One December evening three months
afterward Count Muffat was strolling in the Passage
des Panoramas. The evening was very
mild, and owing to a passing shower, the passage had
just become crowded with people. There was a
perfect mob of them, and they thronged slowly and laboriously
along between the shops on either side. Under
the windows, white with reflected light, the pavement
was violently illuminated. A perfect stream of
brilliancy emanated from white globes, red lanterns,
blue transparencies, lines of gas jets, gigantic watches
and fans, outlined in flame and burning in the open.
And the motley displays in the shops, the gold ornaments
of the jeweler’s, the glass ornaments of the
confectioner’s, the light-colored silks of the
modiste’s, seemed to shine again in the crude
light of the reflectors behind the clear plate-glass
windows, while among the bright-colored, disorderly
array of shop signs a huge purple glove loomed in
the distance like a bleeding hand which had been severed
from an arm and fastened to a yellow cuff.
Count Muffat had slowly returned as
far as the boulevard. He glanced out at the roadway
and then came sauntering back along the shopwindows.
The damp and heated atmosphere filled the narrow passage
with a slight luminous mist. Along the flagstones,
which had been wet by the drip-drop of umbrellas,
the footsteps of the crowd rang continually, but there
was no sound of voices. Passers-by elbowed him
at every turn and cast inquiring looks at his silent
face, which the gaslight rendered pale. And to
escape these curious manifestations the count posted
himself in front of a stationer’s, where with
profound attention contemplated an array of paperweights
in the form of glass bowls containing floating landscapes
and flowers.
He was conscious of nothing:
he was thinking of Nana. Why had she lied to
him again? That morning she had written and told
him not to trouble about her in the evening, her excuse
being that Louiset was ill and that she was going
to pass the night at her aunt’s in order to nurse
him. But he had felt suspicious and had called
at her house, where he learned from the porter that
Madame had just gone off to her theater. He was
astonished at this, for she was not playing in the
new piece. Why then should she have told him
this falsehood, and what could she be doing at the
Varietés that evening? Hustled by a passer-by,
the count unconsciously left the paperweights and
found himself in front of a glass case full of toys,
where he grew absorbed over an array of pocketbooks
and cigar cases, all of which had the same blue swallow
stamped on one corner. Nana was most certainly
not the same woman! In the early days after his
return from the country she used to drive him wild
with delight, as with pussycat caresses she kissed
him all round his face and whiskers and vowed that
he was her own dear pet and the only little man she
adored. He was no longer afraid of Georges, whom
his mother kept down at Les Fondettes. There
was only fat Steiner to reckon with, and he believed
he was really ousting him, but he did not dare provoke
an explanation on his score. He knew he was once
more in an extraordinary financial scrape and on the
verge of being declared bankrupt on ’change,
so much so that he was clinging fiercely to the shareholders
in the Landes Salt Pits and striving to sweat a final
subscription out of them. Whenever he met him
at Nana’s she would explain reasonably enough
that she did not wish to turn him out of doors like
a dog after all he had spent on her. Besides,
for the last three months he had been living in such
a whirl of sensual excitement that, beyond the need
of possessing her, he had felt no very distinct impressions.
His was a tardy awakening of the fleshly instinct,
a childish greed of enjoyment, which left no room
for either vanity or jealousy. Only one definite
feeling could affect him now, and that was Nana’s
decreasing kindness. She no longer kissed him
on the beard! It made him anxious, and as became
a man quite ignorant of womankind, he began asking
himself what possible cause of offense he could have
given her. Besides, he was under the impression
that he was satisfying all her desires. And so
he harked back again and again to the letter he had
received that morning with its tissue of falsehoods,
invented for the extremely simple purpose of passing
an evening at her own theater. The crowd had
pushed him forward again, and he had crossed the passage
and was puzzling his brain in front of the entrance
to a restaurant, his eyes fixed on some plucked larks
and on a huge salmon laid out inside the window.
At length he seemed to tear himself
away from this spectacle. He shook himself, looked
up and noticed that it was close on nine o’clock.
Nana would soon be coming out, and he would make her
tell the truth. And with that he walked on and
recalled to memory the evenings he once passed in
that region in the days when he used to meet her at
the door of the theater.
He knew all the shops, and in the
gas-laden air he recognized their different scents,
such, for instance, as the strong savor of Russia
leather, the perfume of vanilla emanating from a chocolate
dealer’s basement, the savor of musk blown in
whiffs from the open doors of the perfumers.
But he did not dare linger under the gaze of the pale
shopwomen, who looked placidly at him as though they
knew him by sight. For one instant he seemed
to be studying the line of little round windows above
the shops, as though he had never noticed them before
among the medley of signs. Then once again he
went up to the boulevard and stood still a minute
or two. A fine rain was now falling, and the
cold feel of it on his hands calmed him. He thought
of his wife who was staying in a country house near
Macon, where her friend Mme de Chezelles had been
ailing a good deal since the autumn. The carriages
in the roadway were rolling through a stream of mud.
The country, he thought, must be detestable in such
vile weather. But suddenly he became anxious
and re-entered the hot, close passage down which he
strode among the strolling people. A thought
struck him: if Nana were suspicious of his presence
there she would be off along the Galerie Montmartre.
After that the count kept a sharp
lookout at the very door of the theater, though he
did not like this passage end, where he was afraid
of being recognized. It was at the corner between
the Galerie des Varietés and the Galerie
Saint-Marc, an equivocal corner full of obscure little
shops. Of these last one was a shoemaker’s,
where customers never seemed to enter. Then there
were two or three upholsterers’, deep in dust,
and a smoky, sleepy reading room and library, the
shaded lamps in which cast a green and slumberous
light all the evening through. There was never
anyone in this corner save well-dressed, patient gentlemen,
who prowled about the wreckage peculiar to a stage
door, where drunken sceneshifters and ragged chorus
girls congregate. In front of the theater a single
gas jet in a ground-glass globe lit up the doorway.
For a moment or two Muffat thought of questioning
Mme Bron; then he grew afraid lest Nana should get
wind of his presence and escape by way of the boulevard.
So he went on the march again and determined to wait
till he was turned out at the closing of the gates,
an event which had happened on two previous occasions.
The thought of returning home to his solitary bed simply
wrung his heart with anguish. Every time that
golden-haired girls and men in dirty linen came out
and stared at him he returned to his post in front
of the reading room, where, looking in between two
advertisements posted on a windowpane, he was always
greeted by the same sight. It was a little old
man, sitting stiff and solitary at the vast table and
holding a green newspaper in his green hands under
the green light of one of the lamps. But shortly
before ten o’clock another gentleman, a tall,
good-looking, fair man with well-fitting gloves, was
also walking up and down in front of the stage door.
Thereupon at each successive turn the pair treated
each other to a suspicious sidelong glance. The
count walked to the corner of the two galleries, which
was adorned with a high mirror, and when he saw himself
therein, looking grave and elegant, he was both ashamed
and nervous.
Ten o’clock struck, and suddenly
it occurred to Muffat that it would be very easy to
find out whether Nana were in her dressing room or
not. He went up the three steps, crossed the
little yellow-painted lobby and slipped into the court
by a door which simply shut with a latch. At that
hour of the night the narrow, damp well of a court,
with its pestiferous water closets, its fountain,
its back view of the kitchen stove and the collection
of plants with which the portress used to litter the
place, was drenched in dark mist; but the two walls,
rising pierced with windows on either hand, were flaming
with light, since the property room and the firemen’s
office were situated on the ground floor, with the
managerial bureau on the left, and on the right and
upstairs the dressing rooms of the company. The
mouths of furnaces seemed to be opening on the outer
darkness from top to bottom of this well. The
count had at once marked the light in the windows
of the dressing room on the first floor, and as a
man who is comforted and happy, he forgot where he
was and stood gazing upward amid the foul mud and faint
decaying smell peculiar to the premises of this antiquated
Parisian building. Big drops were dripping from
a broken waterspout, and a ray of gaslight slipped
from Mme Bron’s window and cast a yellow glare
over a patch of moss-clad pavement, over the base
of a wall which had been rotted by water from a sink,
over a whole cornerful of nameless filth amid which
old pails and broken crocks lay in fine confusion
round a spindling tree growing mildewed in its pot.
