Nana, Émile Zola [reading list txt] 📗

had become soft, and she was chaffing him in a ferociously

wheedling manner. He was deeply moved and began blushing as he paid

her back her kisses. Then she cried:

 

“By God, to think I should have guessed! He’s thought about it;

he’s waiting for his wife to go off the hooks! Well, well, that’s

the finishing touch! Why, he’s even a bigger rascal than the

others!”

 

Muffat had resigned himself to “the others.” Nowadays he was

trusting to the last relics of his personal dignity in order to

remain “Monsieur” among the servants and intimates of the house, the

man, in fact, who because he gave most was the official lover. And

his passion grew fiercer. He kept his position because he paid for

it, buying even smiles at a high price. He was even robbed and he

never got his money’s worth, but a disease seemed to be gnawing his

vitals from which he could not prevent himself suffering. Whenever

he entered Nana’s bedroom he was simply content to open the windows

for a second or two in order to get rid of the odors the others left

behind them, the essential smells of fair-haired men and dark, the

smoke of cigars, of which the pungency choked him. This bedroom was

becoming a veritable thoroughfare, so continually were boots wiped

on its threshold. Yet never a man among them was stopped by the

bloodstain barring the door. Zoe was still preoccupied by this

stain; it was a simple mania with her, for she was a clean girl, and

it horrified her to see it always there. Despite everything her

eyes would wander in its direction, and she now never entered

Madame’s room without remarking:

 

“It’s strange that don’t go. All the same, plenty of folk come in

this way.”

 

Nana kept receiving the best news from Georges, who was by that time

already convalescent in his mother’s keeping at Les Fondettes, and

she used always to make the same reply.

 

“Oh, hang it, time’s all that’s wanted. It’s apt to grow paler as

feet cross it.”

 

As a matter of fact, each of the gentlemen, whether Foucarmont,

Steiner, La Faloise or Fauchery, had borne away some of it on their

bootsoles. And Muffat, whom the bloodstain preoccupied as much as

it did Zoe, kept studying it in his own despite, as though in its

gradual rosy disappearance he would read the number of men that

passed. He secretly dreaded it and always stepped over it out of a

vivid fear of crushing some live thing, some naked limb lying on the

floor.

 

But in the bedroom within he would grow dizzy and intoxicated and

would forget everything—the mob of men which constantly crossed it,

the sign of mourning which barred its door. Outside, in the open

air of the street, he would weep occasionally out of sheer shame and

disgust and would vow never to enter the room again. And the moment

the portiere had closed behind him he was under the old influence

once more and felt his whole being melting in the damp warm air of

the place, felt his flesh penetrated by a perfume, felt himself

overborne by a voluptuous yearning for self-annihilation. Pious and

habituated to ecstatic experiences in sumptuous chapels, he there

re-encountered precisely the same mystical sensations as when he

knelt under some painted window and gave way to the intoxication of

organ music and incense. Woman swayed him as jealously and

despotically as the God of wrath, terrifying him, granting him

moments of delight, which were like spasms in their keenness, in

return for hours filled with frightful, tormenting visions of hell

and eternal tortures. In Nana’s presence, as in church, the same

stammering accents were his, the same prayers and the same fits of

despair—nay, the same paroxysms of humility peculiar to an accursed

creature who is crushed down in the mire from whence he has sprung.

His fleshly desires, his spiritual needs, were confounded together

and seemed to spring from the obscure depths of his being and to

bear but one blossom on the tree of his existence. He abandoned

himself to the power of love and of faith, those twin levers which

move the world. And despite all the struggles of his reason this

bedroom of Nana’s always filled him with madness, and he would sink

shuddering under the almighty dominion of sex, just as he would

swoon before the vast unknown of heaven.

 

Then when she felt how humble he was Nana grew tyrannously

triumphant. The rage for debasing things was inborn in her. It did

not suffice her to destroy them; she must soil them too. Her

delicate hands left abominable traces and themselves decomposed

whatever they had broken. And he in his imbecile condition lent

himself to this sort of sport, for he was possessed by vaguely

remembered stories of saints who were devoured by vermin and in turn

devoured their own excrements. When once she had him fast in her

room and the doors were shut, she treated herself to a man’s infamy.

At first they joked together, and she would deal him light blows and

impose quaint tasks on him, making him lisp like a child and repeat

tags of sentences.

 

“Say as I do: ‘tonfound it! Ickle man damn vell don’t tare about

it!”

 

He would prove so docile as to reproduce her very accent.

 

“‘Tonfound it! Ickle man damn vell don’t tare about it!”

 

Or again she would play bear, walking on all fours on her rugs when

she had only her chemise on and turning round with a growl as though

she wanted to eat him. She would even nibble his calves for the fun

of the thing. Then, getting up again:

 

“It’s your turn now; try it a bit. I bet you don’t play bear like

me.”

