At the Varietés they were giving
the thirty-fourth performance of the Blonde Venus.
The first act had just finished, and in the greenroom
Simonne, dressed as the little laundress, was standing
in front of a console table, surmounted by a looking
glass and situated between the two corner doors which
opened obliquely on the end of the dressing-room passage.
No one was with her, and she was scrutinizing her face
and rubbing her finger up and down below her eyes
with a view to putting the finishing touches to her
make-up. The gas jets on either side of the mirror
flooded her with warm, crude light.
“Has he arrived?” asked
Prulliere, entering the room in his Alpine admiral’s
costume, which was set off by a big sword, enormous
top boots and a vast tuft of plumes.
“Who d’you mean?”
said Simonne, taking no notice of him and laughing
into the mirror in order to see how her lips looked.
“The prince.”
“I don’t know; I’ve
just come down. Oh, he’s certainly due here
tonight; he comes every time!”
Prulliere had drawn near the hearth
opposite the console table, where a coke fire was
blazing and two more gas jets were flaring brightly.
He lifted his eyes and looked at the clock and the
barometer on his right hand and on his left.
They had gilded sphinxes by way of adornment in the
style of the First Empire. Then he stretched himself
out in a huge armchair with ears, the green velvet
of which had been so worn by four generations of comedians
that it looked yellow in places, and there he stayed,
with moveless limbs and vacant eyes, in that weary
and resigned attitude peculiar to actors who are used
to long waits before their turn for going on the stage.
Old Bosc, too, had just made his appearance.
He came in dragging one foot behind the other and
coughing. He was wrapped in an old box coat,
part of which had slipped from his shoulder in such
a way as to uncover the gold-laced cloak of King Dagobert.
He put his crown on the piano and for a moment or
two stood moodily stamping his feet. His hands
were trembling slightly with the first beginnings of
alcoholism, but he looked a sterling old fellow for
all that, and a long white beard lent that fiery tippler’s
face of his a truly venerable appearance. Then
in the silence of the room, while the shower of hail
was whipping the panes of the great window that looked
out on the courtyard, he shook himself disgustedly.
“What filthy weather!” he growled.
Simonne and Prulliere did not move.
Four or five pictures a landscape, a portrait
of the actor Vernet hung yellowing in the
hot glare of the gas, and a bust of Potier, one of
the bygone glories of the Varietés, stood gazing
vacant-eyed from its pedestal. But just then there
was a burst of voices outside. It was Fontan,
dressed for the second act. He was a young dandy,
and his habiliments, even to his gloves, were entirely
yellow.
“Now say you don’t know!”
he shouted, gesticulating. “Today’s
my patron saint’s day!”
“What?” asked Simonne,
coming up smilingly, as though attracted by the huge
nose and the vast, comic mouth of the man. “D’you
answer to the name of Achille?”
“Exactly so! And I’m
going to get ’em to tell Madame Bron to send
up champagne after the second act.”
For some seconds a bell had been ringing
in the distance. The long-drawn sound grew fainter,
then louder, and when the bell ceased a shout ran up
the stair and down it till it was lost along the passages.
“All on the stage for the second act! All
on the stage for the second act!” The sound
drew near, and a little pale-faced man passed by the
greenroom doors, outside each of which he yelled at
the top of his shrill voice, “On the stage for
the second act!”
“The deuce, it’s champagne!”
said Prulliere without appearing to hear the din.
“You’re prospering!”
“If I were you I should have
it in from the cafe,” old Bosc slowly announced.
He was sitting on a bench covered with green velvet,
with his head against the wall.
But Simonne said that it was one’s
duty to consider Mme Bron’s small perquisites.
She clapped her hands excitedly and devoured Fontan
with her gaze while his long goatlike visage kept
up a continuous twitching of eyes and nose and mouth.
“Oh, that Fontan!” she
murmured. “There’s no one like him,
no one like him!”
The two greenroom doors stood wide
open to the corridor leading to the wings. And
along the yellow wall, which was brightly lit up by
a gas lamp out of view, passed a string of rapidly
moving shadows men in costume, women with
shawls over their scant attire, in a word, the whole
of the characters in the second act, who would shortly
make their appearance as masqeuraders in the ball
at the Boule Noire. And at the end
of the corridor became audible a shuffling of feet
as these people clattered down the five wooden steps
which led to the stage. As the big Clarisse went
running by Simonne called to her, but she said she
would be back directly. And, indeed, she reappeared
almost at once, shivering in the thin tunic and scarf
which she wore as Iris.
“God bless me!” she said.
“It isn’t warm, and I’ve left my
furs in my dressing room!”
Then as she stood toasting her legs
in their warm rose-colored tights in front of the
fireplace she resumed:
“The prince has arrived.”
“Oh!” cried the rest with the utmost curiosity.
“Yes, that’s why I ran
down: I wanted to see. He’s in the
first stage box to the right, the same he was in on
Thursday. It’s the third time he’s
been this week, eh? That’s Nana; well, she’s
in luck’s way! I was willing to wager he
wouldn’t come again.”
Simonne opened her lips to speak,
but her remarks were drowned by a fresh shout which
arose close to the greenroom. In the passage the
callboy was yelling at the top of his shrill voice,
“They’ve knocked!”
“Three times!” said Simonne
when she was again able to speak. “It’s
getting exciting. You know, he won’t go
to her place; he takes her to his. And it seems
that he has to pay for it too!”
“Egad! It’s a case
of when one ‘has to go out,’” muttered
Prulliere wickedly, and he got up to have a last look
at the mirror as became a handsome fellow whom the
boxes adored.
“They’ve knocked!
They’ve knocked!” the callboy kept repeating
in tones that died gradually away in the distance
as he passed through the various stories and corridors.
Fontan thereupon, knowing how it had
all gone off on the first occasion the prince and
Nana met, told the two women the whole story while
they in their turn crowded against him and laughed
at the tops of their voices whenever he stooped to
whisper certain details in their ears. Old Bosc
had never budged an inch he was totally
indifferent. That sort of thing no longer interested
him now. He was stroking a great tortoise-shell
cat which was lying curled up on the bench. He
did so quite beautifully and ended by taking her in
his arms with the tender good nature becoming a worn-out
monarch. The cat arched its back and then, after
a prolonged sniff at the big white beard, the gluey
odor of which doubtless disgusted her, she turned
and, curling herself up, went to sleep again on the
bench beside him. Bosc remained grave and absorbed.
“That’s all right, but
if I were you I should drink the champagne at the
restaurant its better there,” he said,
suddenly addressing Fontan when he had finished his
recital.
“The curtain’s up!”
cried the callboy in cracked and long-drawn accents
“The curtain’s up! The curtain’s
up!”
The shout sounded for some moments,
during which there had been a noise of rapid footsteps.
Through the suddenly opened door of the passage came
a burst of music and a far-off murmur of voices, and
then the door shut to again and you could hear its
dull thud as it wedged itself into position once more.
A heavy, peaceful, atmosphere again
pervaded the greenroom, as though the place were situated
a hundred leagues from the house where crowds were
applauding. Simonne and Clarisse were still on
the topic of Nana. There was a girl who never
hurried herself! Why, yesterday she had again
come on too late! But there was a silence, for
a tall damsel had just craned her head in at the door
and, seeing that she had made a mistake, had departed
to the other end of the passage. It was Satin.
Wearing a hat and a small veil for the nonce she was
affecting the manner of a lady about to pay a call.
“A pretty trollop!” muttered
Prulliere, who had been coming across her for a year
past at the Cafe des Varietés.
And at this Simonne told them how Nana had recognized
in Satin an old schoolmate, had taken a vast fancy
to her and was now plaguing Bordenave to let her make
a first appearance on the stage.
