Nana, Émile Zola [reading list txt] 📗

son’s favor. Downstairs the doors of the house stood

open, but as she mounted to the first floor her sick feet failed

her, and she was hesitating as to which way to go when suddenly

horror-stricken cries directed her. Then upstairs she found a man

lying on the floor with bloodstained shirt. It was Georges—it was

her other child.

 

Nana, in idiotic tones, kept saying:

 

“He wanted to marry me, and I said no, and he’s killed himself.”

 

Uttering no cry, Mme Hugon stooped down. Yes, it was the other one;

it was Georges. The one was brought to dishonor, the other

murdered! It caused her no surprise, for her whole life was ruined.

Kneeling on the carpet, utterly forgetting where she was, noticing

no one else, she gazed fixedly at her boy’s face and listened with

her hand on his heart. Then she gave a feeble sigh—she had felt

the heart beating. And with that she lifted her head and

scrutinized the room and the woman and seemed to remember. A fire

glowed forth in her vacant eyes, and she looked so great and

terrible in her silence that Nana trembled as she continued to

defend herself above the body that divided them.

 

“I swear it, madame! If his brother were here he could explain it

to you.”

 

“His brother has robbed—he is in prison,” said the mother in a hard

voice.

 

Nana felt a choking sensation. Why, what was the reason of it all?

The other had turned thief now! They were mad in that family! She

ceased struggling in self-defense; she seemed no longer mistress in

her own house and allowed Mme Hugon to give what orders she liked.

The servants had at last hurried up, and the old lady insisted on

their carrying the fainting Georges down to her carriage. She

preferred killing him rather than letting him remain in that house.

With an air of stupefaction Nana watched the retreating servants as

they supported poor, dear Zizi by his legs and shoulders. The

mother walked behind them in a state of collapse; she supported

herself against the furniture; she felt as if all she held dear had

vanished in the void. On the landing a sob escaped her; she turned

and twice ejaculated:

 

“Oh, but you’ve done us infinite harm! You’ve done us infinite

harm!”

 

That was all. In her stupefaction Nana had sat down; she still wore

her gloves and her hat. The house once more lapsed into heavy

silence; the carriage had driven away, and she sat motionless, not

knowing what to do next. her head swimming after all she had gone

through. A quarter of an hour later Count Muffat found her thus,

but at sight of him she relieved her feelings in an overflowing

current of talk. She told him all about the sad incident, repeated

the same details twenty times over, picked up the bloodstained

scissors in order to imitate Zizi’s gesture when he stabbed himself.

And above all she nursed the idea of proving her own innocence.

 

“Look you here, dearie, is it my fault? If you were the judge would

you condemn me? I certainly didn’t tell Philippe to meddle with the

till any more than I urged that wretched boy to kill himself. I’ve

been most unfortunate throughout it all. They come and do stupid

things in my place; they make me miserable; they treat me like a

hussy.”

 

And she burst into tears. A fit of nervous expansiveness rendered

her soft and doleful, and her immense distress melted her utterly.

 

“And you, too, look as if you weren’t satisfied. Now do just ask

Zoe if I’m at all mixed up in it. Zoe, do speak: explain to

Monsieur—”

 

The lady’s maid, having brought a towel and a basin of water out of

the dressing room, had for some moments past been rubbing the carpet

in order to remove the bloodstains before they dried.

 

“Oh, monsieur, ” she declared, “Madame is utterly miserable!”

 

Muffat was still stupefied; the tragedy had frozen him, and his

imagination was full of the mother weeping for her sons. He knew

her greatness of heart and pictured her in her widow’s weeds,

withering solitarily away at Les Fondettes. But Nana grew ever more

despondent, for now the memory of Zizi lying stretched on the floor,

with a red hole in his shirt, almost drove her senseless.

 

“He used to be such a darling, so sweet and caressing. Oh, you

know, my pet—I’m sorry if it vexes you—I loved that baby! I can’t

help saying so; the words must out. Besides, now it ought not to

hurt you at all. He’s gone. You’ve got what you wanted; you’re

quite certain never to surprise us again.”

 

And this last reflection tortured her with such regret that he ended

by turning comforter. Well, well, he said, she ought to be brave;

she was quite right; it wasn’t her fault! But she checked her

lamentations of her own accord in order to say:

 

“Listen, you must run round and bring me news of him. At once! I

wish it!”

 

He took his hat and went to get news of Georges. When he returned

after some three quarters of an hour he saw Nana leaning anxiously

out of a window, and he shouted up to her from the pavement that the

lad was not dead and that they even hoped to bring him through. At

this she immediately exchanged grief for excess of joy and began to

sing and dance and vote existence delightful. Zoe, meanwhile, was

still dissatisfied with her washing. She kept looking at the stain,

and every time she passed it she repeated:

 

“You know it’s not gone yet, madame.”