A window fastening creaked, and the count fled.
Nana was certainly going to come down.
He returned to his post in front of the reading room;
among its slumbering shadows, which seemed only broken
by the glimmer of a night light, the little old man
still sat motionless, his side face sharply outlined
against his newspaper. Then Muffat walked again
and this time took a more prolonged turn and, crossing
the large gallery, followed the Galerie des
Varietés as far as that of Feydeau. The
last mentioned was cold and deserted and buried in
melancholy shadow. He returned from it, passed
by the theater, turned the corner of the Galerie Saint-Marc
and ventured as far as the Galerie Montmartre, where
a sugar-chopping machine in front of a grocer’s
interested him awhile. But when he was taking
his third turn he was seized with such dread lest
Nana should escape behind his back that he lost all
self-respect. Thereupon he stationed himself beside
the fair gentleman in front of the very theater.
Both exchanged a glance of fraternal humility with
which was mingled a touch of distrust, for it was
possible they might yet turn out to be rivals.
Some sceneshifters who came out smoking their pipes
between the acts brushed rudely against them, but
neither one nor the other ventured to complain.
Three big wenches with untidy hair and dirty gowns
appeared on the doorstep. They were munching
apples and spitting out the cores, but the two men
bowed their heads and patiently braved their impudent
looks and rough speeches, though they were hustled
and, as it were, soiled by these trollops, who amused
themselves by pushing each other down upon them.
At that very moment Nana descended
the three steps. She grew very pale when she
noticed Muffat.
“Oh, it’s you!” she stammered.
The sniggering extra ladies were quite
frightened when they recognized her, and they formed
in line and stood up, looking as stiff and serious
as servants whom their mistress has caught behaving
badly. The tall fair gentleman had moved away;
he was at once reassured and sad at heart.
“Well, give me your arm,” Nana continued
impatiently.
They walked quietly off. The
count had been getting ready to question her and now
found nothing to say.
It was she who in rapid tones told
a story to the effect that she had been at her aunt’s
as late as eight o’clock, when, seeing Louiset
very much better, she had conceived the idea of going
down to the theater for a few minutes.
“On some important business?” he queried.
“Yes, a new piece,” she
replied after some slight hesitation. “They
wanted my advice.”
He knew that she was not speaking
the truth, but the warm touch of her arm as it leaned
firmly on his own, left him powerless. He felt
neither anger nor rancor after his long, long wait;
his one thought was to keep her where she was now
that he had got hold of her. Tomorrow, and not
before, he would try and find out what she had come
to her dressing room after. But Nana still appeared
to hesitate; she was manifestly a prey to the sort
of secret anguish that besets people when they are
trying to regain lost ground and to initiate a plan
of action. Accordingly, as they turned the corner
of the Galerie des Varietés, she stopped
in front of the show in a fan seller’s window.
“I say, that’s pretty,”
she whispered; “I mean that mother-of-pearl
mount with the feathers.”
Then, indifferently:
“So you’re seeing me home?”
“Of course,” he said, with some surprise,
“since your child’s better.”
She was sorry she had told him that
story. Perhaps Louiset was passing through another
crisis! She talked of returning to the Batignolles.
But when he offered to accompany her she did not insist
on going. For a second or two she was possessed
with the kind of white-hot fury which a woman experiences
when she feels herself entrapped and must, nevertheless,
behave prettily. But in the end she grew resigned
and determined to gain time. If only she could
get rid of the count toward midnight everything would
happen as she wished.
“Yes, it’s true; you’re
a bachelor tonight,” she murmured. “Your
wife doesn’t return till tomorrow, eh?”
“Yes,” replied Muffat.
It embarrassed him somewhat to hear her talking familiarly
about the countess.
But she pressed him further, asking
at what time the train was due and wanting to know
whether he were going to the station to meet her.
She had begun to walk more slowly than ever, as though
the shops interested her very much.
“Now do look!” she said,
pausing anew before a jeweler’s window, “what
a funny bracelet!”
She adored the Passage des
Panoramas. The tinsel of the article
de Paris, the false jewelry, the gilded
zinc, the cardboard made to look like leather, had
been the passion of her early youth. It remained,
and when she passed the shop-windows she could not
tear herself away from them. It was the same
with her today as when she was a ragged, slouching
child who fell into reveries in front of the chocolate
maker’s sweet-stuff shows or stood listening
to a musical box in a neighboring shop or fell into
supreme ecstasies over cheap, vulgarly designed knickknacks,
such as nutshell workboxes, ragpickers’ baskets
for holding toothpicks, Vendome columns and Luxor
obelisks on which thermometers were mounted.
But that evening she was too much agitated and looked
at things without seeing them. When all was said
and done, it bored her to think she was not free.
An obscure revolt raged within her, and amid it all
she felt a wild desire to do something foolish.
It was a great thing gained, forsooth, to be mistress
of men of position! She had been devouring the
prince’s substance and Steiner’s, too,
with her childish caprices, and yet she had no
notion where her money went. Even at this time
of day her flat in the Boulevard Haussmann was not
entirely furnished. The drawing room alone was
finished, and with its red satin upholsteries and
excess of ornamentation and furniture it struck a
decidedly false note. Her creditors, moreover,
would now take to tormenting her more than ever before
whenever she had no money on hand, a fact which caused
her constant surprise, seeing that she was wont to
quote her self as a model of economy. For a month
past that thief Steiner had been scarcely able to
pay up his thousand francs on the occasions when she
threatened to kick him out of doors in case he failed
to bring them. As to Muffat, he was an idiot:
he had no notion as to what it was usual to give,
and she could not, therefore, grow angry with him
on the score of miserliness. Oh, how gladly she
would have turned all these folks off had she not
repeated to herself a score of times daily a whole
string of economical maxims!
One ought to be sensible, Zoe kept
saying every morning, and Nana herself was constantly
haunted by the queenly vision seen at Chamont.
It had now become an almost religious memory with
her, and through dint of being ceaselessly recalled
it grew even more grandiose. And for these reasons,
though trembling with repressed indignation, she now
hung submissively on the count’s arm as they
went from window to window among the fast-diminishing
crowd. The pavement was drying outside, and a
cool wind blew along the gallery, swept the close
hot air up beneath the glass that imprisoned it and
shook the colored lanterns and the lines of gas jets
and the giant fan which was flaring away like a set
piece in an illumination. At the door of the
restaurant a waiter was putting out the gas, while
the motionless attendants in the empty, glaring shops
looked as though they had dropped off to sleep with
their eyes open.
“Oh, what a duck!” continued
Nana, retracing her steps as far as the last of the
shops in order to go into ecstasies over a porcelain
greyhound standing with raised forepaw in front of
a nest hidden among roses.
At length they quitted the passage,
but she refused the offer of a cab. It was very
pleasant out she said; besides, they were in no hurry,
and it would be charming to return home on foot.
When they were in front of the Cafe Anglais she had
a sudden longing to eat oysters. Indeed, she
said that owing to Louiset’s illness she had
tasted nothing since morning. Muffat dared not
oppose her. Yet as he did not in those days wish
to be seen about with her he asked for a private supper
room and hurried to it along the corridors. She
followed him with the air of a woman familiar with
the house, and they were on the point of entering
a private room, the door of which a waiter held open,
when from a neighboring saloon, whence issued a perfect
tempest of shouts and laughter, a man rapidly emerged.