“How d’ye do?” said
Fontan, shaking hands with Mignon and Fauchery, who
now came into the room.
Old Bosc himself gave them the tips
of his fingers while the two women kissed Mignon.
“A good house this evening?” queried Fauchery.
“Oh, a splendid one!” replied Prulliere.
“You should see ’em gaping.”
“I say, my little dears,” remarked Mignon,
“it must be your turn!”
Oh, all in good time! They were
only at the fourth scene as yet, but Bosc got up in
obedience to instinct, as became a rattling old actor
who felt that his cue was coming. At that very
moment the callboy was opening the door.
“Monsieur Bosc!” he called. “Mademoiselle
Simonne!”
Simonne flung a fur-lined pelisse
briskly over her shoulders and went out. Bosc,
without hurrying at all, went and got his crown, which
he settled on his brow with a rap. Then dragging
himself unsteadily along in his greatcoat, he took
his departure, grumbling and looking as annoyed as
a man who has been rudely disturbed.
“You were very amiable in your
last notice,” continued Fontan, addressing Fauchery.
“Only why do you say that comedians are vain?”
“Yes, my little man, why d’you
say that?” shouted Mignon, bringing down his
huge hands on the journalist’s slender shoulders
with such force as almost to double him up.
Prulliere and Clarisse refrained from
laughing aloud. For some time past the whole
company had been deriving amusement from a comedy which
was going on in the wings. Mignon, rendered frantic
by his wife’s caprice and annoyed at the thought
that this man Fauchery brought nothing but a certain
doubtful notoriety to his household, had conceived
the idea of revenging himself on the journalist by
overwhelming him with tokens of friendship. Every
evening, therefore, when he met him behind scenes he
would shower friendly slaps on his back and shoulders,
as though fairly carried away by an outburst of tenderness,
and Fauchery, who was a frail, small man in comparison
with such a giant, was fain to take the raps with
a strained smile in order not to quarrel with Rose’s
husband.
“Aha, my buck, you’ve
insulted Fontan,” resumed Mignon, who was doing
his best to force the joke. “Stand on guard!
One two got him right in the
middle of his chest!”
He lunged and struck the young man
with such force that the latter grew very pale and
could not speak for some seconds. With a wink
Clarisse showed the others where Rose Mignon was standing
on the threshold of the greenroom. Rose had witnessed
the scene, and she marched straight up to the journalist,
as though she had failed to notice her husband and,
standing on tiptoe, bare-armed and in baby costume,
she held her face up to him with a caressing, infantine
pout.
“Good evening, baby,”
said Fauchery, kissing her familiarly.
Thus he indemnified himself.
Mignon, however, did not seem to have observed this
kiss, for everybody kissed his wife at the theater.
But he laughed and gave the journalist a keen little
look. The latter would assurely have to pay for
Rose’s bravado.
In the passage the tightly shutting
door opened and closed again, and a tempest of applause
was blown as far as the greenroom. Simonne came
in after her scene.
“Oh, Father Bosc has just
scored!” she cried. “The prince was
writhing with laughter and applauded with the rest
as though he had been paid to. I say, do you
know the big man sitting beside the prince in the
stage box? A handsome man, with a very sedate
expression and splendid whiskers!”
“It’s Count Muffat,”
replied Fauchery. “I know that the prince,
when he was at the empress’s the day before
yesterday, invited him to dinner for tonight.
He’ll have corrupted him afterward!”
“So that’s Count Muffat!
We know his father-in-law, eh, Auguste?” said
Rose, addressing her remark to Mignon. “You
know the Marquis de Chouard, at whose place I went
to sing? Well, he’s in the house too.
I noticed him at the back of a box. There’s
an old boy for you!”
Prulliere, who had just put on his
huge plume of feathers, turned round and called her.
“Hi, Rose! Let’s go now!”
She ran after him, leaving her sentence
unfinished. At that moment Mme Bron, the portress
of the theater, passed by the door with an immense
bouquet in her arms. Simonne asked cheerfully
if it was for her, but the porter woman did not vouchsafe
an answer and only pointed her chin toward Nana’s
dressing room at the end of the passage. Oh, that
Nana! They were loading her with flowers!
Then when Mme Bron returned she handed a letter to
Clarisse, who allowed a smothered oath to escape her.
That beggar La Faloise again! There was a fellow
who wouldn’t let her alone! And when she
learned the gentleman in question was waiting for
her at the porter’s lodge she shrieked:
“Tell him I’m coming down
after this act. I’m going to catch him one
on the face.”
Fontan had rushed forward, shouting:
“Madame Bron, just listen.
Please listen, Madame Bron. I want you to send
up six bottles of champagne between the acts.”
But the callboy had again made his
appearance. He was out of breath, and in a singsong
voice he called out:
“All to go on the stage!
It’s your turn, Monsieur Fontan. Make haste,
make haste!”
“Yes, yes, I’m going,
Father Barillot,” replied Fontan in a flurry.
And he ran after Mme Bron and continued:
“You understand, eh? Six
bottles of champagne in the greenroom between the
acts. It’s my patron saint’s day,
and I’m standing the racket.”
Simonne and Clarisse had gone off
with a great rustling of skirts. Everybody was
swallowed up in the distance, and when the passage
door had banged with its usual hollow sound a fresh
hail shower was heard beating against the windows
in the now-silent greenroom. Barillot, a small,
pale-faced ancient, who for thirty years had been a
servant in the theater, had advanced familiarly toward
Mignon and had presented his open snuffbox to him.
This proffer of a pinch and its acceptance allowed
him a minute’s rest in his interminable career
up and down stairs and along the dressing-room passage.
He certainly had still to look up Mme Nana, as he
called her, but she was one of those who followed her
own sweet will and didn’t care a pin for penalties.
Why, if she chose to be too late she was too late!
But he stopped short and murmured in great surprise:
“Well, I never! She’s
ready; here she is! She must know that the prince
is here.”
Indeed, Nana appeared in the corridor.
She was dressed as a fish hag: her arms and face
were plastered with white paint, and she had a couple
of red dabs under her eyes. Without entering the
greenroom she contented herself by nodding to Mignon
and Fauchery.
“How do? You’re all right?”
Only Mignon shook her outstretched
hand, and she hied royally on her way, followed by
her dresser, who almost trod on her heels while stooping
to adjust the folds of her skirt. In the rear
of the dresser came Satin, closing the procession
and trying to look quite the lady, though she was
already bored to death.
“And Steiner?” asked Mignon sharply.
“Monsieur Steiner has gone away
to the Loiret,” said Barillot, preparing to
return to the neighborhood of the stage. “I
expect he’s gone to buy a country place in those
parts.”
“Ah yes, I know, Nana’s country place.”
Mignon had grown suddenly serious.
Oh, that Steiner! He had promised Rose a fine
house in the old days! Well, well, it wouldn’t
do to grow angry with anybody. Here was a position
that would have to be won again. From fireplace
to console table Mignon paced, sunk in thought yet
still unconquered by circumstances. There was
no one in the greenroom now save Fauchery and himself.
The journalist was tired and had flung himself back
into the recesses of the big armchair. There he
stayed with half-closed eyes and as quiet as quiet
could be, while the other glanced down at him as he
passed. When they were alone Mignon scorned to
slap him at every turn. What good would it have
done, since nobody would have enjoyed the spectacle?
He was far too disinterested to be personally entertained
by the farcical scenes in which he figured as a bantering
husband. Glad of this short-lived respite, Fauchery
stretched his feet out languidly toward the fire and
let his upturned eyes wander from the barometer to
the clock. In the course of his march Mignon planted
himself in front of Potier’s bust, looked at
it without seeming to see it and then turned back
to the window, outside which yawned the darkling gulf
of the courtyard. The rain had ceased, and there
was now a deep silence in the room, which the fierce
heat of the coke fire and the flare of the gas jets
rendered still more oppressive. Not a sound came
from the wings: the staircase and the passages
were deadly still.
