Nana, Émile Zola [reading list txt] 📗

Avenue de Villiers, even though he was abused there.

 

Soon there was but one question between Nana and the count, and that

was “money.” One day after having formally promised her ten

thousand francs he had dared keep his appointment empty handed. For

two days past she had been surfeiting him with love, and such a

breach of faith, such a waste of caresses, made her ragingly

abusive. She was white with fury.

 

“So you’ve not got the money, eh? Then go back where you came from,

my little rough, and look sharp about it! There’s a bloody fool for

you! He wanted to kiss me again! Mark my words—no money, no

nothing!”

 

He explained matters; he would be sure to have the money the day

after tomorrow. But she interrupted him violently:

 

“And my bills! They’ll sell me up while Monsieur’s playing the

fool. Now then, look at yourself. D’ye think I love you for your

figure? A man with a mug like yours has to pay the women who are

kind enough to put up with him. By God, if you don’t bring me that

ten thousand francs tonight you shan’t even have the tip of my

little finger to suck. I mean it! I shall send you back to your

wife!”

 

At night he brought the ten thousand francs. Nana put up her lips,

and he took a long kiss which consoled him for the whole day of

anguish. What annoyed the young woman was to have him continually

tied to her apron strings. She complained to M. Venot, begging him

to take her little rough off to the countess. Was their

reconciliation good for nothing then? She was sorry she had mixed

herself up in it, since despite everything he was always at her

heels. On the days when, out of anger, she forgot her own interest,

she swore to play him such a dirty trick that he would never again

be able to set foot in her place. But when she slapped her leg and

yelled at him she might quite as well have spat in his face too: he

would still have stayed and even thanked her. Then the rows about

money matters kept continually recurring. She demanded money

savagely; she rowed him over wretched little amounts; she was

odiously stingy with every minute of her time; she kept fiercely

informing him that she slept with him for his money, not for any

other reasons, and that she did not enjoy it a bit, that, in fact,

she loved another and was awfully unfortunate in needing an idiot of

his sort! They did not even want him at court now, and there was

some talk of requiring him to send in his resignation. The empress

had said, “He is too disgusting.” It was true enough. So Nana

repeated the phrase by way of closure to all their quarrels.

 

“Look here! You disgust me!”

 

Nowadays she no longer minded her ps and qs; she had regained the

most perfect freedom.

 

Every day she did her round of the lake, beginning acquaintanceships

which ended elsewhere. Here was the happy hunting ground par

excellence, where courtesans of the first water spread their nets in

open daylight and flaunted themselves amid the tolerating smiles and

brilliant luxury of Paris. Duchesses pointed her out to one another

with a passing look—rich shopkeepers’ wives copied the fashion of

her hats. Sometimes her landau, in its haste to get by, stopped a

file of puissant turnouts, wherein sat plutocrats able to buy up all

Europe or Cabinet ministers with plump fingers tight-pressed to the

throat of France. She belonged to this Bois society, occupied a

prominent place in it, was known in every capital and asked about by

every foreigner. The splendors of this crowd were enhanced by the

madness of her profligacy as though it were the very crown, the

darling passion, of the nation. Then there were unions of a night,

continual passages of desire, which she lost count of the morning

after, and these sent her touring through the grand restaurants and

on fine days, as often as not, to “Madrid.” The staffs of all the

embassies visited her, and she, Lucy Stewart, Caroline Hequet and

Maria Blond would dine in the society of gentlemen who murdered the

French language and paid to be amused, engaging them by the evening

with orders to be funny and yet proving so blase and so worn out

that they never even touched them. This the ladies called “going on

a spree,” and they would return home happy at having been despised

and would finish the night in the arms of the lovers of their

choice.

 

When she did not actually throw the men at his head Count Muffat

pretended not to know about all this. However, he suffered not a

little from the lesser indignities of their daily life. The mansion

in the Avenue de Villiers was becoming a hell, a house full of mad

people, in which every hour of the day wild disorders led to hateful

complications. Nana even fought with her servants. One moment she

would be very nice with Charles, the coachman. When she stopped at

a restaurant she would send him out beer by the waiter and would

talk with him from the inside of her carriage when he slanged the

cabbies at a block in the traffic, for then he struck her as funny

and cheered her up. Then the next moment she called him a fool for

no earthly reason. She was always squabbling over the straw, the

bran or the oats; in spite of her love for animals she thought her

horses ate too much. Accordingly one day when she was settling up

she accused the man of robbing her. At this Charles got in a rage

and called her a whore right out; his horses, he said, were

distinctly better than she was, for they did not sleep with

everybody. She answered him in the same strain, and the count had

to separate them and give the coachman the sack. This was the

beginning of a rebellion among the servants. When her diamonds had

been stolen Victorine and Francois left. Julien himself

disappeared, and the tale ran that the master had given him a big

bribe and had begged him to go, because he slept with the mistress.