It was Daguenet.
“By Jove, it’s Nana!” he cried.
The count had briskly disappeared
into the private room, leaving the door ajar behind
him. But Daguenet winked behind his round shoulders
and added in chaffing tones:
“The deuce, but you’re
doing nicely! You catch ’em in the Tuileries
nowadays!”
Nana smiled and laid a finger on her
lips to beg him to be silent. She could see he
was very much exalted, and yet she was glad to have
met him, for she still felt tenderly toward him, and
that despite the nasty way he had cut her when in
the company of fashionable ladies.
“What are you doing now?” she asked amicably.
“Becoming respectable. Yes indeed, I’m
thinking of getting married.”
She shrugged her shoulders with a
pitying air. But he jokingly continued to the
effect that to be only just gaining enough on ’change
to buy ladies bouquets could scarcely be called an
income, provided you wanted to look respectable too!
His three hundred thousand francs had only lasted
him eighteen months! He wanted to be practical,
and he was going to marry a girl with a huge dowry
and end off as a Préfet, like his father before
him! Nana still smiled incredulously. She
nodded in the direction of the saloon: “Who
are you with in there?”
“Oh, a whole gang,” he
said, forgetting all about his projects under the
influence of returning intoxication. “Just
think! Lea is telling us about her trip in Egypt.
Oh, it’s screaming! There’s a bathing
story ”
And he told the story while Nana lingered
complaisantly. They had ended by leaning up against
the wall in the corridor, facing one another.
Gas jets were flaring under the low ceiling, and a
vague smell of cookery hung about the folds of the
hangings. Now and again, in order to hear each
other’s voices when the din in the saloon became
louder than ever, they had to lean well forward.
Every few seconds, however, a waiter with an armful
of dishes found his passage barred and disturbed them.
But they did not cease their talk for that; on the
contrary, they stood close up to the walls and, amid
the uproar of the supper party and the jostlings of
the waiters, chatted as quietly as if they were by
their own firesides.
“Just look at that,” whispered
the young man, pointing to the door of the private
room through which Muffat had vanished.
Both looked. The door was quivering
slightly; a breath of air seemed to be disturbing
it, and at last, very, very slowly and without the
least sound, it was shut to. They exchanged a
silent chuckle. The count must be looking charmingly
happy all alone in there!
“By the by,” she asked,
“have you read Fauchery’s article about
me?”
“Yes, ‘The Golden Fly,’”
replied Daguenet; “I didn’t mention it
to you as I was afraid of paining you.”
“Paining me why? His article’s
a very long one.”
She was flattered to think that the
Figaro should concern itself about her person.
But failing the explanations of her hairdresser Francis,
who had brought her the paper, she would not have
understood that it was she who was in question.
Daguenet scrutinized her slyly, sneering in his chaffing
way. Well, well, since she was pleased, everybody
else ought to be.
“By your leave!” shouted
a waiter, holding a dish of iced cheese in both hands
as he separated them.
Nana had stepped toward the little
saloon where Muffat was waiting.
“Well, good-by!” continued
Daguenet. “Go and find your cuckold again.”
But she halted afresh.
“Why d’you call him cuckold?”
“Because he is a cuckold, by Jove!”
She came and leaned against the wall
again; she was profoundly interested.
“Ah!” she said simply.
“What, d’you mean to say
you didn’t know that? Why, my dear girl,
his wife’s Fauchery’s mistress. It
probably began in the country. Some time ago,
when I was coming here, Fauchery left me, and I suspect
he’s got an assignation with her at his place
tonight. They’ve made up a story about
a journey, I fancy.”
Overcome with surprise, Nana remained voiceless.
“I suspected it,” she
said at last, slapping her leg. “I guessed
it by merely looking at her on the highroad that day.
To think of its being possible for an honest woman
to deceive her husband, and with that blackguard Fauchery
too! He’ll teach her some pretty things!”
“Oh, it isn’t her trial
trip,” muttered Daguenet wickedly. “Perhaps
she knows as much about it as he does.”
At this Nana gave vent to an indignant exclamation.
“Indeed she does! What a nice world!
It’s too foul!”
“By your leave!” shouted
a waiter, laden with bottles, as he separated them.
Daguenet drew her forward again and
held her hand for a second or two. He adopted
his crystalline tone of voice, the voice with notes
as sweet as those of a harmonica, which had gained
him his success among the ladies of Nana’s type.
“Good-by, darling! You know I love you
always.”
She disengaged her hand from his,
and while a thunder of shouts and bravos, which made
the door in the saloon tremble again, almost drowned
her words she smilingly remarked:
“It’s over between us,
stupid! But that doesn’t matter. Do
come up one of these days, and we’ll have a
chat.”
Then she became serious again and
in the outraged tones of a respectable woman:
“So he’s a cuckold, is
he?” she cried. “Well, that is
a nuisance, dear boy. They’ve always sickened
me, cuckolds have.”
When at length she went into the private
room she noticed that Muffat was sitting resignedly
on a narrow divan with pale face and twitching hands.
He did not reproach her at all, and she, greatly moved,
was divided between feelings of pity and of contempt.
The poor man! To think of his being so unworthily
cheated by a vile wife! She had a good mind to
throw her arms round his neck and comfort him.
But it was only fair all the same! He was a fool
with women, and this would teach him a lesson!
Nevertheless, pity overcame her. She did not get
rid of him as she had determined to do after the oysters
had been discussed. They scarcely stayed a quarter
of an hour in the Cafe Anglais, and together they
went into the house in the Boulevard Haussmann.
It was then eleven. Before midnight she would
have easily have discovered some means of getting
rid of him kindly.
In the anteroom, however, she took
the precaution of giving Zoe an order. “You’ll
look out for him, and you’ll tell him not to
make a noise if the other man’s still with me.”
“But where shall I put him, madame?”
“Keep him in the kitchen. It’s more
safe.”
In the room inside Muffat was already
taking off his overcoat. A big fire was burning
on the hearth. It was the same room as of old,
with its rosewood furniture and its hangings and chair
coverings of figured damask with the large blue flowers
on a gray background. On two occasions Nana had
thought of having it redone, the first in black velvet,
the second in white satin with bows, but directly Steiner
consented she demanded the money that these changes
would cost simply with a view to pillaging him.
She had, indeed, only indulged in a tiger skin rug
for the hearth and a cut-glass hanging lamp.
“I’m not sleepy; I’m
not going to bed,” she said the moment they were
shut in together.
The count obeyed her submissively,
as became a man no longer afraid of being seen.
His one care now was to avoid vexing her.
“As you will,” he murmured.
Nevertheless, he took his boots off,
too, before seating himself in front of the fire.
One of Nana’s pleasures consisted in undressing
herself in front of the mirror on her wardrobe door,
which reflected her whole height. She would let
everything slip off her in turn and then would stand
perfectly naked and gaze and gaze in complete oblivion
of all around her. Passion for her own body,
ecstasy over her satin skin and the supple contours
of her shape, would keep her serious, attentive and
absorbed in the love of herself. The hairdresser
frequently found her standing thus and would enter
without her once turning to look at him. Muffat
used to grow angry then, but he only succeeded in
astonishing her. What was coming over the man?
She was doing it to please herself, not other people.
That particular evening she wanted
to have a better view of herself, and she lit the
six candles attached to the frame of the mirror.
But while letting her shift slip down she paused.
She had been preoccupied for some moments past, and
a question was on her lips.
“You haven’t read the
Figaro article, have you? The paper’s on
the table.” Daguenet’s laugh had
recurred to her recollections, and she was harassed
by a doubt. If that Fauchery had slandered her
she would be revenged.