That choking sensation of quiet, which
behind the scenes immediately precedes the end of
an act, had begun to pervade the empty greenroom.
Indeed, the place seemed to be drowsing off through
very breathlessness amid that faint murmur which the
stage gives forth when the whole troupe are raising
the deafening uproar of some grand finale.
“Oh, the cows!” Bordenave
suddenly shouted in his hoarse voice.
He had only just come up, and he was
already howling complaints about two chorus girls
who had nearly fallen flat on the stage because they
were playing the fool together. When his eye lit
on Mignon and Fauchery he called them; he wanted to
show them something. The prince had just notified
a desire to compliment Nana in her dressing room during
the next interval. But as he was leading them
into the wings the stage manager passed.
“Just you find those hags Fernande
and Maria!” cried Bordenave savagely.
Then calming down and endeavoring
to assume the dignified expression worn by “heavy
fathers,” he wiped his face with his pocket handkerchief
and added:
“I am now going to receive His Highness.”
The curtain fell amid a long-drawn
salvo of applause. Then across the twilight stage,
which was no longer lit up by the footlights, there
followed a disorderly retreat. Actors and supers
and chorus made haste to get back to their dressing
rooms while the sceneshifters rapidly changed the
scenery. Simonne and Clarisse, however, had remained
“at the top,” talking together in whispers.
On the stage, in an interval between their lines,
they had just settled a little matter. Clarisse,
after viewing the thing in every light, found she
preferred not to see La Faloise, who could never decide
to leave her for Gaga, and so Simonne was simply to
go and explain that a woman ought not to be palled
up to in that fashion! At last she agreed to
undertake the mission.
Then Simonne, in her theatrical laundress’s
attire but with furs over her shoulders, ran down
the greasy steps of the narrow, winding stairs which
led between damp walls to the porter’s lodge.
This lodge, situated between the actors’ staircase
and that of the management, was shut in to right and
left by large glass partitions and resembled a huge
transparent lantern in which two gas jets were flaring.
There was a set of pigeonholes in
the place in which were piled letters and newspapers,
while on the table various bouquets lay awaiting their
recipients in close proximity to neglected heaps of
dirty plates and to an old pair of stays, the eyelets
of which the portress was busy mending. And in
the middle of this untidy, ill-kept storeroom sat four
fashionable, white-gloved society men. They occupied
as many ancient straw-bottomed chairs and, with an
expression at once patient and submissive, kept sharply
turning their heads in Mme Bron’s direction
every time she came down from the theater overhead,
for on such occasions she was the bearer of replies.
Indeed, she had but now handed a note to a young man
who had hurried out to open it beneath the gaslight
in the vestibule, where he had grown slightly pale
on reading the classic phrase how often
had others read it in that very place! “Impossible
tonight, my dearie! I’m booked!” La
Faloise sat on one of these chairs at the back of
the room, between the table and the stove. He
seemed bent on passing the evening there, and yet he
was not quite happy. Indeed, he kept tucking
up his long legs in his endeavors to escape from a
whole litter of black kittens who were gamboling wildly
round them while the mother cat sat bolt upright, staring
at him with yellow eyes.
“Ah, it’s you, Mademoiselle
Simonne! What can I do for you?” asked the
portress.
Simonne begged her to send La Faloise
out to her. But Mme Bron was unable to comply
with her wishes all at once. Under the stairs
in a sort of deep cupboard she kept a little bar,
whither the supers were wont to descend for drinks
between the acts, and seeing that just at that moment
there were five or six tall lubbers there who, still
dressed as Boule Noire masqueraders, were
dying of thirst and in a great hurry, she lost her
head a bit. A gas jet was flaring in the cupboard,
within which it was possible to descry a tin-covered
table and some shelves garnished with half-emptied
bottles. Whenever the door of this coalhole was
opened a violent whiff of alcohol mingled with the
scent of stale cooking in the lodge, as well as with
the penetrating scent of the flowers upon the table.
“Well now,” continued
the portress when she had served the supers, “is
it the little dark chap out there you want?”
“No, no; don’t be silly!”
said Simonne. “It’s the lanky one
by the side of the stove. Your cat’s sniffing
at his trouser legs!”
And with that she carried La Faloise
off into the lobby, while the other gentlemen once
more resigned themselves to their fate and to semisuffocation
and the masqueraders drank on the stairs and indulged
in rough horseplay and guttural drunken jests.
On the stage above Bordenave was wild
with the sceneshifters, who seemed never to have done
changing scenes. They appeared to be acting of
set purpose the prince would certainly have
some set piece or other tumbling on his head.
“Up with it! Up with it!” shouted
the foreman.
At length the canvas at the back of
the stage was raised into position, and the stage
was clear. Mignon, who had kept his eye on Fauchery,
seized this opportunity in order to start his pummeling
matches again. He hugged him in his long arms
and cried:
“Oh, take care! That mast just missed crushing
you!”
And he carried him off and shook him
before setting him down again. In view of the
sceneshifters’ exaggerated mirth, Fauchery grew
white. His lips trembled, and he was ready to
flare up in anger while Mignon, shamming good nature,
was clapping him on the shoulder with such affectionate
violence as nearly to pulverize him.
“I value your health, I do!”
he kept repeating. “Egad! I should
be in a pretty pickle if anything serious happened
to you!”
But just then a whisper ran through
their midst: “The prince! The prince!”
And everybody turned and looked at the little door
which opened out of the main body of the house.
At first nothing was visible save Bordenave’s
round back and beefy neck, which bobbed down and arched
up in a series of obsequious obeisances. Then
the prince made his appearance. Largely and strongly
built, light of beard and rosy of hue, he was not
lacking in the kind of distinction peculiar to a sturdy
man of pleasure, the square contours of whose limbs
are clearly defined by the irreproachable cut of a
frock coat. Behind him walked Count Muffat and
the Marquis de Chouard, but this particular corner
of the theater being dark, the group were lost to
view amid huge moving shadows.
In order fittingly to address the
son of a queen, who would someday occupy a throne,
Bordenave had assumed the tone of a man exhibiting
a bear in the street. In a voice tremulous with
false emotion he kept repeating:
“If His Highness will have the
goodness to follow me would His Highness
deign to come this way? His Highness will take
care!”
The prince did not hurry in the least.
On the contrary, he was greatly interested and kept
pausing in order to look at the sceneshifters’
maneuvers. A batten had just been lowered, and
the group of gaslights high up among its iron crossbars
illuminated the stage with a wide beam of light.
Muffat, who had never yet been behind scenes at a theater,
was even more astonished than the rest. An uneasy
feeling of mingled fear and vague repugnance took
possession of him. He looked up into the heights
above him, where more battens, the gas jets on which
were burning low, gleamed like galaxies of little
bluish stars amid a chaos of iron rods, connecting
lines of all sizes, hanging stages and canvases spread
out in space, like huge cloths hung out to dry.
“Lower away!” shouted the foreman unexpectedly.
And the prince himself had to warn
the count, for a canvas was descending. They
were setting the scenery for the third act, which was
the grotto on Mount Etna. Men were busy planting
masts in the sockets, while others went and took frames
which were leaning against the walls of the stage
and proceeded to lash them with strong cords to the
poles already in position. At the back of the
stage, with a view to producing the bright rays thrown
by Vulcan’s glowing forge, a stand had been
fixed by a limelight man, who was now lighting various
burners under red glasses. The scene was one
of confusion, verging to all appearances on absolute
chaos, but every little move had been prearranged.
Nay, amid all the scurry the whistle blower even took
a few turns, stepping short as he did so, in order
to rest his legs.
