Nana, Émile Zola [reading list txt] 📗

appearances were kept up; and, indeed, it was not

deemed advisable to interfere, for some respectable folks might have

been worried.

 

Of an evening five or six well-to-do citizens would enter the front

room and play at dominoes there. Although Cartier was dead and the

Cafe de Paris had got a queer name, they saw nothing and kept up

their old habits. In course of time, the waiter having nothing to

do, Melanie dismissed him and made Phrosine light the solitary gas

burner in the corner where the domino players congregated.

Occasionally a party of young men, attracted by the gossip that

circulated through the town, would come in, wildly excited and

laughing loudly and awkwardly. But they were received there with

icy dignity. As a rule they did not even see the widow, and even if

she happened to be present she treated them with withering disdain,

so that they withdrew, stammering and confused. Melanie was too

astute to indulge in any compromising whims. While the front room

remained obscure, save in the corner where the few townsfolk rattled

their dominoes, she personally waited on the gentlemen of the divan,

showing herself amiable without being free, merely venturing in

moments of familiarity to lean on the shoulder of one or another of

them, the better to watch a skillfully played game of ecarte.

 

One evening the gentlemen of the divan, who had ended by tolerating

each other’s presence, experienced a disagreeable surprise on

finding Captain Burle at home there. He had casually entered the

cafe that same morning to get a glass of vermouth, so it seemed, and

he had found Melanie there. They had conversed, and in the evening

when he returned Phrosine immediately showed him to the inner room.

 

Two days later Burle reigned there supreme; still he had not

frightened the chemist, the vermicelli maker, the lawyer or the

retired magistrate away. The captain, who was short and dumpy,

worshiped tall, plump women. In his regiment he had been nicknamed

“Petticoat Burle” on account of his constant philandering. Whenever

the officers, and even the privates, met some monstrous-looking

creature, some giantess puffed out with fat, whether she were in

velvet or in rags, they would invariably exclaim, “There goes one to

Petticoat Burle’s taste!” Thus Melanie, with her opulent presence,

quite conquered him. He was lost—quite wrecked. In less than a

fortnight he had fallen to vacuous imbecility. With much the

expression of a whipped hound in the tiny sunken eyes which lighted

up his bloated face, he was incessantly watching the widow in mute

adoration before her masculine features and stubby hair. For fear

that he might be dismissed, he put up with the presence of the other

gentlemen of the divan and spent his pay in the place down to the

last copper. A sergeant reviewed the situation in one sentence:

“Petticoat Burle is done for; he’s a buried man!”

 

It was nearly ten o’clock when Major Laguitte furiously flung the

door of the cafe open. For a moment those inside could see the

deluged square transformed into a dark sea of liquid mud, bubbling

under the terrible downpour. The major, now soaked to the skin and

leaving a stream behind him, strode up to the small counter where

Phrosine was reading a novel.

 

“You little wretch,” he yelled, “you have dared to gammon an

officer; you deserve—”

 

And then he lifted his hand as if to deal a blow such as would have

felled an ox. The little maid shrank back, terrified, while the

amazed domino players looked, openmouthed. However, the major did

not linger there—he pushed the divan door open and appeared before

Melanie and Burle just as the widow was playfully making the captain

sip his grog in small spoonfuls, as if she were feeding a pet

canary. Only the ex-magistrate and the chemist had come that

evening, and they had retired early in a melancholy frame of mind.

Then Melanie, being in want of three hundred francs for the morrow,

had taken advantage of the opportunity to cajole the captain.

 

“Come.” she said, “open your mouth; ain’t it nice, you greedy piggy-wiggy?”

 

Burle, flushing scarlet, with glazed eyes and sunken figure, was

sucking the spoon with an air of intense enjoyment.

 

“Good heavens!” roared the major from the threshold. “You now play

tricks on me, do you? I’m sent to the roundabout and told that you

never came here, and yet all the while here you are, addling your

silly brains.”

 

Burle shuddered, pushing the grog away, while Melanie stepped

angrily in front of him as if to shield him with her portly figure,

but Laguitte looked at her with that quiet, resolute expression well

known to women who are familiar with bodily chastisement.

 

“Leave us,” he said curtly.

 

She hesitated for the space of a second. She almost felt the gust

of the expected blow, and then, white with rage, she joined Phrosine

in the outer room.

 

When the two men were alone Major Laguitte walked up to Burle,

looked at him and, slightly stooping, yelled into his face these two

words: “You pig!”

 

The captain, quite dazed, endeavored to retort, but he had not time

to do so.

 

“Silence!” resumed the major. “You have bamboozled a friend. You

palmed off on me a lot of forged receipts which might have sent both

of us to the gallows. Do you call that proper behavior? Is that

the sort of trick to play a friend of thirty years’ standing?”