“They say that it’s about
me,” she continued, affecting indifference.
“What’s your notion, eh, darling?”
And letting go her shift and waiting
till Muffat should have done reading, she stood naked.
Muffat was reading slowly Fauchery’s article
entitled “The Golden Fly,” describing the
life of a harlot descended from four or five generations
of drunkards and tainted in her blood by a cumulative
inheritance of misery and drink, which in her case
has taken the form of a nervous exaggeration of the
sexual instinct. She has shot up to womanhood
in the slums and on the pavements of Paris, and tall,
handsome and as superbly grown as a dunghill plant,
she avenges the beggars and outcasts of whom she is
the ultimate product. With her the rottenness
that is allowed to ferment among the populace is carried
upward and rots the aristocracy. She becomes a
blind power of nature, a leaven of destruction, and
unwittingly she corrupts and disorganizes all Paris,
churning it between her snow-white thighs as milk is
monthly churned by housewives. And it was at
the end of this article that the comparison with a
fly occurred, a fly of sunny hue which has flown up
out of the dung, a fly which sucks in death on the
carrion tolerated by the roadside and then buzzing,
dancing and glittering like a precious stone enters
the windows of palaces and poisons the men within by
merely settling on them in her flight.
Muffat lifted his head; his eyes stared
fixedly; he gazed at the fire.
“Well?” asked Nana.
But he did not answer. It seemed
as though he wanted to read the article again.
A cold, shivering feeling was creeping from his scalp
to his shoulders. This article had been written
anyhow. The phrases were wildly extravagant;
the unexpected epigrams and quaint collocations
of words went beyond all bounds. Yet notwithstanding
this, he was struck by what he had read, for it had
rudely awakened within him much that for months past
he had not cared to think about.
He looked up. Nana had grown
absorbed in her ecstatic self-contemplation.
She was bending her neck and was looking attentively
in the mirror at a little brown mark above her right
haunch. She was touching it with the tip of her
finger and by dint of bending backward was making
it stand out more clearly than ever. Situated
where it was, it doubtless struck her as both quaint
and pretty. After that she studied other parts
of her body with an amused expression and much of
the vicious curiosity of a child. The sight of
herself always astonished her, and she would look
as surprised and ecstatic as a young girl who has
discovered her puberty. Slowly, slowly, she spread
out her arms in order to give full value to her figure,
which suggested the torso of a plump Venus. She
bent herself this way and that and examined herself
before and behind, stooping to look at the side view
of her bosom and at the sweeping contours of her thighs.
And she ended with a strange amusement which consisted
of swinging to right and left, her knees apart and
her body swaying from the waist with the perpetual
jogging, twitching movements peculiar to an oriental
dancer in the danse du ventre.
Muffat sat looking at her. She
frightened him. The newspaper had dropped from
his hand. For a moment he saw her as she was,
and he despised himself. Yes, it was just that;
she had corrupted his life; he already felt himself
tainted to his very marrow by impurities hitherto undreamed
of. Everything was now destined to rot within
him, and in the twinkling of an eye he understood
what this evil entailed. He saw the ruin brought
about by this kind of “leaven” himself
poisoned, his family destroyed, a bit of the social
fabric cracking and crumbling. And unable to take
his eyes from the sight, he sat looking fixedly at
her, striving to inspire himself with loathing for
her nakedness.
Nana no longer moved. With an
arm behind her neck, one hand clasped in the other,
and her elbows far apart, she was throwing back her
head so that he could see a foreshortened reflection
of her half-closed eyes, her parted lips, her face
clothed with amorous laughter. Her masses of
yellow hair were unknotted behind, and they covered
her back with the fell of a lioness.
Bending back thus, she displayed her
solid Amazonian waist and firm bosom, where strong
muscles moved under the satin texture of the skin.
A delicate line, to which the shoulder and the thigh
added their slight undulations, ran from one of her
elbows to her foot, and Muffat’s eyes followed
this tender profile and marked how the outlines of
the fair flesh vanished in golden gleams and how its
rounded contours shone like silk in the candlelight.
He thought of his old dread of Woman, of the Beast
of the Scriptures, at once lewd and wild. Nana
was all covered with fine hair; a russet made her
body velvety, while the Beast was apparent in the
almost equine development of her flanks, in the fleshy
exubérances and deep hollows of her body, which
lent her sex the mystery and suggestiveness lurking
in their shadows. She was, indeed, that Golden
Creature, blind as brute force, whose very odor ruined
the world. Muffat gazed and gazed as a man possessed,
till at last, when he had shut his eyes in order to
escape it, the Brute reappeared in the darkness of
the brain, larger, more terrible, more suggestive in
its attitude. Now, he understood, it would remain
before his eyes, in his very flesh, forever.
But Nana was gathering herself together.
A little thrill of tenderness seemed to have traversed
her members. Her eyes were moist; she tried, as
it were, to make herself small, as though she could
feel herself better thus. Then she threw her
head and bosom back and, melting, as it were, in one
great bodily caress, she rubbed her cheeks coaxingly,
first against one shoulder, then against the other.
Her lustful mouth breathed desire over her limbs.
She put out her lips, kissed herself long in the neighborhood
of her armpit and laughed at the other Nana who also
was kissing herself in the mirror.
Then Muffat gave a long sigh.
This solitary pleasure exasperated him. Suddenly
all his resolutions were swept away as though by a
mighty wind. In a fit of brutal passion he caught
Nana to his breast and threw her down on the carpet.
“Leave me alone!” she cried. “You’re
hurting me!”
He was conscious of his undoing; he
recognized in her stupidity, vileness and falsehood,
and he longed to possess her, poisoned though she
was.
“Oh, you’re a fool!”
she said savagely when he let her get up.
Nevertheless, she grew calm.
He would go now. She slipped on a nightgown trimmed
with lace and came and sat down on the floor in front
of the fire. It was her favorite position.
When she again questioned him about Fauchery’s
article Muffat replied vaguely, for he wanted to avoid
a scene. Besides, she declared that she had found
a weak spot in Fauchery. And with that she relapsed
into a long silence and reflected on how to dismiss
the count. She would have liked to do it in an
agreeable way, for she was still a good-natured wench,
and it bored her to cause others pain, especially
in the present instance where the man was a cuckold.
The mere thought of his being that had ended by rousing
her sympathies!
“So you expect your wife tomorrow
morning?” she said at last.
Muffat had stretched himself in an
armchair. He looked drowsy, and his limbs were
tired. He gave a sign of assent. Nana sat
gazing seriously at him with a dull tumult in her
brain. Propped on one leg, among her slightly
rumpled laces she was holding one of her bare feet
between her hands and was turning it mechanically
about and about.
“Have you been married long?” she asked.
“Nineteen years,” replied the count
“Ah! And is your wife amiable? Do
you get on comfortably together?”
He was silent. Then with some embarrassment:
“You know I’ve begged you never to talk
of those matters.”
“Dear me, why’s that?”
she cried, beginning to grow vexed directly. “I’m
sure I won’t eat your wife if I do talk
about her. Dear boy, why, every woman’s
worth ”
But she stopped for fear of saying
too much. She contented herself by assuming a
superior expression, since she considered herself extremely
kind. The poor fellow, he needed delicate handling!
Besides, she had been struck by a laughable notion,
and she smiled as she looked him carefully over.
“I say,” she continued,
“I haven’t told you the story about you
that Fauchery’s circulating. There’s
a viper, if you like! I don’t bear him
any ill will, because his article may be all right,
but he’s a regular viper all the same.”
And laughing more gaily than ever,
she let go her foot and, crawling along the floor,
came and propped herself against the count’s
knees.