“His Highness overwhelms me,”
said Bordenave, still bowing low. “The
theater is not large, but we do what we can. Now
if His Highness deigns to follow me ”
Count Muffat was already making for
the dressing-room passage. The really sharp downward
slope of the stage had surprised him disagreeably,
and he owed no small part of his present anxiety to
a feeling that its boards were moving under his feet.
Through the open sockets gas was descried burning
in the “dock.” Human voices and blasts
of air, as from a vault, came up thence, and, looking
down into the depths of gloom, one became aware of
a whole subterranean existence. But just as the
count was going up the stage a small incident occurred
to stop him. Two little women, dressed for the
third act, were chatting by the peephole in the curtain.
One of them, straining forward and widening the hole
with her fingers in order the better to observe things,
was scanning the house beyond.
“I see him,” said she sharply. “Oh,
what a mug!”
Horrified, Bordenave had much ado
not to give her a kick. But the prince smiled
and looked pleased and excited by the remark.
He gazed warmly at the little woman who did not care
a button for His Highness, and she, on her part, laughed
unblushingly. Bordenave, however, persuaded the
prince to follow him. Muffat was beginning to
perspire; he had taken his hat off. What inconvenienced
him most was the stuffy, dense, overheated air of
the place with its strong, haunting smell, a smell
peculiar to this part of a theater, and, as such,
compact of the reek of gas, of the glue used in the
manufacture of the scenery, of dirty dark nooks and
corners and of questionably clean chorus girls.
In the passage the air was still more suffocating,
and one seemed to breathe a poisoned atmosphere, which
was occasionally relieved by the acid scents of toilet
waters and the perfumes of various soaps emanating
from the dressing rooms. The count lifted his
eyes as he passed and glanced up the staircase, for
he was well-nigh startled by the keen flood of light
and warmth which flowed down upon his back and shoulders.
High up above him there was a clicking of ewers and
basins, a sound of laughter and of people calling to
one another, a banging of doors, which in their continual
opening and shutting allowed an odor of womankind
to escape a musky scent of oils and essences
mingling with the natural pungency exhaled from human
tresses. He did not stop. Nay, he hastened
his walk: he almost ran, his skin tingling with
the breath of that fiery approach to a world he knew
nothing of.
“A theater’s a curious
sight, eh?” said the Marquis de Chouard with
the enchanted expression of a man who once more finds
himself amid familiar surroundings.
But Bordenave had at length reached
Nana’s dressing room at the end of the passage.
He quietly turned the door handle; then, cringing again:
“If His Highness will have the goodness to enter ”
They heard the cry of a startled woman
and caught sight of Nana as, stripped to the waist,
she slipped behind a curtain while her dresser, who
had been in the act of drying her, stood, towel in
air, before them.
“Oh, it is silly to come
in that way!” cried Nana from her hiding place.
“Don’t come in; you see you mustn’t
come in!”
Bordenave did not seem to relish this sudden flight.
“Do stay where you were, my
dear. Why, it doesn’t matter,” he
said. “It’s His Highness. Come,
come, don’t be childish.”
And when she still refused to make
her appearance for she was startled as
yet, though she had begun to laugh he added
in peevish, paternal tones:
“Good heavens, these gentlemen
know perfectly well what a woman looks like.
They won’t eat you.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” said
the prince wittily.
With that the whole company began
laughing in an exaggerated manner in order to pay
him proper court.
“An exquisitely witty speech an
altogether Parisian speech,” as Bordenave remarked.
Nana vouchsafed no further reply,
but the curtain began moving. Doubtless she was
making up her mind. Then Count Muffat, with glowing
cheeks, began to take stock of the dressing room.
It was a square room with a very low ceiling, and
it was entirely hung with a light-colored Havana stuff.
A curtain of the same material depended from a copper
rod and formed a sort of recess at the end of the room,
while two large windows opened on the courtyard of
the theater and were faced, at a distance of three
yards at most, by a leprous-looking wall against which
the panes cast squares of yellow light amid the surrounding
darkness. A large dressing glass faced a white
marble toilet table, which was garnished with a disorderly
array of flasks and glass boxes containing oils, essences
and powders. The count went up to the dressing
glass and discovered that he was looking very flushed
and had small drops of perspiration on his forehead.
He dropped his eyes and came and took up a position
in front of the toilet table, where the basin, full
of soapy water, the small, scattered, ivory toilet
utensils and the damp sponges, appeared for some moments
to absorb his attention. The feeling of dizziness
which he had experienced when he first visited Nana
in the Boulevard Haussmann once more overcame him.
He felt the thick carpet soften under foot, and the
gasjets burning by the dressing table and by the glass
seemed to shoot whistling flames about his temples.
For one moment, being afraid of fainting away under
the influence of those feminine odors which he now
re-encountered, intensified by the heat under the
low-pitched ceiling, he sat down on the edge of a softly
padded divan between the two windows. But he got
up again almost directly and, returning to the dressing
table, seemed to gaze with vacant eyes into space,
for he was thinking of a bouquet of tuberoses which
had once faded in his bedroom and had nearly killed
him in their death. When tuberoses are turning
brown they have a human smell.
“Make haste!” Bordenave
whispered, putting his head in behind the curtain.
The prince, however, was listening
complaisantly to the Marquis de Chouard, who had taken
up a hare’s-foot on the dressing table and had
begun explaining the way grease paint is put on.
In a corner of the room Satin, with her pure, virginal
face, was scanning the gentlemen keenly, while the
dresser, Mme Jules by name, was getting ready Venus’
tights and tunic. Mme Jules was a woman of no
age. She had the parchment skin and changeless
features peculiar to old maids whom no one ever knew
in their younger years. She had indeed shriveled
up in the burning atmosphere of the dressing rooms
and amid the most famous thighs and bosoms in all
Paris. She wore everlastingly a faded black dress,
and on her flat and sexless chest a perfect forest
of pins clustered above the spot where her heart should
have been.
“I beg your pardon, gentlemen,”
said Nana, drawing aside the curtain, “but you
took me by surprise.”
They all turned round. She had
not clothed herself at all, had, in fact, only buttoned
on a little pair of linen stays which half revealed
her bosom. When the gentlemen had put her to
flight she had scarcely begun undressing and was rapidly
taking off her fishwife’s costume. Through
the opening in her drawers behind a corner of her shift
was even now visible. There she stood, bare-armed,
bare-shouldered, bare-breasted, in all the adorable
glory of her youth and plump, fair beauty, but she
still held the curtain with one hand, as though ready
to draw it to again upon the slightest provocation.
“Yes, you took me by surprise!
I never shall dare ” she stammered
in pretty, mock confusion, while rosy blushes crossed
her neck and shoulders and smiles of embarrassment
played about her lips.
“Oh, don’t apologize,”
cried Bordenave, “since these gentlemen approve
of your good looks!”
But she still tried the hesitating,
innocent, girlish game, and, shivering as though someone
were tickling her, she continued:
“His Highness does me too great
an honor. I beg His Highness will excuse my receiving
him thus ”
“It is I who am importunate,”
said the prince, “but, madame, I could not
resist the desire of complimenting you.”
Thereupon, in order to reach her dressing
table, she walked very quietly and just as she was
through the midst of the gentlemen, who made way for
her to pass.
She had strongly marked hips, which
filled her drawers out roundly, while with swelling
bosom she still continued bowing and smiling her delicate
little smile. Suddenly she seemed to recognize
Count Muffat, and she extended her hand to him as
an old friend. Then she scolded him for not having
come to her supper party. His Highness deigned
to chaff Muffat about this, and the latter stammered
and thrilled again at the thought that for one second
he had held in his own feverish clasp a little fresh
and perfumed hand. The count had dined excellently
at the prince’s, who, indeed, was a heroic eater
and drinker. Both of them were even a little
intoxicated, but they behaved very creditably.