 

Burle, who had fallen back in his chair, was livid; his limbs shook

as if with ague. Meanwhile the major, striding up and down and

striking the tables wildly with his fists, continued: “So you have

become a thief like the veriest scribbling cur of a clerk, and all

for the sake of that creature here! If at least you had stolen for

your mother’s sake it would have been honorable! But, curse it, to

play tricks and bring the money into this shanty is what I cannot

understand! Tell me—what are you made of at your age to go to the

dogs as you are going all for the sake of a creature like a

grenadier!”

 

“YOU gamble—” stammered the captain.

 

“Yes, I do—curse it!” thundered the major, lashed into still

greater fury by this remark. “And I am a pitiful rogue to do so,

because it swallows up all my pay and doesn’t redound to the honor

of the French army. However, I don’t steal. Kill yourself, if it

pleases you; starve your mother and the boy, but respect the

regimental cashbox and don’t drag your friends down with you.”

 

He stopped. Burle was sitting there with fixed eyes and a stupid

air. Nothing was heard for a moment save the clatter of the major’s

heels.

 

“And not a single copper,” he continued aggressively. “Can you

picture yourself between two gendarmes, eh?”

 

He then grew a little calmer, caught hold of Burle’s wrists and

forced him to rise.

 

“Come!” he said gruffly. “Something must be done at once, for I

cannot go to bed with this affair on my mind—I have an idea.”

 

In the front room Melanie and Phrosine were talking eagerly in low

voices. When the widow saw the two men leaving the divan she moved

toward Burle and said coaxingly: “What, are you going already,

Captain?”

 

“Yes, he’s going,” brutally answered Laguitte, “and I don’t intend

to let him set foot here again.”

 

The little maid felt frightened and pulled her mistress back by the

skirt of her dress; in doing so she imprudently murmured the word

“drunkard” and thereby brought down the slap which the major’s hand

had been itching to deal for some time past. Both women having

stooped, however, the blow only fell on Phrosine’s back hair,

flattening her cap and breaking her comb. The domino players were

indignant.

 

“Let’s cut it,” shouted Laguitte, and he pushed Burle on the

pavement. “If I remained I should smash everyone in the place.”

 

To cross the square they had to wade up to their ankles in mud. The

rain, driven by the wind, poured off their faces. The captain

walked on in silence, while the major kept on reproaching him with

his cowardice and its disastrous consequences. Wasn’t it sweet

weather for tramping the streets? If he hadn’t been such an idiot

they would both be warmly tucked in bed instead of paddling about in

the mud. Then he spoke of Gagneux—a scoundrel whose diseased meat

had on three separate occasions made the whole regiment ill. In a

week, however, the contract would come to an end, and the fiend

himself would not get it renewed.

 

“It rests with me,” the major grumbled. “I can select whomsoever I

choose, and I’d rather cut off my right arm than put that poisoner

in the way of earning another copper.”

 

Just then he slipped into a gutter and, half choked by a string of

oaths, he gasped:

 

“You understand—I am going to rout up Gagneux. You must stop

outside while I go in. I must know what the rascal is up to and if

he’ll dare to carry out his threat of informing the colonel

tomorrow. A butcher—curse him! The idea of compromising oneself

with a butcher! Ah, you aren’t over-proud, and I shall never

forgive you for all this.”

 

They had now reached the Place aux Herbes. Gagneux’s house was

quite dark, but Laguitte knocked so loudly that he was eventually

admitted. Burle remained alone in the dense obscurity and did not

even attempt to seek any shelter. He stood at a corner of the

market under the pelting rain, his head filled with a loud buzzing

noise which prevented him from thinking. He did not feel impatient,

for he was unconscious of the flight of time. He stood there

looking at the house, which, with its closed door and windows,

seemed quite lifeless. When at the end of an hour the major came

out again it appeared to the captain as if he had only just gone in.

 

Laguitte was so grimly mute that Burle did not venture to question

him. For a moment they sought each other, groping about in the

dark; then they resumed their walk through the somber streets, where

the water rolled as in the bed of a torrent. They moved on in

silence side by side, the major being so abstracted that he even

forgot to swear. However, as they again crossed the Place du

Palais, at the sight of the Cafe de Paris, which was still lit up,

he dropped his hand on Burle’s shoulder and said, “If you ever re-enter that hole I—”

 

“No fear!” answered the captain without letting his friend finish

his sentence.

 

Then he stretched out his hand.

 

“No, no,” said Laguitte, “I’ll see you home; I’ll at least make sure

that you’ll sleep in your bed tonight.”

 

They went on, and as they ascended the Rue des Recollets they

slackened their pace. When the captain’s door was reached and Burle

had taken out his latchkey he ventured to ask:

 

“Well?”

 

“Well,” answered the major gruffly, “I am as dirty a rogue as you

are. Yes! I have done a scurrilous thing. The fiend take you!

Our soldiers will eat carrion for three months longer.”

 

Then he explained that Gagneux, the disgusting Gagneux, had a

horribly level head and that he had persuaded him—the major—to

strike a bargain. He would refrain from informing the colonel, and

he would even make a present of the two thousand francs and replace

the forged receipts by genuine ones, on condition that the major

bound himself to renew the meat contract. It was a settled thing.

 

“Ah,” continued Laguitte,