Nana - Émile Zola (good books to read for young adults txt) 📗
- Author: Émile Zola
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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,
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