To hide the commotion within him Muffat could only
remark about the heat.
“Good heavens, how hot it is
here!” he said. “How do you manage
to live in such a temperature, madame?”
And conversation was about to ensue
on this topic when noisy voices were heard at the
dressing-room door. Bordenave drew back the slide
over a grated peephole of the kind used in convents.
Fontan was outside with Prulliere and Bosc, and all
three had bottles under their arms and their hands
full of glasses. He began knocking and shouting
out that it was his patron saint’s day and that
he was standing champagne round. Nana consulted
the prince with a glance. Eh! Oh dear, yes!
His Highness did not want to be in anyone’s
way; he would be only too happy! But without
waiting for permission Fontan came in, repeating in
baby accents:
“Me not a cad, me pay for champagne!”
Then all of a sudden he became aware
of the prince’s presence of which he had been
totally ignorant. He stopped short and, assuming
an air of farcical solemnity, announced:
“King Dagobert is in the corridor
and is desirous of drinking the health of His Royal
Highness.”
The prince having made answer with
a smile, Fontan’s sally was voted charming.
But the dressing room was too small to accommodate
everybody, and it became necessary to crowd up anyhow,
Satin and Mme Jules standing back against the curtain
at the end and the men clustering closely round the
half-naked Nana. The three actors still had on
the costumes they had been wearing in the second act,
and while Prulliere took off his Alpine admiral’s
cocked hat, the huge plume of which would have knocked
the ceiling, Bosc, in his purple cloak and tinware
crown, steadied himself on his tipsy old legs and
greeted the prince as became a monarch receiving the
son of a powerful neighbor. The glasses were filled,
and the company began clinking them together.
“I drink to Your Highness!” said ancient
Bosc royally.
“To the army!” added Prulliere.
“To Venus!” cried Fontan.
The prince complaisantly poised his
glass, waited quietly, bowed thrice and murmured:
“Madame! Admiral! Your Majesty!”
Then he drank it off. Count Muffat
and the Marquis de Chouard had followed his example.
There was no more jesting now the company
were at court. Actual life was prolonged in the
life of the theater, and a sort of solemn farce was
enacted under the hot flare of the gas. Nana,
quite forgetting that she was in her drawers and that
a corner of her shift stuck out behind, became the
great lady, the queen of love, in act to open her
most private palace chambers to state dignitaries.
In every sentence she used the words “Royal
Highness” and, bowing with the utmost conviction,
treated the masqueraders, Bosc and Prulliere, as if
the one were a sovereign and the other his attendant
minister. And no one dreamed of smiling at this
strange contrast, this real prince, this heir to a
throne, drinking a petty actor’s champagne and
taking his ease amid a carnival of gods, a masquerade
of royalty, in the society of dressers and courtesans,
shabby players and showmen of venal beauty. Bordenave
was simply ravished by the dramatic aspects of the
scene and began dreaming of the receipts which would
have accrued had His Highness only consented thus
to appear in the second act of the Blonde Venus.
“I say, shall we have our little
women down?” he cried, becoming familiar.
Nana would not hear of it. But
notwithstanding this, she was giving way herself.
Fontan attracted her with his comic make-up. She
brushed against him and, eying him as a woman in the
family way might do when she fancies some unpleasant
kind of food, she suddenly became extremely familiar:
“Now then, fill up again, ye great brute!”
Fontan charged the glasses afresh,
and the company drank, repeating the same toasts.
“To His Highness!”
“To the army!”
“To Venus!”
But with that Nana made a sign and
obtained silence. She raised her glass and cried:
“No, no! To Fontan! It’s Fontan’s
day; to Fontan! To Fontan!”
Then they clinked glasses a third
time and drank Fontan with all the honors. The
prince, who had noticed the young woman devouring the
actor with her eyes, saluted him with a “Monsieur
Fontan, I drink to your success!” This he said
with his customary courtesy.
But meanwhile the tail of his highness’s
frock coat was sweeping the marble of the dressing
table. The place, indeed, was like an alcove or
narrow bathroom, full as it was of the steam of hot
water and sponges and of the strong scent of essences
which mingled with the tartish, intoxicating fumes
of the champagne. The prince and Count Muffat,
between whom Nana was wedged, had to lift up their
hands so as not to brush against her hips or her breast
with every little movement. And there stood Mme
Jules, waiting, cool and rigid as ever, while Satin,
marveling in the depths of her vicious soul to see
a prince and two gentlemen in black coats going after
a naked woman in the society of dressed-up actors,
secretly concluded that fashionable people were not
so very particular after all.
But Father Barillot’s tinkling
bell approached along the passage. At the door
of the dressing room he stood amazed when he caught
sight of the three actors still clad in the costumes
which they had worn in the second act.
“Gentlemen, gentlemen,”
he stammered, “do please make haste. They’ve
just rung the bell in the public foyer.”
“Bah, the public will have to
wait!” said Bordenave placidly.
However, as the bottles were now empty,
the comedians went upstairs to dress after yet another
interchange of civilities. Bosc, having dipped
his beard in the champagne, had taken it off, and under
his venerable disguise the drunkard had suddenly reappeared.
His was the haggard, empurpled face of the old actor
who has taken to drink. At the foot of the stairs
he was heard remarking to Fontan in his boozy voice:
“I pulverized him, eh?”
He was alluding to the prince.
In Nana’s dressing room none
now remained save His Highness, the count and the
marquis. Bordenave had withdrawn with Barillot,
whom he advised not to knock without first letting
Madame know.
“You will excuse me, gentlemen?”
asked Nana, again setting to work to make up her arms
and face, of which she was now particularly careful,
owing to her nude appearance in the third act.
The prince seated himself by the Marquis
de Chouard on the divan, and Count Muffat alone remained
standing. In that suffocating heat the two glasses
of champagne they had drunk had increased their intoxication.
Satin, when she saw the gentlemen thus closeting themselves
with her friend, had deemed it discreet to vanish
behind the curtain, where she sat waiting on a trunk,
much annoyed at being compelled to remain motionless,
while Mme Jules came and went quietly without word
or look.
“You sang your numbers marvelously,” said
the prince.
And with that they began a conversation,
but their sentences were short and their pauses frequent.
Nana, indeed, was not always able to reply. After
rubbing cold cream over her arms and face with the
palm of her hand she laid on the grease paint with
the corner of a towel. For one second only she
ceased looking in the glass and smilingly stole a glance
at the prince.
“His Highness is spoiling me,”
she murmured without putting down the grease paint.
Her task was a complicated one, and
the Marquis de Chouard followed it with an expression
of devout enjoyment. He spoke in his turn.
“Could not the band accompany
you more softly?” he said. “It drowns
your voice, and that’s an unpardonable crime.”
This time Nana did not turn round.
She had taken up the hare’s-foot and was lightly
manipulating it. All her attention was concentrated
on this action, and she bent forward over her toilet
table so very far that the white round contour of
her drawers and the little patch of chemise stood
out with the unwonted tension. But she was anxious
to prove that she appreciated the old man’s
compliment and therefore made a little swinging movement
with her hips.
Silence reigned. Mme Jules had
noticed a tear in the right leg of her drawers.
She took a pin from over her heart and for a second
or so knelt on the ground, busily at work about Nana’s
leg, while the young woman, without seeming to notice
her presence, applied the rice powder, taking extreme
pains as she did so, to avoid putting any on the upper
part of her cheeks. But when the prince remarked
that if she were to come and sing in London all England
would want to applaud her, she laughed amiably and
turned round for a moment with her left cheek looking
very white amid a perfect cloud of powder. Then
she became suddenly serious, for she had come to the
operation of rouging. And with her face once
more close to the mirror, she dipped her finger in
a jar and began applying the rouge below her eyes
and gently spreading it back toward her temples.