Every week there were new faces in the servants’ hall. Never was

there such a mess; the house was like a passage down which the scum

of the registry offices galloped, destroying everything in their

path. Zoe alone kept her place; she always looked clean, and her

only anxiety was how to organize this riot until she had got enough

together to set up on her own account in fulfillment of a plan she

had been hatching for some time past.

 

These, again, were only the anxieties he could own to. The count

put up with the stupidity of Mme Maloir, playing bezique with her in

spite of her musty smell. He put up with Mme Lerat and her

encumbrances, with Louiset and the mournful complaints peculiar to a

child who is being eaten up with the rottenness inherited from some

unknown father. But he spent hours worse than these. One evening

he had heard Nana angrily telling her maid that a man pretending to

be rich had just swindled her—a handsome man calling himself an

American and owning gold mines in his own country, a beast who had

gone off while she was asleep without giving her a copper and had

even taken a packet of cigarette papers with him. The count had

turned very pale and had gone downstairs again on tiptoe so as not

to hear more. But later he had to hear all. Nana, having been

smitten with a baritone in a music hall and having been thrown over

by him, wanted to commit suicide during a fit of sentimental

melancholia. She swallowed a glass of water in which she had soaked

a box of matches. This made her terribly sick but did not kill her.

The count had to nurse her and to listen to the whole story of her

passion, her tearful protests and her oaths never to take to any man

again. In her contempt for those swine, as she called them, she

could not, however, keep her heart free, for she always had some

sweetheart round her, and her exhausted body inclined to

incomprehensible fancies and perverse tastes. As Zoe designedly

relaxed her efforts the service of the house had got to such a pitch

that Muffat did not dare to push open a door, to pull a curtain or

to unclose a cupboard. The bells did not ring; men lounged about

everywhere and at every moment knocked up against one another. He

had now to cough before entering a room, having almost caught the

girl hanging round Francis’ neck one evening that he had just gone

out of the dressing room for two minutes to tell the coachman to put

the horses to, while her hairdresser was finishing her hair. She

gave herself up suddenly behind his back; she took her pleasure in

every corner, quickly, with the first man she met. Whether she was

in her chemise or in full dress did not matter. She would come back

to the count red all over, happy at having cheated him. As for him,

he was plagued to death; it was an abominable infliction!

 

In his jealous anguish the unhappy man was comparatively at peace

when he left Nana and Satin alone together. He would have willingly

urged her on to this vice, to keep the men off her. But all was

spoiled in this direction too. Nana deceived Satin as she deceived

the count, going mad over some monstrous fancy or other and picking

up girls at the street corners. Coming back in her carriage, she

would suddenly be taken with a little slut that she saw on the

pavement; her senses would be captivated, her imagination excited.

She would take the little slut in with her, pay her and send her

away again. Then, disguised as a man, she would go to infamous

houses and look on at scenes of debauch to while away hours of

boredom. And Satin, angry at being thrown over every moment, would

turn the house topsy-turvy with the most awful scenes. She had at

last acquired a complete ascendancy over Nana, who now respected

her. Muffat even thought of an alliance between them. When he

dared not say anything he let Satin loose. Twice she had compelled

her darling to take up with him again, while he showed himself

obliging and effaced himself in her favor at the least sign. But

this good understanding lasted no time, for Satin, too, was a little

cracked. On certain days she would very nearly go mad and would

smash everything, wearing herself out in tempest of love and anger,

but pretty all the time. Zoe must have excited her, for the maid

took her into corners as if she wanted to tell her about her great

design of which she as yet spoke to no one.

 

At times, however, Count Muffat was still singularly revolted. He

who had tolerated Satin for months, who had at last shut his eyes to

the unknown herd of men that scampered so quickly through Nana’s

bedroom, became terribly enraged at being deceived by one of his own

set or even by an acquaintance. When she confessed her relations

with Foucarmont he suffered so acutely, he thought the treachery of

the young man so base, that he wished to insult him and fight a

duel. As he did not know where to find seconds for such an affair,

he went to Labordette. The latter, astonished, could not help

laughing.

 

“A duel about Nana? But,