Nana, Émile Zola [reading list txt] 📗

>where the red-gold hair showed like some animal’s fell. Then the

plaudits became frantic.

 

The close of the act was not so exciting. Vulcan wanted to slap

Venus. The gods held a consultation and decided to go and hold an

inquiry on earth before granting the deceived husband satisfaction.

It was then that Diana surprised a tender conversation between Venus

and Mars and vowed that she would not take her eyes off them during

the whole of the voyage. There was also a scene where Love, played

by a little twelve-year-old chit, answered every question put to her

with “Yes, Mamma! No, Mamma!” in a winy-piny tone, her fingers in

her nose. At last Jupiter, with the severity of a master who is

growing cross, shut Love up in a dark closet, bidding her conjugate

the verb “I love” twenty times. The finale was more appreciated: it

was a chorus which both troupe and orchestra performed with great

brilliancy. But the curtain once down, the clappers tried in vain

to obtain a call, while the whole house was already up and making

for the doors.

 

The crowd trampled and jostled, jammed, as it were, between the rows

of seats, and in so doing exchanged expressions. One phrase only

went round:

 

“It’s idiotic.” A critic was saying that it would be one’s duty to

do a pretty bit of slashing. The piece, however, mattered very

little, for people were talking about Nana before everything else.

Fauchery and La Faloise, being among the earliest to emerge, met

Steiner and Mignon in the passage outside the stalls. In this

gaslit gut of a place, which was as narrow and circumscribed as a

gallery in a mine, one was well-nigh suffocated. They stopped a

moment at the foot of the stairs on the right of the house,

protected by the final curve of the balusters. The audience from

the cheap places were coming down the steps with a continuous tramp

of heavy boots; a stream of black dress coats was passing, while an

attendant was making every possible effort to protect a chair, on

which she had piled up coats and cloaks, from the onward pushing of

the crowd.

 

“Surely I know her,” cried Steiner, the moment he perceived

Fauchery. “I’m certain I’ve seen her somewhere—at the casino, I

imagine, and she got herself taken up there—she was so drunk.”

 

“As for me,” said the journalist, “I don’t quite know where it was.

I am like you; I certainly have come across her.”

 

He lowered his voice and asked, laughing:

 

“At the Tricons’, perhaps.”

 

“Egad, it was in a dirty place,” Mignon declared. He seemed

exasperated. “It’s disgusting that the public give such a reception

to the first trollop that comes by. There’ll soon be no more decent

women on the stage. Yes, I shall end by forbidding Rose to play.”

 

Fauchery could not restrain a smile. Meanwhile the downward shuffle

of the heavy shoes on the steps did not cease, and a little man in a

workman’s cap was heard crying in a drawling voice:

 

“Oh my, she ain’t no wopper! There’s some pickings there!”

 

In the passage two young men, delicately curled and formally

resplendent in turndown collars and the rest, were disputing

together. One of them was repeating the words, “Beastly, beastly!”

without stating any reasons; the other was replying with the words,

“Stunning, stunning!” as though he, too, disdained all argument.

 

La Faloise declared her to be quite the thing; only he ventured to

opine that she would be better still if she were to cultivate her

voice. Steiner, who was no longer listening, seemed to awake with a

start. Whatever happens, one must wait, he thought. Perhaps

everything will be spoiled in the following acts. The public had

shown complaisance, but it was certainly not yet taken by storm.

Mignon swore that the piece would never finish, and when Fauchery

and La Faloise left them in order to go up to the foyer he took

Steiner’s arm and, leaning hard against his shoulder, whispered in

his ear:

 

“You’re going to see my wife’s costume for the second act, old

fellow. It IS just blackguardly.”

 

Upstairs in the foyer three glass chandeliers burned with a

brilliant light. The two cousins hesitated an instant before

entering, for the widely opened glazed doors afforded a view right

through the gallery—a view of a surging sea of heads, which two

currents, as it were, kept in a continuous eddying movement. But

they entered after all. Five or six groups of men, talking very

loudly and gesticulating, were obstinately discussing the play amid

these violent interruptions; others were filing round, their heels,

as they turned, sounding sharply on the waxed floor. To right and

left, between columns of variegated imitation marble, women were

sitting on benches covered with red velvet and viewing the passing

movement of the crowd with an air of fatigue as though the heat had

rendered them languid. In the lofty mirrors behind them one saw the

reflection of their chignons. At the end of the room, in front of

the bar, a man with a huge corporation was drinking a glass of fruit

syrup.

 

But Fauchery, in order to breathe more freely, had gone to the

balcony. La Faloise, who was studying the photographs of actresses

hung in frames alternating with the mirrors between the columns,

ended by following him. They had extinguished the line of gas jets

on the facade of the theater, and it was dark and very cool on the

balcony, which seemed to them unoccupied. Solitary and enveloped in

shadow, a young man was standing, leaning his arms on the stone

balustrade, in the recess to the right. He was smoking a cigarette,

of which the burning end shone redly. Fauchery recognized Daguenet.

They shook hands warmly.

 

“What are you after there, my dear fellow?” asked the journalist.