The gentlemen maintained a respectful silence.
Count Muffat, indeed, had not yet
opened his lips. He was thinking perforce of
his own youth. The bedroom of his childish days
had been quite cold, and later, when he had reached
the age of sixteen and would give his mother a good-night
kiss every evening, he used to carry the icy feeling
of the embrace into the world of dreams. One day
in passing a half-open door he had caught sight of
a maidservant washing herself, and that was the solitary
recollection which had in any way troubled his peace
of mind from the days of puberty till the time of marriage.
Afterward he had found his wife strictly obedient to
her conjugal duties but had himself felt a species
of religious dislike to them. He had grown to
man’s estate and was now aging, in ignorance
of the flesh, in the humble observance of rigid devotional
practices and in obedience to a rule of life full
of precepts and moral laws. And now suddenly he
was dropped down in this actress’s dressing
room in the presence of this undraped courtesan.
He, who had never seen the Countess
Muffat putting on her garters, was witnessing, amid
that wild disarray of jars and basins and that strong,
sweet perfume, the intimate details of a woman’s
toilet. His whole being was in turmoil; he was
terrified by the stealthy, all-pervading influence
which for some time past Nana’s presence had
been exercising over him, and he recalled to mind
the pious accounts of diabolic possession which had
amused his early years. He was a believer in the
devil, and, in a confused kind of way, Nana was he,
with her laughter and her bosom and her hips, which
seemed swollen with many vices. But he promised
himself that he would be strong nay, he
would know how to defend himself.
“Well then, it’s agreed,”
said the prince, lounging quite comfortably on the
divan. “You will come to London next year,
and we shall receive you so cordially that you will
never return to France again. Ah, my dear Count,
you don’t value your pretty women enough.
We shall take them all from you!”
“That won’t make much
odds to him,” murmured the Marquis de Chouard
wickedly, for he occasionally said a risky thing among
friends. “The count is virtue itself.”
Hearing his virtue mentioned, Nana
looked at him so comically that Muffat felt a keen
twinge of annoyance. But directly afterward he
was surprised and angry with himself. Why, in
the presence of this courtesan, should the idea of
being virtuous embarrass him? He could have struck
her. But in attempting to take up a brush Nana
had just let it drop on the ground, and as she stooped
to pick it up he rushed forward. Their breath
mingled for one moment, and the loosened tresses of
Venus flowed over his hands. But remorse mingled
with his enjoyment, a kind of enjoyment, moreover,
peculiar to good Catholics, whom the fear of hell
torments in the midst of their sin.
At this moment Father Barillot’s
voice was heard outside the door.
“May I give the knocks, madame?
The house is growing impatient.”
“All in good time,” answered Nana quietly.
She had dipped her paint brush in
a pot of kohl, and with the point of her nose close
to the glass and her left eye closed she passed it
delicately along between her eyelashes. Muffat
stood behind her, looking on. He saw her reflection
in the mirror, with her rounded shoulders and her
bosom half hidden by a rosy shadow. And despite
all his endeavors he could not turn away his gaze
from that face so merry with dimples and so worn with
desire, which the closed eye rendered more seductive.
When she shut her right eye and passed the brush along
it he understood that he belonged to her.
“They are stamping their feet,
madame,” the callboy once more cried.
“They’ll end by smashing the seats.
May I give the knocks?”
“Oh, bother!” said Nana
impatiently. “Knock away; I don’t
care! If I’m not ready, well, they’ll
have to wait for me!”
She grew calm again and, turning to
the gentlemen, added with a smile:
“It’s true: we’ve only got
a minute left for our talk.”
Her face and arms were now finished,
and with her fingers she put two large dabs of carmine
on her lips. Count Muffat felt more excited than
ever. He was ravished by the perverse transformation
wrought by powders and paints and filled by a lawless
yearning for those young painted charms, for the too-red
mouth and the too-white face and the exaggerated eyes,
ringed round with black and burning and dying for very
love. Meanwhile Nana went behind the curtain
for a second or two in order to take off her drawers
and slip on Venus’ tights. After which,
with tranquil immodesty, she came out and undid her
little linen stays and held out her arms to Mme Jules,
who drew the short-sleeved tunic over them.
“Make haste; they’re growing angry!”
she muttered.
The prince with half-closed eyes marked
the swelling lines of her bosom with an air of connoisseurship,
while the Marquis de Chouard wagged his head involuntarily.
Muffat gazed at the carpet in order not to see any
more. At length Venus, with only her gauze veil
over her shoulders, was ready to go on the stage.
Mme Jules, with vacant, unconcerned eyes and an expression
suggestive of a little elderly wooden doll, still kept
circling round her. With brisk movements she took
pins out of the inexhaustible pincushion over her
heart and pinned up Venus’ tunic, but as she
ran over all those plump nude charms with her shriveled
hands, nothing was suggested to her. She was
as one whom her sex does not concern.
“There!” said the young
woman, taking a final look at herself in the mirror.
Bordenave was back again. He
was anxious and said the third act had begun.
“Very well! I’m coming,”
replied Nana. “Here’s a pretty fuss!
Why, it’s usually I that waits for the others.”
The gentlemen left the dressing room,
but they did not say good-by, for the prince had expressed
a desire to assist behind the scenes at the performance
of the third act. Left alone, Nana seemed greatly
surprised and looked round her in all directions.
“Where can she be?” she queried.
She was searching for Satin.
When she had found her again, waiting on her trunk
behind the curtain, Satin quietly replied:
“Certainly I didn’t want
to be in your way with all those men there!”
And she added further that she was
going now. But Nana held her back. What
a silly girl she was! Now that Bordenave had agreed
to take her on! Why, the bargain was to be struck
after the play was over! Satin hesitated.
There were too many bothers; she was out of her element!
Nevertheless, she stayed.
As the prince was coming down the
little wooden staircase a strange sound of smothered
oaths and stamping, scuffling feet became audible on
the other side of the theater. The actors waiting
for their cues were being scared by quite a serious
episode. For some seconds past Mignon had been
renewing his jokes and smothering Fauchery with caresses.
He had at last invented a little game of a novel kind
and had begun flicking the other’s nose in order,
as he phrased it, to keep the flies off him.
This kind of game naturally diverted the actors to
any extent.
But success had suddenly thrown Mignon
off his balance. He had launched forth into extravagant
courses and had given the journalist a box on the
ear, an actual, a vigorous, box on the ear. This
time he had gone too far: in the presence of
so many spectators it was impossible for Fauchery
to pocket such a blow with laughing equanimity.
Whereupon the two men had desisted from their farce,
had sprung at one another’s throats, their faces
livid with hate, and were now rolling over and over
behind a set of side lights, pounding away at each
other as though they weren’t breakable.
“Monsieur Bordenave, Monsieur
Bordenave!” said the stage manager, coming up
in a terrible flutter.
Bordenave made his excuses to the
prince and followed him. When he recognized Fauchery
and Mignon in the men on the floor he gave vent to
an expression of annoyance. They had chosen a
nice time, certainly, with His Highness on the other
side of the scenery and all that houseful of people
who might have overheard the row! To make matters
worse, Rose Mignon arrived out of breath at the very
moment she was due on the stage. Vulcan, indeed,
was giving her the cue, but Rose stood rooted to the
ground, marveling at sight of her husband and her lover
as they lay wallowing at her feet, strangling one
another, kicking, tearing their hair out and whitening
their coats with dust. They barred the way.
A sceneshifter had even stopped Fauchery’s hat
just when the devilish thing was going to bound onto
the stage in the middle of the struggle. Meanwhile
Vulcan, who had been gagging away to amuse the audience,
gave Rose her cue a second time. But she stood
motionless, still gazing at the two men.
