Nana, Émile Zola [reading list txt] 📗

back. The fair lad knew that he had

just been guilty of some breach of good manners. He blushed more

hotly than ever and looked scared.

 

The traditional three knocks were given, and among the returning

throng, attendants, laden with pelisses and overcoats, bustled about

at a great rate in order to put away people’s things. The clappers

applauded the scenery, which represented a grotto on Mount Etna,

hollowed out in a silver mine and with sides glittering like new

money. In the background Vulcan’s forge glowed like a setting star.

Diana, since the second act, had come to a good understanding with

the god, who was to pretend that he was on a journey, so as to leave

the way clear for Venus and Mars. Then scarcely was Diana alone

than Venus made her appearance. A shiver of delight ran round the

house. Nana was nude. With quiet audacity she appeared in her

nakedness, certain of the sovereign power of her flesh. Some gauze

enveloped her, but her rounded shoulders, her Amazonian bosom, her

wide hips, which swayed to and fro voluptuously, her whole body, in

fact, could be divined, nay discerned, in all its foamlike whiteness

of tint beneath the slight fabric she wore. It was Venus rising

from the waves with no veil save her tresses. And when Nana lifted

her arms the golden hairs in her armpits were observable in the

glare of the footlights. There was no applause. Nobody laughed any

more. The men strained forward with serious faces, sharp features,

mouths irritated and parched. A wind seemed to have passed, a soft,

soft wind, laden with a secret menace. Suddenly in the bouncing

child the woman stood discovered, a woman full of restless

suggestion, who brought with her the delirium of sex and opened the

gates of the unknown world of desire. Nana was smiling still, but

her smile was now bitter, as of a devourer of men.

 

“By God,” said Fauchery quite simply to La Faloise.

 

Mars in the meantime, with his plume of feathers, came hurrying to

the trysting place and found himself between the two goddesses.

Then ensued a passage which Prulliere played with great delicacy.

Petted by Diana, who wanted to make a final attack upon his feelings

before delivering him up to Vulcan, wheedled by Venus, whom the

presence of her rival excited, he gave himself up to these tender

delights with the beatified expression of a man in clover. Finally

a grand trio brought the scene to a close, and it was then that an

attendant appeared in Lucy Stewart’s box and threw on the stage two

immense bouquets of white lilacs. There was applause; Nana and Rose

Mignon bowed, while Prulliere picked up the bouquets. Many of the

occupants of the stalls turned smilingly toward the ground-floor

occupied by Steiner and Mignon. The banker, his face blood-red, was

suffering from little convulsive twitchings of the chin, as though

he had a stoppage in his throat.

 

What followed took the house by storm completely. Diana had gone

off in a rage, and directly afterward, Venus, sitting on a moss-clad

seat, called Mars to her. Never yet had a more glowing scene of

seduction been ventured on. Nana, her arms round Prulliere’s neck,

was drawing him toward her when Fontan, with comically furious

mimicry and an exaggerated imitation of the face of an outraged

husband who surprises his wife in FLAGRANTE DELICTO, appeared at the

back of the grotto. He was holding the famous net with iron meshes.

For an instant he poised and swung it, as a fisherman does when he

is going to make a cast, and by an ingenious twist Venus and Mars

were caught in the snare; the net wrapped itself round them and held

them motionless in the attitude of happy lovers.

 

A murmur of applause swelled and swelled like a growing sigh. There

was some hand clapping, and every opera glass was fixed on Venus.

Little by little Nana had taken possession of the public, and now

every man was her slave.

 

A wave of lust had flowed from her as from an excited animal, and

its influence had spread and spread and spread till the whole house

was possessed by it. At that moment her slightest movement blew the

flame of desire: with her little finger she ruled men’s flesh.

Backs were arched and quivered as though unseen violin bows had been

drawn across their muscles; upon men’s shoulders appeared fugitive

hairs, which flew in air, blown by warm and wandering breaths,

breathed one knew not from what feminine mouth. In front of him

Fauchery saw the truant schoolboy half lifted from his seat by

passion. Curiosity led him to look at the Count de Vandeuvres—he

was extremely pale, and his lips looked pinched—at fat Steiner,

whose face was purple to the verge of apoplexy; at Labordette,

ogling away with the highly astonished air of a horse dealer

admiring a perfectly shaped mare; at Daguenet, whose ears were

blood-red and twitching with enjoyment. Then a sudden idea made him

glance behind, and he marveled at what he saw in the Muffats’ box.

