much agitated as

to be unable to answer his questions. The man had been present; why

should she not be with him now? The more he thought about it the

more possible the whole story became, and he ended by thinking it

natural and even inevitable. While he was in his shirt sleeves in

the house of a harlot his wife was undressing in her lover’s room.

Nothing could be simpler or more logical! Reasoning in this way, he

forced himself to keep cool. He felt as if there were a great

downward movement in the direction of fleshly madness, a movement

which, as it grew, was overcoming the whole world round about him.

Warm images pursued him in imagination. A naked Nana suddenly

evoked a naked Sabine. At this vision, which seemed to bring them

together in shameless relationship and under the influence of the

same lusts, he literally stumbled, and in the road a cab nearly ran

over him. Some women who had come out of a cafe jostled him amid

loud laughter. Then a fit of weeping once more overcame him,

despite all his efforts to the contrary, and, not wishing to shed

tears in the presence of others, he plunged into a dark and empty

street. It was the Rue Rossini, and along its silent length he wept

like a child.

 

“It’s over with us,” he said in hollow tones. “There’s nothing left

us now, nothing left us now!”

 

He wept so violently that he had to lean up against a door as he

buried his face in his wet hands. A noise of footsteps drove him

away. He felt a shame and a fear which made him fly before people’s

faces with the restless step of a bird of darkness. When passers-by

met him on the pavement he did his best to look and walk in a

leisurely way, for he fancied they were reading his secret in the

very swing of his shoulders. He had followed the Rue de la Grange

Bateliere as far as the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre, where the

brilliant lamplight surprised him, and he retraced his steps. For

nearly an hour he traversed the district thus, choosing always the

darkest corners. Doubtless there was some goal whither his steps

were patiently, instinctively, leading him through a labyrinth of

endless turnings. At length he lifted his eyes up it a street

corner. He had reached his destination, the point where the Rue

Taitbout and the Rue de la Provence met. He had taken an hour amid

his painful mental sufferings to arrive at a place he could have

reached in five minutes. One morning a month ago he remembered

going up to Fauchery’s rooms to thank him for a notice of a ball at

the Tuileries, in which the journalist had mentioned him. The flat

was between the ground floor and the first story and had a row of

small square windows which were half hidden by the colossal

signboard belonging to a shop. The last window on the left was

bisected by a brilliant band of lamplight coming from between the

half-closed curtains. And he remained absorbed and expectant, with

his gaze fixed on this shining streak.

 

The moon had disappeared in an inky sky, whence an icy drizzle was

falling. Two o’clock struck at the Trinite. The Rue de Provence

and the Rue Taitbout lay in shadow, bestarred at intervals by bright

splashes of light from the gas lamps, which in the distance were

merged in yellow mist. Muffat did not move from where he was

standing. That was the room. He remembered it now: it had hangings

of red “andrinople,” and a Louis XIII bed stood at one end of it.

The lamp must be standing on the chimney piece to the right.

Without doubt they had gone to bed, for no shadows passed across the

window, and the bright streak gleamed as motionless as the light of

a night lamp. With his eyes still uplifted he began forming a plan;

he would ring the bell, go upstairs despite the porter’s

remonstrances, break the doors in with a push of his shoulder and

fall upon them in the very bed without giving them time to unlace

their arms. For one moment the thought that he had no weapon upon

him gave him pause, but directly afterward he decided to throttle

them. He returned to the consideration of his project, and he

perfected it while waiting for some sign, some indication, which

should bring certainty with it.

 

Had a woman’s shadow only shown itself at that moment he would have

rung. But the thought that perhaps he was deceiving himself froze

him. How could he be certain? Doubts began to return. His wife

could not be with that man. It was monstrous and impossible.

Nevertheless, he stayed where he was and was gradually overcome by a

species of torpor which merged into sheer feebleness while he waited

long, and the fixity of his gaze induced hallucinations.

 

A shower was falling. Two policemen were approaching, and he was

forced to leave the doorway where he had taken shelter. When these

were lost to view in the Rue de Provence he returned to his post,

wet and shivering. The luminous streak still traversed the window,

and this time he was going away for good when a shadow crossed it.