“Oh, don’t look at them!”
Bordenave furiously whispered to her. “Go
on the stage; go on, do! It’s no business
of yours! Why, you’re missing your cue!”
And with a push from the manager,
Rose stepped over the prostrate bodies and found herself
in the flare of the footlights and in the presence
of the audience. She had quite failed to understand
why they were fighting on the floor behind her.
Trembling from head to foot and with a humming in
her ears, she came down to the footlights, Diana’s
sweet, amorous smile on her lips, and attacked the
opening lines of her duet with so feeling a voice
that the public gave her a veritable ovation.
Behind the scenery she could hear
the dull thuds caused by the two men. They had
rolled down to the wings, but fortunately the music
covered the noise made by their feet as they kicked
against them.
“By God!” yelled Bordenave
in exasperation when at last he had succeeded in separating
them. “Why couldn’t you fight at home?
You know as well as I do that I don’t like this
sort of thing. You, Mignon, you’ll do me
the pleasure of staying over here on the prompt side,
and you, Fauchery, if you leave the O.P. side I’ll
chuck you out of the theater. You understand,
eh? Prompt side and O.P. side or I forbid Rose
to bring you here at all.”
When he returned to the prince’s
presence the latter asked what was the matter.
“Oh, nothing at all,” he murmured quietly.
Nana was standing wrapped in furs,
talking to these gentlemen while awaiting her cue.
As Count Muffat was coming up in order to peep between
two of the wings at the stage, he understood from a
sign made him by the stage manager that he was to
step softly. Drowsy warmth was streaming down
from the flies, and in the wings, which were lit by
vivid patches of light, only a few people remained,
talking in low voices or making off on tiptoe.
The gasman was at his post amid an intricate arrangement
of cocks; a fireman, leaning against the side lights,
was craning forward, trying to catch a glimpse of
things, while on his seat, high up, the curtain man
was watching with resigned expression, careless of
the play, constantly on the alert for the bell to ring
him to his duty among the ropes. And amid the
close air and the shuffling of feet and the sound
of whispering, the voices of the actors on the stage
sounded strange, deadened, surprisingly discordant.
Farther off again, above the confused noises of the
band, a vast breathing sound was audible. It was
the breath of the house, which sometimes swelled up
till it burst in vague rumors, in laughter, in applause.
Though invisible, the presence of the public could
be felt, even in the silences.
“There’s something open,”
said Nana sharply, and with that she tightened the
folds of her fur cloak. “Do look, Barillot.
I bet they’ve just opened a window. Why,
one might catch one’s death of cold here!”
Barillot swore that he had closed
every window himself but suggested that possibly there
were broken panes about. The actors were always
complaining of drafts. Through the heavy warmth
of that gaslit region blasts of cold air were constantly
passing it was a regular influenza trap,
as Fontan phrased it.
“I should like to see you
in a low-cut dress,” continued Nana, growing
annoyed.
“Hush!” murmured Bordenave.
On the stage Rose rendered a phrase
in her duet so cleverly that the stalls burst into
universal applause. Nana was silent at this, and
her face grew grave. Meanwhile the count was
venturing down a passage when Barillot stopped him
and said he would make a discovery there. Indeed,
he obtained an oblique back view of the scenery and
of the wings which had been strengthened, as it were,
by a thick layer of old posters. Then he caught
sight of a corner of the stage, of the Etna cave hollowed
out in a silver mine and of Vulcan’s forge in
the background. Battens, lowered from above,
lit up a sparkling substance which had been laid on
with large dabs of the brush. Side lights with
red glasses and blue were so placed as to produce
the appearance of a fiery brazier, while on the floor
of the stage, in the far background, long lines of
gaslight had been laid down in order to throw a wall
of dark rocks into sharp relief. Hard by on a
gentle, “practicable” incline, amid little
points of light resembling the illumination lamps
scattered about in the grass on the night of a public
holiday, old Mme Drouard, who played Juno, was sitting
dazed and sleepy, waiting for her cue.
Presently there was a commotion, for
Simonne, while listening to a story Clarisse was telling
her, cried out:
“My! It’s the Tricon!”
It was indeed the Tricon, wearing
the same old curls and looking as like a litigious
great lady as ever.
When she saw Nana she went straight up to her.
“No,” said the latter
after some rapid phrases had been exchanged, “not
now.” The old lady looked grave. Just
then Prulliere passed by and shook hands with her,
while two little chorus girls stood gazing at her with
looks of deep emotion. For a moment she seemed
to hesitate. Then she beckoned to Simonne, and
the rapid exchange of sentences began again.
“Yes,” said Simonne at last. “In
half an hour.”
But as she was going upstairs again
to her dressing room, Mme Bron, who was once more
going the rounds with letters, presented one to her.
Bordenave lowered his voice and furiously reproached
the portress for having allowed the Tricon to come
in. That woman! And on such an evening of
all others! It made him so angry because His Highness
was there! Mme Bron, who had been thirty years
in the theater, replied quite sourly. How was
she to know? she asked. The Tricon did business
with all the ladies M. lé Directeur
had met her a score of times without making remarks.
And while Bordenave was muttering oaths the Tricon
stood quietly by, scrutinizing the prince as became
a woman who weighs a man at a glance. A smile
lit up her yellow face. Presently she paced slowly
off through the crowd of deeply deferential little
women.
“Immediately, eh?” she
queried, turning round again to Simonne.
Simonne seemed much worried.
The letter was from a young man to whom she had engaged
herself for that evening. She gave Mme Bron a
scribbled note in which were the words, “Impossible
tonight, darling I’m booked.”
But she was still apprehensive; the young man might
possibly wait for her in spite of everything.
As she was not playing in the third act, she had a
mind to be off at once and accordingly begged Clarisse
to go and see if the man were there. Clarisse
was only due on the stage toward the end of the act,
and so she went downstairs while Simonne ran up for
a minute to their common dressing room.
In Mme Bron’s drinking bar downstairs
a super, who was charged with the part of Pluto, was
drinking in solitude amid the folds of a great red
robe diapered with golden flames. The little business
plied by the good portress must have been progressing
finely, for the cellarlike hole under the stairs was
wet with emptied heeltaps and water. Clarisse
picked up the tunic of Iris, which was dragging over
the greasy steps behind her, but she halted prudently
at the turn in the stairs and was content simply to
crane forward and peer into the lodge. She certainly
had been quick to scent things out! Just fancy!
That idiot La Faloise was still there, sitting on
the same old chair between the table and the stove!
He had made pretense of sneaking off in front of Simonne
and had returned after her departure. For the
matter of that, the lodge was still full of gentlemen
who sat there gloved, elegant, submissive and patient
as ever. They were all waiting and viewing each
other gravely as they waited. On the table there
were now only some dirty plates, Mme Bron having recently
distributed the last of the bouquets. A single
fallen rose was withering on the floor in the neighborhood
of the black cat, who had lain down and curled herself
up while the kittens ran wild races and danced fierce
gallops among the gentlemen’s legs. Clarisse
was momentarily inclined to turn La Faloise out.
The idiot wasn’t fond of animals, and that put
the finishing touch to him! He was busy drawing
in his legs because the cat was there, and he didn’t
want to touch her.
“He’ll nip you; take care!”
said Pluto, who was a joker, as he went upstairs,
wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
After that Clarisse gave up the idea
of hauling La Faloise over the coals. She had
seen Mme Bron giving the letter to Simonne’s
young man, and he had gone out to read it under the
gas light in the lobby. “Impossible tonight,
darling I’m booked.” And
with that he had peaceably departed, as one who was
doubtless used to the formula. He, at any rate,
knew how to conduct himself! Not so the others,
the fellows who sat there doggedly on Mme Bron’s
battered straw-bottomed chairs under the great glazed
lantern, where the heat was enough to roast you and
there was an unpleasant odor. What a lot of men
it must have held! Clarisse went upstairs again
in disgust, crossed over behind scenes and nimbly
mounted three flights of steps which led to the dressing
rooms, in order to bring Simonne her reply.