 

It was still charming enough. As bear she amused him with her white

skin and her fell of ruddy hair. He used to laugh and go down on

all fours, too, and growl and bite her calves, while she ran from

him with an affectation of terror.

 

“Are we beasts, eh?” she would end by saying. “You’ve no notion how

ugly you are, my pet! Just think if they were to see you like that

at the Tuileries!”

 

But ere long these little games were spoiled. It was not cruelty in

her case, for she was still a good-natured girl; it was as though a

passing wind of madness were blowing ever more strongly in the shut-up bedroom. A storm of lust disordered their brains, plunged them

into the delirious imaginations of the flesh. The old pious terrors

of their sleepless nights were now transforming themselves into a

thirst for bestiality, a furious longing to walk on all fours, to

growl and to bite. One day when he was playing bear she pushed him

so roughly that he fell against a piece of furniture, and when she

saw the lump on his forehead she burst into involuntary laughter.

After that her experiments on La Faloise having whetted her

appetite, she treated him like an animal, threshing him and chasing

him to an accompaniment of kicks.

 

“Gee up! Gee up! You’re a horse. Hoi! Gee up! Won’t you hurry

up, you dirty screw?”

 

At other times he was a dog. She would throw her scented

handkerchief to the far end of the room, and he had to run and pick

it up with his teeth, dragging himself along on hands and knees.

 

“Fetch it, Caesar! Look here, I’ll give you what for if you don’t

look sharp! Well done, Caesar! Good dog! Nice old fellow! Now

behave pretty!”

 

And he loved his abasement and delighted in being a brute beast. He

longed to sink still further and would cry:

 

“Hit harder. On, on! I’m wild! Hit away!”

 

She was seized with a whim and insisted on his coming to her one

night clad in his magnificent chamberlain’s costume. Then how she

did laugh and make fun of him when she had him there in all his

glory, with the sword and the cocked hat and the white breeches and

the full-bottomed coat of red cloth laced with gold and the symbolic

key hanging on its left-hand skirt. This key made her especially

merry and urged her to a wildly fanciful and extremely filthy

discussion of it. Laughing without cease and carried away by her

irreverence for pomp and by the joy of debasing him in the official

dignity of his costume, she shook him, pinched him, shouted, “Oh,

get along with ye, Chamberlain!” and ended by an accompaniment of

swinging kicks behind. Oh, those kicks! How heartily she rained

them on the Tuileries and the majesty of the imperial court,

throning on high above an abject and trembling people. That’s what

she thought of society! That was her revenge! It was an affair of

unconscious hereditary spite; it had come to her in her blood. Then

when once the chamberlain was undressed and his coat lay spread on

the ground she shrieked, “Jump!” And he jumped. She shrieked,

“Spit!” And he spat. With a shriek she bade him walk on the gold,

on the eagles, on the decorations, and he walked on them. Hi tiddly

hi ti! Nothing was left; everything was going to pieces. She

smashed a chamberlain just as she smashed a flask or a comfit box,

and she made filth of him, reduced him to a heap of mud at a street

corner.

 

Meanwhile the goldsmiths had failed to keep their promise, and the

bed was not delivered till one day about the middle of January.

Muffat was just then in Normandy, whither he had gone to sell a last

stray shred of property, but Nana demanded four thousand francs

forthwith. He was not due in Paris till the day after tomorrow, but

when his business was once finished he hastened his return and

without even paying a flying visit in the Rue Miromesnil came direct

to the Avenue de Villiers. Ten o’clock was striking. As he had a

key of a little door opening on the Rue Cardinet, he went up

unhindered. In the drawing room upstairs Zoe, who was polishing the

bronzes, stood dumfounded at sight of him, and not knowing how to

stop him, she began with much circumlocution, informing him that M.

Venot, looking utterly beside himself, had been searching for him

since yesterday and that he had already come twice to beg her to

send Monsieur to his house if Monsieur arrived at Madame’s before

going home. Muffat listened to her without in the least

understanding the meaning of her recital; then he noticed her

agitation and was seized by a sudden fit of jealousy of which he no

longer believed himself capable. He threw himself against the

bedroom door, for he heard the sound of laughter within. The door

gave; its two flaps flew asunder, while Zoe withdrew, shrugging her

shoulders. So much the worse for Madame! As Madame was bidding

good-by to her wits, she might arrange matters for herself.

 

And on the threshold Muffat uttered a cry at the sight that was

presented to his view.

 

“My God! My God!”

 

The renovated bedroom was resplendent in all its royal luxury.

Silver buttons gleamed like bright stars on the tea-rose velvet of

the hangings. These last were of that pink flesh tint which the

skies assume on fine evenings, when Venus lights her fires on the

horizon against the clear background of fading daylight. The golden

cords and tassels hanging in corners and the gold lace-work

surrounding the panels were like little flames of ruddy strands of

loosened hair, and they half covered the wide nakedness of the room

while they emphasized its pale, voluptuous tone. Then