Behind the countess, who was white and serious as usual, the count

was sitting straight upright, with mouth agape and face mottled with

red, while close by him, in the shadow, the restless eyes of the

Marquis de Chouard had become catlike phosphorescent, full of golden

sparkles. The house was suffocating; people’s very hair grew heavy

on their perspiring heads. For three hours back the breath of the

multitude had filled and heated the atmosphere with a scent of

crowded humanity. Under the swaying glare of the gas the dust

clouds in mid-air had grown constantly denser as they hung

motionless beneath the chandelier. The whole house seemed to be

oscillating, to be lapsing toward dizziness in its fatigue and

excitement, full, as it was, of those drowsy midnight desires which

flutter in the recesses of the bed of passion. And Nana, in front

of this languorous public, these fifteen hundred human beings

thronged and smothered in the exhaustion and nervous exasperation

which belong to the close of a spectacle, Nana still triumphed by

right of her marble flesh and that sexual nature of hers, which was

strong enough to destroy the whole crowd of her adorers and yet

sustain no injury.

 

The piece drew to a close. In answer to Vulcan’s triumphant summons

all the Olympians defiled before the lovers with ohs and ahs of

stupefaction and gaiety. Jupiter said, “I think it is light conduct

on your part, my son, to summon us to see such a sight as this.”

Then a reaction took place in favor of Venus. The chorus of

cuckolds was again ushered in by Iris and besought the master of the

gods not to give effect to its petition, for since women had lived

at home, domestic life was becoming impossible for the men: the

latter preferred being deceived and happy. That was the moral of

the play. Then Venus was set at liberty, and Vulcan obtained a

partial divorce from her. Mars was reconciled with Diana, and Jove,

for the sake of domestic peace, packed his little laundress off into

a constellation. And finally they extricated Love from his black

hole, where instead of conjugating the verb AMO he had been busy in

the manufacture of “dollies.” The curtain fell on an apotheosis,

wherein the cuckolds’ chorus knelt and sang a hymn of gratitude to

Venus, who stood there with smiling lips, her stature enhanced by

her sovereign nudity.

 

The audience, already on their feet, were making for the exits. The

authors were mentioned, and amid a thunder of applause there were

two calls before the curtain. The shout of “Nana! Nana!” rang

wildly forth. Then no sooner was the house empty than it grew dark:

the footlights went out; the chandelier was turned down; long strips

of gray canvas slipped from the stage boxes and swathed the gilt

ornamentation of the galleries, and the house, lately so full of

heat and noise, lapsed suddenly into a heavy sleep, while a musty,

dusty odor began to pervade it. In the front of her box stood the

Countess Muffat. Very erect and closely wrapped up in her furs, she

stared at the gathering shadows and waited for the crowd to pass

away.

 

In the passages the people were jostling the attendants, who hardly

knew what to do among the tumbled heaps of outdoor raiment.

Fauchery and La Faloise had hurried in order to see the crowd pass

out. All along the entrance hall men formed a living hedge, while

down the double staircase came slowly and in regular, complete

formation two interminable throngs of human beings. Steiner, in tow

of Mignon, had left the house among the foremost. The Count de

Vandeuvres took his departure with Blanche de Sivry on his arm. For

a moment or two Gaga and her daughter seemed doubtful how to

proceed, but Labordette made haste to go and fetch them a

conveyance, the door whereof he gallantly shut after them. Nobody

saw Daguenet go by. As the truant schoolboy, registering a mental

vow to wait at the stage door, was running with burning cheeks

toward the Passage des Panoramas, of which he found the gate closed,

Satin, standing on the edge of the pavement, moved forward and

brushed him with her skirts, but he in his despair gave her a savage

refusal and vanished amid the crowd, tears of impotent desire in his

eyes. Members of the audience were lighting their cigars and

walking off, humming:

 

When Venus roams at eventide.

 

Satin had gone back in front of the Cafe des Varietes, where Auguste

let her eat the sugar that remained over from the customers’ orders.

A stout man, who came out in a very heated condition, finally

carried her off in the shadow of the boulevard, which was now

gradually going to sleep.

 

Still people kept coming downstairs. La Faloise was waiting for

Clarisse; Fauchery had promised to catch up Lucy Stewart with

Caroline Hequet and her mother. They came; they took up a whole

corner of the entrance hall and were laughing very loudly when the

Muffats passed by them with an icy expression. Bordenave had just

then opened a little door and, peeping out, had obtained from

Fauchery the formal promise of an article. He was dripping with

perspiration, his face blazed, as though he were drunk with success.

 

“You’re good for two hundred nights,” La Faloise said to him with

civility. “The whole of Paris will visit your theater.”

 

But Bordenave grew annoyed and, indicating with a jerk of his chin

the public who filled the entrance hall—a herd of men with parched

lips and ardent eyes, still burning with the enjoyment of Nana—he

cried out violently:

 

“Say ‘my brothel,’ you obstinate devil!”