“Now just fancy, he swears you
were still like a babe when you married your wife.
You were still like that, eh? Is it true, eh?”
Her eyes pressed for an answer, and
she raised her hands to his shoulders and began shaking
him in order to extract the desired confession.
“Without doubt,” he at last made answer
gravely.
Thereupon she again sank down at his
feet. She was shaking with uproarious laughter,
and she stuttered and dealt him little slaps.
“No, it’s too funny!
There’s no one like you; you’re a marvel.
But, my poor pet, you must just have been stupid!
When a man doesn’t know oh, it is
so comical! Good heavens, I should have liked
to have seen you! And it came off well, did it?
Now tell me something about it! Oh, do, do tell
me!”
She overwhelmed him with questions,
forgetting nothing and requiring the veriest details.
And she laughed such sudden merry peals which doubled
her up with mirth, and her chemise slipped and got
turned down to such an extent, and her skin looked
so golden in the light of the big fire, that little
by little the count described to her his bridal night.
He no longer felt at all awkward. He himself
began to be amused at last as he spoke. Only
he kept choosing his phrases, for he still had a certain
sense of modesty. The young woman, now thoroughly
interested, asked him about the countess. According
to his account, she had a marvelous figure but was
a regular iceberg for all that.
“Oh, get along with you!”
he muttered indolently. “You have no cause
to be jealous.”
Nana had ceased laughing, and she
now resumed her former position and, with her back
to the fire, brought her knees up under her chin with
her clasped hands. Then in a serious tone she
declared:
“It doesn’t pay, dear
boy, to look like a ninny with one’s wife the
first night.”
“Why?” queried the astonished count.
“Because,” she replied slowly, assuming
a doctorial expression.
And with that she looked as if she
were delivering a lecture and shook her head at him.
In the end, however, she condescended to explain herself
more lucidly.
“Well, look here! I know
how it all happens. Yes, dearie, women don’t
like a man to be foolish. They don’t say
anything because there’s such a thing as modesty,
you know, but you may be sure they think about it for
a jolly long time to come. And sooner or later,
when a man’s been an ignoramus, they go and
make other arrangements. That’s it, my pet.”
He did not seem to understand.
Whereupon she grew more definite still. She became
maternal and taught him his lesson out of sheer goodness
of heart, as a friend might do. Since she had
discovered him to be a cuckold the information had
weighed on her spirits; she was madly anxious to discuss
his position with him.
“Good heavens! I’m
talking of things that don’t concern me.
I’ve said what I have because everybody ought
to be happy. We’re having a chat, eh?
Well then, you’re to answer me as straight as
you can.”
But she stopped to change her position,
for she was burning herself. “It’s
jolly hot, eh? My back’s roasted. Wait
a second. I’ll cook my tummy a bit.
That’s what’s good for the aches!”
And when she had turned round with
her breast to the fire and her feet tucked under her:
“Let me see,” she said;
“you don’t sleep with your wife any longer?”
“No, I swear to you I don’t,”
said Muffat, dreading a scene.
“And you believe she’s really a stick?”
He bowed his head in the affirmative.
“And that’s why you love me? Answer
me! I shan’t be angry.”
He repeated the same movement.
“Very well then,” she
concluded. “I suspected as much! Oh,
the poor pet. Do you know my aunt Lerat?
When she comes get her to tell you the story about
the fruiterer who lives opposite her. Just fancy
that man Damn it, how hot this fire is!
I must turn round. I’m going to roast my
left side now.” And as she presented her
side to the blaze a droll idea struck her, and like
a good-tempered thing, she made fun of herself for
she was delighted to see that she was looking so plump
and pink in the light of the coal fire.
“I look like a goose, eh?
Yes, that’s it! I’m a goose on the
spit, and I’m turning, turning and cooking in
my own juice, eh?”
And she was once more indulging in
a merry fit of laughter when a sound of voices and
slamming doors became audible. Muffat was surprised,
and he questioned her with a look. She grew serious,
and an anxious expression came over her face.
It must be Zoe’s cat, a cursed beast that broke
everything. It was half-past twelve o’clock.
How long was she going to bother herself in her cuckold’s
behalf? Now that the other man had come she ought
to get him out of the way, and that quickly.
“What were you saying?”
asked the count complaisantly, for he was charmed
to see her so kind to him.
But in her desire to be rid of him
she suddenly changed her mood, became brutal and did
not take care what she was saying.
“Oh yes! The fruiterer
and his wife. Well, my dear fellow, they never
once touched one another! Not the least bit!
She was very keen on it, you understand, but he, the
ninny, didn’t know it. He was so green
that he thought her a stick, and so he went elsewhere
and took up with streetwalkers, who treated him to
all sorts of nastiness, while she, on her part, made
up for it beautifully with fellows who were a lot slyer
than her greenhorn of a husband. And things always
turn out that way through people not understanding
one another. I know it, I do!”
Muffat was growing pale. At last
he was beginning to understand her allusions, and
he wanted to make her keep silence. But she was
in full swing.
“No, hold your tongue, will
you? If you weren’t brutes you would be
as nice with your wives as you are with us, and if
your wives weren’t geese they would take as
much pains to keep you as we do to get you. That’s
the way to behave. Yes, my duck, you can put that
in your pipe and smoke it.”
“Do not talk of honest women,”
he said in a hard voice. “You do not know
them.”
At that Nana rose to her knees.
“I don’t know them!
Why, they aren’t even clean, your honest women
aren’t! They aren’t even clean!
I defy you to find me one who would dare show herself
as I am doing. Oh, you make me laugh with your
honest women. Don’t drive me to it; don’t
oblige me to tell you things I may regret afterward.”
The count, by way of answer, mumbled
something insulting. Nana became quite pale in
her turn. For some seconds she looked at him without
speaking. Then in her decisive way:
“What would you do if your wife were deceiving
you?”
He made a threatening gesture.
“Well, and if I were to?”
“Oh, you,” he muttered with a shrug of
his shoulders.
Nana was certainly not spiteful.
Since the beginning of the conversation she had been
strongly tempted to throw his cuckold’s reputation
in his teeth, but she had resisted. She would
have liked to confess him quietly on the subject,
but he had begun to exasperate her at last. The
matter ought to stop now.
“Well, then, my dearie,”
she continued, “I don’t know what you’re
getting at with me. For two hours past you’ve
been worrying my life out. Now do just go and
find your wife, for she’s at it with Fauchery.
Yes, it’s quite correct; they’re in the
Rue Taitbout, at the corner of the Rue de Provence.
You see, I’m giving you the address.”
Then triumphantly, as she saw Muffat
stagger to his feet like an ox under the hammer:
“If honest women must meddle
in our affairs and take our sweethearts from us Oh,
you bet they’re a nice lot, those honest women!”
But she was unable to proceed.
With a terrible push he had cast her full length on
the floor and, lifting his heel, he seemed on the point
of crushing in her head in order to silence her.
For the twinkling of an eye she felt sickening dread.
Blinded with rage, he had begun beating about the
room like a maniac. Then his choking silence and
the struggle with which he was shaken melted her to
tears. She felt a mortal regret and, rolling
herself up in front of the fire so as to roast her
right side, she undertook the task of comforting him.
“I take my oath, darling, I
thought you knew it all. Otherwise I shouldn’t
have spoken; you may be sure. But perhaps it isn’t
true. I don’t say anything for certain.
I’ve been told it, and people are talking about
it, but what does that prove? Oh, get along!
You’re very silly to grow riled about it.
If I were a man I shouldn’t care a rush for
the women! All the women are alike, you see, high
or low; they’re all rowdy and the rest of it.”
