Nana - Émile Zola (good books to read for young adults txt) 📗
- Author: Émile Zola
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ever since Bordenave had forbidden him the other, came and
buttonholed the count in order to keep himself in countenance and
offered at the same time to show him the dressing rooms. An
increasing sense of languor had left Muffat without any power of
resistance, and after looking round for the Marquis de Chouard, who
had disappeared, he ended by following the journalist. He
experienced a mingled feeling of relief and anxiety as he left the
wings whence he had been listening to Nana’s songs.
Fauchery had already preceded him up the staircase, which was closed
on the first and second floors by low-paneled doors. It was one of
those stairways which you find in miserable tenements. Count Muffat
had seen many such during his rounds as member of the Benevolent
Organization. It was bare and dilapidated: there was a wash of
yellow paint on its walls; its steps had been worn by the incessant
passage of feet, and its iron balustrade had grown smooth under the
friction of many hands. On a level with the floor on every
stairhead there was a low window which resembled a deep, square
venthole, while in lanterns fastened to the walls flaring gas jets
crudely illuminatcd the surrounding squalor and gave out a glowing
heat which, as it mounted up the narrow stairwell, grew ever more
intense.
When he reached the foot of the stairs the count once more felt the
hot breath upon his neck and shoulders. As of old it was laden with
the odor of women, wafted amid floods of light and sound from the
dressing rooms above, and now with every upward step he took the
musky scent of powders and the tart perfume of toilet vinegars
heated and bewildered him more and more. On the first floor two
corridors ran backward, branching sharply off and presenting a set
of doors to view which were painted yellow and numbered with great
white numerals in such a way as to suggest a hotel with a bad
reputation. The tiles on the floor had been many of them unbedded,
and the old house being in a state of subsidence, they stuck up like
hummocks. The count dashed recklessly forward, glanced through a
half-open door and saw a very dirty room which resembled a barber’s
shop in a poor part of the town. In was furnished with two chairs,
a mirror and a small table containing a drawer which had been
blackened by the grease from brushes and combs. A great perspiring
fellow with smoking shoulders was changing his linen there, while in
a similar room next door a woman was drawing on her gloves
preparatory to departure. Her hair was damp and out of curl, as
though she had just had a bath. But Fauchery began calling the
count, and the latter was rushing up without delay when a furious
“damn!” burst from the corridor on the right. Mathilde, a little
drab of a miss, had just broken her washhand basin, the soapy water
from which was flowing out to the stairhead. A dressing room door
banged noisily. Two women in their stays skipped across the
passage, and another, with the hem of her shift in her mouth,
appeared and immediately vanished from view. Then followed a sound
of laughter, a dispute, the snatch of a song which was suddenly
broken off short. All along the passage naked gleams, sudden
visions of white skin and wan underlinen were observable through
chinks in doorways. Two girls were making very merry, showing each
other their birthmarks. One of them, a very young girl, almost a
child, had drawn her skirts up over her knees in order to sew up a
rent in her drawers, and the dressers, catching sight of the two
men, drew some curtains half to for decency’s sake. The wild
stampede which follows the end of a play had already begun, the
grand removal of white paint and rouge, the reassumption amid clouds
of rice powder of ordinary attire. The strange animal scent came in
whiffs of redoubled intensity through the lines of banging doors.
On the third story Muffat abandoned himself to the feeling of
intoxication which was overpowering him. For the chorus girls’
dressing room was there, and you saw a crowd of twenty women and a
wild display of soaps and flasks of lavender water. The place
resembled the common room in a slum lodging house. As he passed by
he heard fierce sounds of washing behind a closed door and a perfect
storm raging in a washhand basin. And as he was mounting up to the
topmost story of all, curiosity led him to risk one more little peep
through an open loophole. The room was empty, and under the flare
of the gas a solitary chamber pot stood forgotten among a heap of
petticoats trailing on the floor. This room afforded him his
ultimate impression. Upstairs on the fourth floor he was well-nigh
suffocated. All the scents, all the blasts of heat, had found their
goal there. The yellow ceiling looked as if it had been baked, and
a lamp burned amid fumes of russet-colored fog. For some seconds he
leaned upon the iron balustrade which felt warm and damp and well-nigh human to the touch. And he shut his eyes and drew a long
breath and drank in the sexual atmosphere of the place. Hitherto he
had been utterly ignorant of it, but now it beat full in his face.
“Do come here,” shouted Fauchery, who had vanished some moments ago.
“You’re being asked for.”
At the end of the corridor was the dressing room belonging to
Clarisse and Simonne. It was a long, ill-built room under the roof
with a garret ceiling and sloping walls. The light penetrated to it
from two deep-set openings high up in the wall, but at that hour of
the night the dressing room was lit by flaring gas. It was papered
with a paper at seven sous a roll with a pattern of roses twining
over green trelliswork. Two boards, placed near one another and
covered with oilcloth, did duty for dressing tables. They were
black with spilled water, and underneath them was a fine medley of
dinted zinc jugs, slop pails and coarse yellow earthenware crocks.