Downstairs the prince had withdrawn
from the rest and stood talking to Nana. He never
left her; he stood brooding over her through half-shut
eyelids. Nana did not look at him but, smiling,
nodded yes. Suddenly, however, Count Muffat obeyed
an overmastering impulse, and leaving Bordenave, who
was explaining to him the working of the rollers and
windlasses, he came up in order to interrupt their
confabulations. Nana lifted her eyes and smiled
at him as she smiled at His Highness. But she
kept her ears open notwithstanding, for she was waiting
for her cue.
“The third act is the shortest,
I believe,” the prince began saying, for the
count’s presence embarrassed him.
She did not answer; her whole expression
altered; she was suddenly intent on her business.
With a rapid movement of the shoulders she had let
her furs slip from her, and Mme Jules, standing behind,
had caught them in her arms. And then after passing
her two hands to her hair as though to make it fast,
she went on the stage in all her nudity.
“Hush, hush!” whispered Bordenave.
The count and the prince had been
taken by surprise. There was profound silence,
and then a deep sigh and the far-off murmur of a multitude
became audible. Every evening when Venus entered
in her godlike nakedness the same effect was produced.
Then Muffat was seized with a desire to see; he put
his eye to the peephole. Above and beyond the
glowing arc formed by the footlights the dark body
of the house seemed full of ruddy vapor, and against
this neutral-tinted background, where row upon row
of faces struck a pale, uncertain note, Nana stood
forth white and vast, so that the boxes from the balcony
to the flies were blotted from view. He saw her
from behind, noted her swelling hips, her outstretched
arms, while down on the floor, on the same level as
her feet, the prompter’s head an
old man’s head with a humble, honest face stood
on the edge of the stage, looking as though it had
been severed from the body. At certain points
in her opening number an undulating movement seemed
to run from her neck to her waist and to die out in
the trailing border of her tunic. When amid a
tempest of applause she had sung her last note she
bowed, and the gauze floated forth round about her
limbs, and her hair swept over her waist as she bent
sharply backward. And seeing her thus, as with
bending form and with exaggerated hips she came backing
toward the count’s peephole, he stood upright
again, and his face was very white. The stage
had disappeared, and he now saw only the reverse side
of the scenery with its display of old posters pasted
up in every direction. On the practicable slope,
among the lines of gas jets, the whole of Olympus
had rejoined the dozing Mme Drouard. They were
waiting for the close of the act. Bosc and Fontan
sat on the floor with their knees drawn up to their
chins, and Prulliere stretched himself and yawned
before going on. Everybody was worn out; their
eyes were red, and they were longing to go home to
sleep.
Just then Fauchery, who had been prowling
about on the O.P. side 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 illuminated 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:
“Oh, the dirty old thing!
Just you bloody well leave me alone!”
It was the Marquis de Chouard who
was tumbling down over Satin. The girl had decidedly
had enough of the fashionable world! Nana had
certainly introduced her to Bordenave, but the necessity
of standing with sealed lips for fear of allowing
some awkward phrase to escape her had been too much
for her feelings, and now she was anxious to regain
her freedom, the more so as she had run against an
old flame of hers in the wings. This was the
super, to whom the task of impersonating Pluto had
been entrusted, a pastry cook, who had already treated
her to a whole week of love and flagellation.
She was waiting for him, much irritated at the things
the marquis was saying to her, as though she were one
of those theatrical ladies! And so at last she
assumed a highly respectable expression and jerked
out this phrase:
“My husband’s coming! You’ll
see.”
Meanwhile the worn-looking artistes
were dropping off one after the other in their outdoor
coats. Groups of men and women were coming down
the little winding staircase, and the outlines of battered
hats and worn-out shawls were visible in the shadows.
They looked colorless and unlovely, as became poor
play actors who have got rid of their paint.
On the stage, where the side lights and battens were
being extinguished, the prince was listening to an
anecdote Bordenave was telling him. He was waiting
for Nana, and when at length she made her appearance
the stage was dark, and the fireman on duty was finishing
his round, lantern in hand. Bordenave, in order
to save His Highness going about by the Passage
des Panoramas, had made them open the corridor
which led from the porter’s lodge to the entrance
hall of the theater. Along this narrow alley
little women were racing pell-mell, for they were delighted
to escape from the men who were waiting for them in
the other passage. They went jostling and elbowing
along, casting apprehensive glances behind them and
only breathing freely when they got outside. Fontan,
Bosc and Prulliere, on the other hand, retired at a
leisurely pace, joking at the figure cut by the serious,
paying admirers who were striding up and down the
Galerie des Varietés at a time when
the little dears were escaping along the boulevard
with the men of their hearts. But Clarisse was
especially sly. She had her suspicions about La
Faloise, and, as a matter of fact, he was still in
his place in the lodge among the gentlemen obstinately
waiting on Mme Bron’s chairs. They all
stretched forward, and with that she passed brazenly
by in the wake of a friend. The gentlemen were
blinking in bewilderment over the wild whirl of petticoats
eddying at the foot of the narrow stairs. It made
them desperate to think they had waited so long, only
to see them all flying away like this without being
able to recognize a single one. The litter of
little black cats were sleeping on the oilcloth, nestled
against their mother’s belly, and the latter
was stretching her paws out in a state of beatitude
while the big tortoise-shell cat sat at the other
end of the table, her tail stretched out behind her
and her yellow eyes solemnly following the flight
of the women.
“If His Highness will be good
enough to come this way,” said Bordenave at
the bottom of the stairs, and he pointed to the passage.
Some chorus girls were still crowding
along it. The prince began following Nana while
Muffat and the marquis walked behind.
It was a long, narrow passage lying
between the theater and the house next door, a kind
of contracted by-lane which had been covered with a
sloping glass roof. Damp oozed from the walls,
and the footfall sounded as hollow on the tiled floor
as in an underground vault. It was crowded with
the kind of rubbish usually found in a garret.
There was a workbench on which the porter was wont
to plane such parts of the scenery as required it,
besides a pile of wooden barriers which at night were
placed at the doors of the theater for the purpose
of regulating the incoming stream of people.
Nana had to pick up her dress as she passed a hydrant
which, through having been carelessly turned off, was
flooding the tiles underfoot. In the entrance
hall the company bowed and said good-by. And
when Bordenave was alone he summed up his opinion of
the prince in a shrug of eminently philosophic disdain.
“He’s a bit of a duffer
all the same,” he said to Fauchery without entering
on further explanations, and with that Rose Mignon
carried the journalist off with her husband in order
to effect a reconciliation between them at home.
Muffat was left alone on the sidewalk.
His Highness had handed Nana quietly into his carriage,
and the marquis had slipped off after Satin and her
super. In his excitement he was content to follow
this vicious pair in vague hopes of some stray favor
being granted him. Then with brain on fire Muffat
decided to walk home. The struggle within him
had wholly ceased. The ideas and beliefs of the
last forty years were being drowned in a flood of
new life. While he was passing along the boulevards
the roll of the last carriages deafened him with the
name of Nana; the gaslights set nude limbs dancing
before his eyes the nude limbs, the lithe
arms, the white shoulders, of Nana. And he felt
that he was hers utterly: he would have abjured
everything, sold everything, to possess her for a
single hour that very night. Youth, a lustful
puberty of early manhood, was stirring within him
at last, flaming up suddenly in the chaste heart of
the Catholic and amid the dignified traditions of
middle age.