In a fit of self-abnegation she was
severe on womankind, for she wished thus to lessen
the cruelty of her blow. But he did not listen
to her or hear what she said. With fumbling movements
he had put on his boots and his overcoat. For
a moment longer he raved round, and then in a final
outburst, finding himself near the door, he rushed
from the room. Nana was very much annoyed.
“Well, well! A prosperous
trip to you!” she continued aloud, though she
was now alone. “He’s polite, too,
that fellow is, when he’s spoken to! And
I had to defend myself at that! Well, I was the
first to get back my temper and I made plenty of excuses,
I’m thinking! Besides, he had been getting
on my nerves!”
Nevertheless, she was not happy and
sat scratching her legs with both hands. Then
she took high ground:
“Tut, tut, it isn’t my fault if he is
a cuckold!”
And toasted on every side and as hot
as a roast bird, she went and buried herself under
the bedclothes after ringing for Zoe to usher in the
other man, who was waiting in the kitchen.
Once outside, Muffat began walking
at a furious pace. A fresh shower had just fallen,
and he kept slipping on the greasy pavement. When
he looked mechanically up into the sky he saw ragged,
soot-colored clouds scudding in front of the moon.
At this hour of the night passers-by were becoming
few and far between in the Boulevard Haussmann.
He skirted the enclosures round the opera house in
his search for darkness, and as he went along he kept
mumbling inconsequent phrases. That girl had been
lying. She had invented her story out of sheer
stupidity and cruelty. He ought to have crushed
her head when he had it under his heel. After
all was said and done, the business was too shameful.
Never would he see her; never would he touch her again,
or if he did he would be miserably weak. And
with that he breathed hard, as though he were free
once more. Oh, that naked, cruel monster, roasting
away like any goose and slavering over everything
that he had respected for forty years back. The
moon had come out, and the empty street was bathed
in white light. He felt afraid, and he burst
into a great fit of sobbing, for he had grown suddenly
hopeless and maddened as though he had sunk into a
fathomless void.
“My God!” he stuttered
out. “It’s finished! There’s
nothing left now!”
Along the boulevards belated people
were hurrying. He tried hard to be calm, and
as the story told him by that courtesan kept recurring
to his burning consciousness, he wanted to reason
the matter out. The countess was coming up from
Mme de Chezelles’s country house tomorrow morning.
Yet nothing, in fact, could have prevented her from
returning to Paris the night before and passing it
with that man. He now began recalling to mind
certain details of their stay at Les Fondettes.
One evening, for instance, he had surprised Sabine
in the shade of some trees, when she was so much agitated
as to be unable to answer his questions. The
man had been present; why should she not be with him
now? The more he thought about it the more possible
the whole story became, and he ended by thinking it
natural and even inevitable. While he was in his
shirt sleeves in the house of a harlot his wife was
undressing in her lover’s room. Nothing
could be simpler or more logical! Reasoning in
this way, he forced himself to keep cool. He
felt as if there were a great downward movement in
the direction of fleshly madness, a movement which,
as it grew, was overcoming the whole world round about
him. Warm images pursued him in imagination.
A naked Nana suddenly evoked a naked Sabine.
At this vision, which seemed to bring them together
in shameless relationship and under the influence
of the same lusts, he literally stumbled, and in the
road a cab nearly ran over him. Some women who
had come out of a cafe jostled him amid loud laughter.
Then a fit of weeping once more overcame him, despite
all his efforts to the contrary, and, not wishing
to shed tears in the presence of others, he plunged
into a dark and empty street. It was the Rue
Rossini, and along its silent length he wept like
a child.
“It’s over with us,”
he said in hollow tones. “There’s
nothing left us now, nothing left us now!”
He wept so violently that he had to
lean up against a door as he buried his face in his
wet hands. A noise of footsteps drove him away.
He felt a shame and a fear which made him fly before
people’s faces with the restless step of a bird
of darkness. When passers-by met him on the pavement
he did his best to look and walk in a leisurely way,
for he fancied they were reading his secret in the
very swing of his shoulders. He had followed
the Rue de la Grange Batelière
as far as the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre, where the
brilliant lamplight surprised him, and he retraced
his steps. For nearly an hour he traversed the
district thus, choosing always the darkest corners.
Doubtless there was some goal whither his steps were
patiently, instinctively, leading him through a labyrinth
of endless turnings. At length he lifted his eyes
up it a street corner. He had reached his destination,
the point where the Rue Taitbout and the Rue de la
Provence met. He had taken an hour amid his painful
mental sufferings to arrive at a place he could have
reached in five minutes. One morning a month
ago he remembered going up to Fauchery’s rooms
to thank him for a notice of a ball at the Tuileries,
in which the journalist had mentioned him. The
flat was between the ground floor and the first story
and had a row of small square windows which were half
hidden by the colossal signboard belonging to a shop.
The last window on the left was bisected by a brilliant
band of lamplight coming from between the half-closed
curtains. And he remained absorbed and expectant,
with his gaze fixed on this shining streak.
The moon had disappeared in an inky
sky, whence an icy drizzle was falling. Two o’clock
struck at the Trinite. The Rue de Provence and
the Rue Taitbout lay in shadow, bestarred at intervals
by bright splashes of light from the gas lamps, which
in the distance were merged in yellow mist. Muffat
did not move from where he was standing. That
was the room. He remembered it now: it had
hangings of red “andrinople,” and
a Louis XIII bed stood at one end of it. The
lamp must be standing on the chimney piece to the
right. Without doubt they had gone to bed, for
no shadows passed across the window, and the bright
streak gleamed as motionless as the light of a night
lamp. With his eyes still uplifted he began forming
a plan; he would ring the bell, go upstairs despite
the porter’s remonstrances, break the doors
in with a push of his shoulder and fall upon them
in the very bed without giving them time to unlace
their arms. For one moment the thought that he
had no weapon upon him gave him pause, but directly
afterward he decided to throttle them. He returned
to the consideration of his project, and he perfected
it while waiting for some sign, some indication, which
should bring certainty with it.
Had a woman’s shadow only shown
itself at that moment he would have rung. But
the thought that perhaps he was deceiving himself froze
him. How could he be certain? Doubts began
to return. His wife could not be with that man.
It was monstrous and impossible. Nevertheless,
he stayed where he was and was gradually overcome
by a species of torpor which merged into sheer feebleness
while he waited long, and the fixity of his gaze induced
hallucinations.
A shower was falling. Two policemen
were approaching, and he was forced to leave the doorway
where he had taken shelter. When these were lost
to view in the Rue de Provence he returned to his
post, wet and shivering. The luminous streak
still traversed the window, and this time he was going
away for good when a shadow crossed it. It moved
so quickly that he thought he had deceived himself.
But first one and then another black thing followed
quickly after it, and there was a regular commotion
in the room. Riveted anew to the pavement, he
experienced an intolerable burning sensation in his
inside as he waited to find out the meaning of it
all. Outlines of arms and legs flitted after one
another, and an enormous hand traveled about with
the silhouette of a water jug. He distinguished
nothing clearly, but he thought he recognized a woman’s
headdress. And he disputed the point with himself;
it might well have been Sabine’s hair, only
the neck did not seem sufficiently slim. At that
hour of the night he had lost the power of recognition
and of action. In this terrible agony of uncertainty
his inside caused him such acute suffering that he
pressed against the door in order to calm himself,
shivering like a man in rags, as he did so. Then
seeing that despite everything he could not turn his
eyes away from the window, his anger changed into
a fit of moralizing. He fancied himself a deputy;
he was haranguing an assembly, loudly denouncing debauchery,
prophesying national ruin. And he reconstructed
Fauchery’s article on the poisoned fly, and
he came before the house and declared that morals such
as these, which could only be paralleled in the days
of the later Roman Empire, rendered society an impossibility;
that did him good. But the shadows had meanwhile
disappeared. Doubtless they had gone to bed again,
and, still watching, he continued waiting where he
was.