It moved so quickly that he thought he had deceived himself. But

first one and then another black thing followed quickly after it,

and there was a regular commotion in the room. Riveted anew to the

pavement, he experienced an intolerable burning sensation in his

inside as he waited to find out the meaning of it all. Outlines of

arms and legs flitted after one another, and an enormous hand

traveled about with the silhouette of a water jug. He distinguished

nothing clearly, but he thought he recognized a woman’s headdress.

And he disputed the point with himself; it might well have been

Sabine’s hair, only the neck did not seem sufficiently slim. At

that hour of the night he had lost the power of recognition and of

action. In this terrible agony of uncertainty his inside caused him

such acute suffering that he pressed against the door in order to

calm himself, shivering like a man in rags, as he did so. Then

seeing that despite everything he could not turn his eyes away from

the window, his anger changed into a fit of moralizing. He fancied

himself a deputy; he was haranguing an assembly, loudly denouncing

debauchery, prophesying national ruin. And he reconstructed

Fauchery’s article on the poisoned fly, and he came before the house

and declared that morals such as these, which could only be

paralleled in the days of the later Roman Empire, rendered society

an impossibility; that did him good. But the shadows had meanwhile

disappeared. Doubtless they had gone to bed again, and, still

watching, he continued waiting where he was.

 

Three o’clock struck, then four, but he could not take his

departure. When showers fell he buried himself in a corner of the

doorway, his legs splashed with wet. Nobody passed by now, and

occasionally his eyes would close, as though scorched by the streak

of light, which he kept watching obstinately, fixedly, with idiotic

persistence. On two subsequent occasions the shadows flitted about,

repeating the same gestures and agitating the silhouette of the same

gigantic jug, and twice quiet was re-established, and the night lamp

again glowed discreetly out. These shadows only increased his

uncertainty. Then, too, a sudden idea soothed his brain while it

postponed the decisive moment. After all, he had only to wait for

the woman when she left the house. He could quite easily recognize

Sabine. Nothing could be simpler, and there would be no scandal,

and he would be sure of things one way or the other. It was only

necessary to stay where he was. Among all the confused feelings

which had been agitating him he now merely felt a dull need of

certain knowledge. But sheer weariness and vacancy began lulling

him to sleep under his doorway, and by way of distraction he tried

to reckon up how long he would have to wait. Sabine was to be at

the station toward nine o’clock; that meant about four hours and a

half more. He was very patient; he would even have been content not

to move again, and he found a certain charm in fancying that his

night vigil would last through eternity.

 

Suddenly the streak of light was gone. This extremely simple event

was to him an unforeseen catastrophe, at once troublesome and

disagreeable. Evidently they had just put the lamp out and were

going to sleep. lt was reasonable enough at that hour, but he was

irritated thereat, for now the darkened window ceased to interest

him. He watched it for a quarter of an hour longer and then grew

tired and, leaving the doorway, took a turn upon the pavement.

Until five o’clock he walked to and fro, looking upward from time to

time. The window seemed a dead thing, and now and then he asked

himself if he had not dreamed that shadows had been dancing up there

behind the panes. An intolerable sense of fatigue weighed him down,

a dull, heavy feeling, under the influence of which he forgot what

he was waiting for at that particular street corner. He kept

stumbling on the pavement and starting into wakefulness with the icy

shudder of a man who does not know where he is. Nothing seemed to

justify the painful anxiety he was inflicting on himself. Since

those people were asleep—well then, let them sleep! What good

could it do mixing in their affairs? It was very dark; no one would

ever know anything about this night’s doings. And with that every

sentiment within him, down to curiosity itself, took flight before

the longing to have done with it all and to find relief somewhere.

The cold was increasing, and the street was becoming insufferable.

Twice he walked away and slowly returned, dragging one foot behind

the other, only to walk farther away next time. It was all over;

nothing was left him now, and so he went down the whole length of

the boulevard and did not return.

 

His was a melancholy progress through the streets. He walked

slowly, never changing his pace and simply keeping along the walls

of the houses.

 

His boot heels re-echoed, and he saw nothing but his shadow moving

at his side. As he neared each successive gaslight it grew taller

and immediately afterward diminished. But this lulled him and

occupied him mechanically. He never knew afterward where he had

been; it seemed as if he had dragged himself round and round in a

circle for hours. One reminiscence only was very distinctly

retained by him. Without