There was an array of fancy articles in the room—a battered, soiled
and well-worn array of chipped basins, of toothless combs, of all
those manifold untidy trifles which, in their hurry and
carelessness, two women will leave scattered about when they undress
and wash together amid purely temporary surroundings, the dirty
aspect of which has ceased to concern them.
“Do come here,” Fauchery repeated with the good-humored familiarity
which men adopt among their fallen sisters. “Clarisse is wanting to
kiss you.”
Muffat entered the room at last. But what was his surprise when he
found the Marquis de Chouard snugly enscounced on a chair between
the two dressing tables! The marquis had withdrawn thither some
time ago. He was spreading his feet apart because a pail was
leaking and letting a whitish flood spread over the floor. He was
visibly much at his ease, as became a man who knew all the snug
corners, and had grown quite merry in the close dressing room, where
people might have been bathing, and amid those quietly immodest
feminine surroundings which the uncleanness of the little place
rendered at once natural and poignant.
“D’you go with the old boy?” Simonne asked Clarisse in a whisper.
“Rather!” replied the latter aloud.
The dresser, a very ugly and extremely familiar young girl, who was
helping Simonne into her coat, positively writhed with laughter.
The three pushed each other and babbled little phrases which
redoubled their merriment.
“Come, Clarisse, kiss the gentleman,” said Fauchery. “You know,
he’s got the rhino.”
And turning to the count:
“You’ll see, she’s very nice! She’s going to kiss you!”
But Clarisse was disgusted by the men. She spoke in violent terms
of the dirty lot waiting at the porter’s lodge down below. Besides,
she was in a hurry to go downstairs again; they were making her miss
her last scene. Then as Fauchery blocked up the doorway, she gave
Muffat a couple of kisses on the whiskers, remarking as she did so:
“It’s not for you, at any rate! It’s for that nuisance Fauchery!”
And with that she darted off, and the count remained much
embarrassed in his father-in-law’s presence. The blood had rushed
to his face. In Nana’s dressing room, amid all the luxury of
hangings and mirrors, he had not experienced the sharp physical
sensation which the shameful wretchedness of that sorry garret
excited within him, redolent as it was of these two girls’ self-abandonment. Meanwhile the marquis had hurried in the rear of
Simonne, who was making off at the top of her pace, and he kept
whispering in her ear while she shook her head in token of refusal.
Fauchery followed them, laughing. And with that the count found
himself alone with the dresser, who was washing out the basins.
Accordingly he took his departure, too, his legs almost failing
under him. Once more he put up flights of half-dressed women and
caused doors to bang as he advanced. But amid the disorderly,
disbanded troops of girls to be found on each of the four stories,
he was only distinctly aware of a cat, a great tortoise-shell cat,
which went gliding upstairs through the ovenlike place where the air
was poisoned with musk, rubbing its back against the banisters and
keeping its tail exceedingly erect.
“Yes, to be sure!” said a woman hoarsely. “I thought they’d keep us
back tonight! What a nuisance they are with their calls!”
The end had come; the curtain had just fallen. There was a
veritable stampede on the staircase—its walls rang with
exclamations, and everyone was in a savage hurry to dress and be
off. As Count Muffat came down the last step or two he saw Nana and
the prince passing slowly along the passage. The young woman halted
and lowered her voice as she said with a smile:
“All right then—by and by!”
The prince returned to the stage, where Bordenave was awaiting him.
And left alone with Nana, Muffat gave way to an impulse of anger and
desire. He ran up behind her and, as she was on the point of
entering her dressing room, imprinted a rough kiss on her neck among
little golden hairs curling low down between her shoulders. It was
as though he had returned the kiss that had been given him upstairs.
Nana was in a fury; she lifted her hand, but when she recognized the
count she smiled.
“Oh, you frightened me,” she said simply.
And her smile was adorable in its embarrassment and submissiveness,
as though she had despaired of this kiss and were happy to have
received it. But she could do nothing for him either that evening
or the day after. It was a case of waiting. Nay, even if it had
been in her power she would still have let herself be desired. Her
glance said as much. At length she continued:
“I’m a landowner, you know. Yes, I’m buying a country house near
Orleans, in a part of the world to which you sometimes betake
yourself. Baby told me you did—little Georges Hugon, I mean. You
know him? So come and see me down there.”
The count was a shy man, and the thought of his roughness had
frightened him; he was ashamed of what he had done and he bowed
ceremoniously, promising at the same time to take advantage of her
invitation. Then he walked off as one who dreams.
He was rejoining the prince when, passing in front of the foyer, he
heard Satin screaming out:
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