Three o’clock struck, then four,
but he could not take his departure. When showers
fell he buried himself in a corner of the doorway,
his legs splashed with wet. Nobody passed by
now, and occasionally his eyes would close, as though
scorched by the streak of light, which he kept watching
obstinately, fixedly, with idiotic persistence.
On two subsequent occasions the shadows flitted about,
repeating the same gestures and agitating the silhouette
of the same gigantic jug, and twice quiet was re-established,
and the night lamp again glowed discreetly out.
These shadows only increased his uncertainty.
Then, too, a sudden idea soothed his brain while it
postponed the decisive moment. After all, he had
only to wait for the woman when she left the house.
He could quite easily recognize Sabine. Nothing
could be simpler, and there would be no scandal, and
he would be sure of things one way or the other.
It was only necessary to stay where he was. Among
all the confused feelings which had been agitating
him he now merely felt a dull need of certain knowledge.
But sheer weariness and vacancy began lulling him to
sleep under his doorway, and by way of distraction
he tried to reckon up how long he would have to wait.
Sabine was to be at the station toward nine o’clock;
that meant about four hours and a half more. He
was very patient; he would even have been content
not to move again, and he found a certain charm in
fancying that his night vigil would last through eternity.
Suddenly the streak of light was gone.
This extremely simple event was to him an unforeseen
catastrophe, at once troublesome and disagreeable.
Evidently they had just put the lamp out and were going
to sleep. It was reasonable enough at that hour,
but he was irritated thereat, for now the darkened
window ceased to interest him. He watched it for
a quarter of an hour longer and then grew tired and,
leaving the doorway, took a turn upon the pavement.
Until five o’clock he walked to and fro, looking
upward from time to time. The window seemed a
dead thing, and now and then he asked himself if he
had not dreamed that shadows had been dancing up there
behind the panes. An intolerable sense of fatigue
weighed him down, a dull, heavy feeling, under the
influence of which he forgot what he was waiting for
at that particular street corner. He kept stumbling
on the pavement and starting into wakefulness with
the icy shudder of a man who does not know where he
is. Nothing seemed to justify the painful anxiety
he was inflicting on himself. Since those people
were asleep well then, let them sleep!
What good could it do mixing in their affairs?
It was very dark; no one would ever know anything
about this night’s doings. And with that
every sentiment within him, down to curiosity itself,
took flight before the longing to have done with it
all and to find relief somewhere. The cold was
increasing, and the street was becoming insufferable.
Twice he walked away and slowly returned, dragging
one foot behind the other, only to walk farther away
next time. It was all over; nothing was left him
now, and so he went down the whole length of the boulevard
and did not return.
His was a melancholy progress through
the streets. He walked slowly, never changing
his pace and simply keeping along the walls of the
houses.
His boot heels re-echoed, and he saw
nothing but his shadow moving at his side. As
he neared each successive gaslight it grew taller and
immediately afterward diminished. But this lulled
him and occupied him mechanically. He never knew
afterward where he had been; it seemed as if he had
dragged himself round and round in a circle for hours.
One reminiscence only was very distinctly retained
by him. Without his being able to explain how
it came about he found himself with his face pressed
close against the gate at the end of the Passage
des Panoramas and his two hands grasping
the bars. He did not shake them but, his whole
heart swelling with emotion, he simply tried to look
into the passage. But he could make nothing out
clearly, for shadows flooded the whole length of the
deserted gallery, and the wind, blowing hard down the
Rue Saint-Marc, puffed in his face with the damp breath
of a cellar. For a time he tried doggedly to
see into the place, and then, awakening from his dream,
he was filled with astonishment and asked himself what
he could possibly be seeking for at that hour and
in that position, for he had pressed against the railings
so fiercely that they had left their mark on his face.
Then he went on tramp once more. He was hopeless,
and his heart was full of infinite sorrow, for he felt,
amid all those shadows, that he was evermore betrayed
and alone.
Day broke at last. It was the
murky dawn that follows winter nights and looks so
melancholy from muddy Paris pavements. Muffat
had returned into the wide streets, which were then
in course of construction on either side of the new
opera house. Soaked by the rain and cut up by
cart wheels, the chalky soil had become a lake of
liquid mire. But he never looked to see where
he was stepping and walked on and on, slipping and
regaining his footing as he went. The awakening
of Paris, with its gangs of sweepers and early workmen
trooping to their destinations, added to his troubles
as day brightened. People stared at him in surprise
as he went by with scared look and soaked hat and
muddy clothes. For a long while he sought refuge
against palings and among scaffoldings, his desolate
brain haunted by the single remaining thought that
he was very miserable.
Then he thought of God. The sudden
idea of divine help, of superhuman consolation, surprised
him, as though it were something unforeseen and extraordinary.
The image of M. Venot was evoked thereby, and he saw
his little plump face and ruined teeth. Assuredly
M. Venot, whom for months he had been avoiding and
thereby rendering miserable, would be delighted were
he to go and knock at his door and fall weeping into
his arms. In the old days God had been always
so merciful toward him. At the least sorrow,
the slightest obstacle on the path of life, he had
been wont to enter a church, where, kneeling down,
he would humble his littleness in the presence of
Omnipotence. And he had been used to go forth
thence, fortified by prayer, fully prepared to give
up the good things of this world, possessed by the
single yearning for eternal salvation. But at
present he only practiced by fits and starts, when
the terror of hell came upon him. All kinds of
weak inclinations had overcome him, and the thought
of Nana disturbed his devotions. And now the thought
of God astonished him. Why had he not thought
of God before, in the hour of that terrible agony
when his feeble humanity was breaking up in ruin?
Meanwhile with slow and painful steps
he sought for a church. But he had lost his bearings;
the early hour had changed the face of the streets.
Soon, however, as he turned the corner of the Rue de
la Chaussee-d’Antin, he noticed a tower
looming vaguely in the fog at the end of the Trinite
Church. The white statues overlooking the bare
garden seemed like so many chilly Venuses among the
yellow foliage of a park. Under the porch he
stood and panted a little, for the ascent of the wide
steps had tired him. Then he went in. The
church was very cold, for its heating apparatus had
been fireless since the previous evening, and its
lofty, vaulted aisles were full of a fine damp vapor
which had come filtering through the windows.
The aisles were deep in shadow; not a soul was in
the church, and the only sound audible amid the unlovely
darkness was that made by the old shoes of some verger
or other who was dragging himself about in sulky semiwakefulness.
Muffat, however, after knocking forlornly against
an untidy collection of chairs, sank on his knees
with bursting heart and propped himself against the
rails in front of a little chapel close by a font.
He clasped his hands and began searching within himself
for suitable prayers, while his whole being yearned
toward a transport. But only his lips kept stammering
empty words; his heart and brain were far away, and
with them he returned to the outer world and began
his long, unresting march through the streets, as
though lashed forward by implacable necessity.
And he kept repeating, “O my God, come to my
assistance! O my God, abandon not Thy creature,
who delivers himself up to Thy justice! O my God,
I adore Thee: Thou wilt not leave me to perish
under the buffetings of mine enemies!” Nothing
answered: the shadows and the cold weighed upon
him, and the noise of the old shoes continued in the
distance and prevented him praying. Nothing,
indeed, save that tiresome noise was audible in the
deserted church, where the matutinal sweeping was unknown
before the early masses had somewhat warmed the air
of the place. After that he rose to his feet
with the help of a chair, his knees cracking under
him as he did so. God was not yet there.
And why should he weep in M. Venot’s arms?
The man could do nothing.