 

As a matter of fact, the pale red stain kept reappearing on one of

the white roses in the carpet pattern. It was as though, on the

very threshold of the room, a splash of blood were barring the

doorway.

 

“Bah!” said the joyous Nana. “That’l be rubbed out under people’s

feet.”

 

After the following day Count Muffat had likewise forgotten the

incident. For a moment or two, when in the cab which drove him to

the Rue Richelieu, he had busily sworn never to return to that

woman’s house. Heaven was warning him; the misfortunes of Philippe

and Georges were, he opined, prophetic of his proper ruin. But

neither the sight of Mme Hugon in tears nor that of the boy burning

with fever had been strong enough to make him keep his vow, and the

short-lived horror of the situation had only left behind it a sense

of secret delight at the thought that he was now well quit of a

rival, the charm of whose youth had always exasperated him. His

passion had by this time grown exclusive; it was, indeed, the

passion of a man who has had no youth. He loved Nana as one who

yearned to be her sole possessor, to listen to her, to touch her, to

be breathed on by her. His was now a supersensual tenderness,

verging on pure sentiment; it was an anxious affection and as such

was jealous of the past and apt at times to dream of a day of

redemption and pardon received, when both should kneel before God

the Father. Every day religion kept regaining its influence over

him. He again became a practicing Christian; he confessed himself

and communicated, while a ceaseless struggle raged within him, and

remorse redoubled the joys of sin and of repentance. Afterward,

when his director gave him leave to spend his passion, he had made a

habit of this daily perdition and would redeem the same by ecstasies

of faith, which were full of pious humility. Very naively he

offered heaven, by way of expiatory anguish, the abominable torment

from which he was suffering. This torment grew and increased, and

he would climb his Calvary with the deep and solemn feelings of a

believer, though steeped in a harlot’s fierce sensuality. That

which made his agony most poignant was this woman’s continued

faithlessness. He could not share her with others, nor did he

understand her imbecile caprices. Undying, unchanging love was what

he wished for. However, she had sworn, and he paid her as having

done so. But he felt that she was untruthful, incapable of common

fidelity, apt to yield to friends, to stray passers-by, like a good-natured animal, born to live minus a shift.

 

One morning when he saw Foucarmont emerging from her bedroom at an

unusual hour, he made a scene about it. But in her weariness of his

jealousy she grew angry directly. On several occasions ere that she

had behaved rather prettily. Thus the evening when he surprised her

with Georges she was the first to regain her temper and to confess

herself in the wrong. She had loaded him with caresses and dosed

him with soft speeches in order to make him swallow the business.

But he had ended by boring her to death with his obstinate refusals

to understand the feminine nature, and now she was brutal.

 

“Very well, yes! I’ve slept with Foucarmont. What then? That’s

flattened you out a bit, my little rough, hasn’t it?”

 

It was the first time she had thrown “my little rough” in his teeth.

The frank directness of her avowal took his breath away, and when he

began clenching his fists she marched up to him and looked him full

in the face.

 

“We’ve had enough of this, eh? If it doesn’t suit you you’ll do me

the pleasure of leaving the house. I don’t want you to go yelling

in my place. Just you get it into your noodle that I mean to be

quite free. When a man pleases me I go to bed with him. Yes, I do—

that’s my way! And you must make up your mind directly. Yes or

no! If it’s no, out you may walk!”

 

She had gone and opened the door, but he did not leave. That was

her way now of binding him more closely to her. For no reason

whatever, at the slightest approach to a quarrel she would tell him

he might stop or go as he liked, and she would accompany her

permission with a flood of odious reflections. She said she could

always find better than he; she had only too many from whom to

choose; men in any quantity could be picked up in the street, and

men a good deal smarter, too, whose blood boiled in their veins. At

this he would hang his head and wait for those gentler moods when

she wanted money. She would then become affectionate, and he would

forget it all, one night of tender dalliance making up for the

tortures of a whole week. His reconciliation with his wife had

rendered his home unbearable. Fauchery, having again fallen under

Rose’s dominion, the countess was running madly after other loves.

She was entering on the forties, that restless, feverish time in the

life of women, and ever hysterically nervous, she now filled her

mansion with the maddening whirl of her fashionable life. Estelle,

since her marriage, had seen nothing of her father; the undeveloped,

insignificant girl had suddenly become a woman of iron will, so

imperious withal that Daguenet trembled in her presence. In these

days he accompanied her to mass: he was converted, and he raged

against his father-in-law for ruining them with a courtesan. M.

Venot alone still remained kindly inclined toward the count, for he

was biding his time. He had even succeeded in getting into Nana’s

immediate circle. In fact, he frequented both houses, where you

encountered his continual smile behind doors. So Muffat, wretched

at home, driven out by ennui and shame, still preferred to live in

the