“You’re hiding yourself in holes and crannies—you, a man who never

leaves the stalls on a first night!”

 

“But I’m smoking, you see,” replied Daguenet.

 

Then Fauchery, to put him out of countenance:

 

“Well, well! What’s your opinion of the new actress? She’s being

roughly handled enough in the passages.”

 

“Bah!” muttered Daguenet. “They’re people whom she’ll have had

nothing to do with!”

 

That was the sum of his criticism of Nana’s talent. La Faloise

leaned forward and looked down at the boulevard. Over against them

the windows of a hotel and of a club were brightly lit up, while on

the pavement below a dark mass of customers occupied the tables of

the Cafe de Madrid. Despite the lateness of the hour the crowd were

still crushing and being crushed; people were advancing with

shortened step; a throng was constantly emerging from the Passage

Jouffroy; individuals stood waiting five or six minutes before they

could cross the roadway, to such a distance did the string of

carriages extend.

 

“What a moving mass! And what a noise!” La Faloise kept

reiterating, for Paris still astonished him.

 

The bell rang for some time; the foyer emptied. There was a

hurrying of people in the passages. The curtain was already up when

whole bands of spectators re-entered the house amid the irritated

expressions of those who were once more in their places. Everyone

took his seat again with an animated look and renewed attention. La

Faloise directed his first glance in Gaga’s direction, but he was

dumfounded at seeing by her side the tall fair man who but recently

had been in Lucy’s stage box.

 

“What IS that man’s name?” he asked.

 

Fauchery failed to observe him.

 

“Ah yes, it’s Labordette,” he said at last with the same careless

movement. The scenery of the second act came as a surprise. It

represented a suburban Shrove Tuesday dance at the Boule Noire.

Masqueraders were trolling a catch, the chorus of which was

accompanied with a tapping of their heels. This ‘Arryish departure,

which nobody had in the least expected, caused so much amusement

that the house encored the catch. And it was to this entertainment

that the divine band, let astray by Iris, who falsely bragged that

he knew the Earth well, were now come in order to proceed with their

inquiry. They had put on disguises so as to preserve their

incognito. Jupiter came on the stage as King Dagobert, with his

breeches inside out and a huge tin crown on his head. Phoebus

appeared as the Postillion of Lonjumeau and Minerva as a Norman

nursemaid. Loud bursts of merriment greeted Mars, who wore an

outrageous uniform, suggestive of an Alpine admiral. But the shouts

of laughter became uproarious when Neptune came in view, clad in a

blouse, a high, bulging workman’s cap on his head, lovelocks glued

to his temples. Shuffling along in slippers, he cried in a thick

brogue.

 

“Well, I’m blessed! When ye’re a masher it’ll never do not to let

‘em love yer!”

 

There were some shouts of “Oh! Oh!” while the ladies held their fans

one degree higher. Lucy in her stage box laughed so obstreperously

that Caroline Hequet silenced her with a tap of her fan.

 

From that moment forth the piece was saved—nay, more, promised a

great success. This carnival of the gods, this dragging in the mud

of their Olympus, this mock at a whole religion, a whole world of

poetry, appeared in the light of a royal entertainment. The fever

of irreverence gained the literary first-night world: legend was

trampled underfoot; ancient images were shattered. Jupiter’s make-up was capital. Mars was a success. Royalty became a farce and the

army a thing of folly. When Jupiter, grown suddenly amorous of a

little laundress, began to knock off a mad cancan, Simonne, who was

playing the part of the laundress, launched a kick at the master of

the immortals’ nose and addressed him so drolly as “My big daddy!”

that an immoderate fit of laughter shook the whole house. While

they were dancing Phoebus treated Minerva to salad bowls of negus,

and Neptune sat in state among seven or eight women who regaled him

with cakes. Allusions were eagerly caught; indecent meanings were

attached to them; harmless phrases were diverted from their proper

significations in the light of exclamations issuing from the stalls.

For a long time past the theatrical public had not wallowed in folly

more irreverent. It rested them.

 

Nevertheless, the action of the piece advanced amid these fooleries.

Vulcan, as an elegant young man clad, down to his gloves, entirely

in yellow and with an eyeglass stuck in his eye, was forever running

after Venus, who at last made her appearance as a fishwife, a

kerchief on her head and her bosom, covered with big gold trinkets,

in great evidence. Nana was so white and plump and looked so

natural in a part demanding wide hips and a voluptuous mouth that

she straightway won the whole house. On her account Rose Mignon was

forgotten, though she was made up as a delicious baby, with a

wickerwork burlet on her head and a short muslin frock and had just

sighed forth Diana’s plaints in a sweetly pretty voice. The other

one, the big wench who slapped her thighs and clucked like a hen,

shed round her an odor of life, a sovereign feminine charm, with

which the public grew intoxicated. From the second act onward

everything was permitted her. She might hold herself awkwardly; she

might fail to sing some note in tune; she might forget her words—it

mattered not: she had only to turn and laugh to raise shouts of

applause. When she gave her famous kick from the hip the stalls

were fired, and a glow of passion rose upward, upward, from gallery

to gallery, till it reached the gods. It was a triumph, too, when

she led