And then mechanically he returned
to Nana’s house. Outside he slipped, and
he felt the tears welling to his eyes again, but he
was not angry with his lot he was only
feeble and ill. Yes, he was too tired; the rain
had wet him too much; he was nipped with cold, but
the idea of going back to his great dark house in
the Rue Miromesnil froze his heart. The house
door at Nana’s was not open as yet, and he had
to wait till the porter made his appearance.
He smiled as he went upstairs, for he already felt
penetrated by the soft warmth of that cozy retreat,
where he would be able to stretch his limbs and go
to sleep.
When Zoe opened the door to him she
gave a start of most uneasy astonishment. Madame
had been taken ill with an atrocious sick headache,
and she hadn’t closed her eyes all night.
Still, she could quite go and see whether Madame had
gone to sleep for good. And with that she slipped
into the bedroom while he sank back into one of the
armchairs in the drawing room. But almost at
that very moment Nana appeared. She had jumped
out of bed and had scarce had time to slip on a petticoat.
Her feet were bare, her hair in wild disorder, her
nightgown all crumpled.
“What! You here again?”
she cried with a red flush on her cheeks.
Up she rushed, stung by sudden indignation,
in order herself to thrust him out of doors.
But when she saw him in such sorry plight nay,
so utterly done for she felt infinite pity.
“Well, you are a pretty sight,
my dear fellow!” she continued more gently.
“But what’s the matter? You’ve
spotted them, eh? And it’s given you the
hump?”
He did not answer; he looked like
a broken-down animal. Nevertheless, she came
to the conclusion that he still lacked proofs, and
to hearten him up the said:
“You see now? I was on
the wrong tack. Your wife’s an honest woman,
on my word of honor! And now, my little friend,
you must go home to bed. You want it badly.”
He did not stir.
“Now then, be off! I can’t
keep you here. But perhaps you won’t presume
to stay at such a time as this?”
“Yes, let’s go to bed,” he stammered.
She repressed a violent gesture, for
her patience was deserting her. Was the man going
crazy?
“Come, be off!” she repeated.
“No.”
But she flared up in exasperation, in utter rebellion.
“It’s sickening!
Don’t you understand I’m jolly tired of
your company? Go and find your wife, who’s
making a cuckold of you. Yes, she’s making
a cuckold of you. I say so yes, I do
now. There, you’ve got the sack! Will
you leave me or will you not?”
Muffat’s eyes filled with tears. He clasped
his hands together.
“Oh, let’s go to bed!”
At this Nana suddenly lost all control
over herself and was choked by nervous sobs.
She was being taken advantage of when all was said
and done! What had these stories to do with her?
She certainly had used all manner of delicate methods
in order to teach him his lesson gently. And
now he was for making her pay the damages! No,
thank you! She was kindhearted, but not to that
extent.
“The devil, but I’ve had
enough of this!” she swore, bringing her fist
down on the furniture. “Yes, yes, I wanted
to be faithful it was all I could do to
be that! Yet if I spoke the word I could be rich
tomorrow, my dear fellow!”
He looked up in surprise. Never
once had he thought of the monetary question.
If she only expressed a desire he would realize it
at once; his whole fortune was at her service.
“No, it’s too late now,”
she replied furiously. “I like men who give
without being asked. No, if you were to offer
me a million for a single interview I should say no!
It’s over between us; I’ve got other fish
to fry there! So be off or I shan’t answer
for the consequences. I shall do something dreadful!”
She advanced threateningly toward
him, and while she was raving, as became a good courtesan
who, though driven to desperation, was yet firmly
convinced of her rights and her superiority over tiresome,
honest folks, the door opened suddenly and Steiner
presented himself. That proved the finishing
touch. She shrieked aloud:
“Well, I never. Here’s the other
one!”
Bewildered by her piercing outcry,
Steiner stopped short. Muffat’s unexpected
presence annoyed him, for he feared an explanation
and had been doing his best to avoid it these three
months past. With blinking eyes he stood first
on one leg, then on the other, looking embarrassed
the while and avoiding the count’s gaze.
He was out of breath, and as became a man who had
rushed across Paris with good news, only to find himself
involved in unforeseen trouble, his face was flushed
and distorted.
“Que veux-tu,
toi?” asked Nana roughly, using the second
person singular in open mockery of the count.
“What what do I ”
he stammered. “I’ve got it for you you
know what.”
“Eh?”
He hesitated. The day before
yesterday she had given him to understand that if
he could not find her a thousand francs to pay a bill
with she would not receive him any more. For
two days he had been loafing about the town in quest
of the money and had at last made the sum up that very
morning.
“The thousand francs!”
he ended by declaring as he drew an envelope from
his pocket.
Nana had not remembered.
“The thousand francs!”
she cried. “D’you think I’m
begging alms? Now look here, that’s what
I value your thousand francs at!”
And snatching the envelope, she threw
it full in his face. As became a prudent Hebrew,
he picked it up slowly and painfully and then looked
at the young woman with a dull expression of face.
Muffat and he exchanged a despairing glance, while
she put her arms akimbo in order to shout more loudly
than before.
“Come now, will you soon have
done insulting me? I’m glad you’ve
come, too, dear boy, because now you see the clearance’ll
be quite complete. Now then, gee up! Out
you go!”
Then as they did not hurry in the
least, for they were paralyzed:
“D’you mean to say I’m
acting like a fool, eh? It’s likely enough!
But you’ve bored me too much! And, hang
it all, I’ve had enough of swelldom! If
I die of what I’m doing well, it’s
my fancy!”
They sought to calm her; they begged
her to listen to reason.
“Now then, once, twice, thrice!
Won’t you go? Very well! Look there!
I’ve got company.”
And with a brisk movement she flung
wide the bedroom door. Whereupon in the middle
of the tumbled bed the two men caught sight of Fontan.
He had not expected to be shown off in this situation;
nevertheless, he took things very easily, for he was
used to sudden surprises on the stage. Indeed,
after the first shock he even hit upon a grimace calculated
to tide him honorably over his difficulty; he “turned
rabbit,” as he phrased it, and stuck out his
lips and wrinkled up his nose, so as completely to
transform the lower half of his face. His base,
satyrlike head seemed to exude incontinence.
It was this man Fontan then whom Nana had been to
fetch at the Varieties every day for a week past, for
she was smitten with that fierce sort of passion which
the grimacing ugliness of a low comedian is wont to
inspire in the genus courtesan.
“There!” she said, pointing him out with
tragic gesture.
Muffat, who hitherto had pocketed everything, rebelled
at this affront.
“Bitch!” he stammered.
But Nana, who was once more in the
bedroom, came back in order to have the last word.
“How am I a bitch? What about your wife?”
And she was off and, slamming the
door with a bang, she noisily pushed to the bolt.
Left alone, the two men gazed at one another in silence.
Zoe had just come into the room, but she did not drive
them out. Nay, she spoke to them in the most
sensible manner. As became a woman with a head
on her shoulders, she decided that Madame’s conduct
was rather too much of a good thing. But she
defended her, nonetheless: this union with the
play actor couldn’t last; the madness must be
allowed to pass off! The two men retired without
uttering a sound. On the pavement outside they
shook hands silently, as though swayed by a mutual
sense of fraternity. Then they turned their backs
on one another and went crawling off in opposite directions.
When at last Muffat entered his town
house in the Rue Miromesnil his wife was just arriving.
The two met on the great staircase, whose walls exhaled
an icy chill. They lifted up their eyes and beheld
one another. The count still wore his muddy clothes,
and his pale, bewildered face betrayed the prodigal
returning from his debauch. The countess looked
as though she were utterly fagged out by a night in
the train. She was dropping with sleep, but her
hair had been brushed anyhow, and her eyes were deeply
sunken.