Toward the end of September Count
Muffat, who was to dine at Nana’s that evening,
came at nightfall to inform her of a summons to the
Tuileries. The lamps in the house had not been
lit yet, and the servants were laughing uproariously
in the kitchen regions as he softly mounted the stairs,
where the tall windows gleamed in warm shadow.
The door of the drawing room up-stairs opened noiselessly.
A faint pink glow was dying out on the ceiling of
the room, and the red hangings, the deep divans, the
lacquered furniture, with their medley of embroidered
fabrics and bronzes and china, were already sleeping
under a slowly creeping flood of shadows, which drowned
nooks and corners and blotted out the gleam of ivory
and the glint of gold. And there in the darkness,
on the white surface of a wide, outspread petticoat,
which alone remained clearly visible, he saw Nana
lying stretched in the arms of Georges. Denial
in any shape or form was impossible. He gave
a choking cry and stood gaping at them.
Nana had bounded up, and now she pushed
him into the bedroom in order to give the lad time
to escape.
“Come in,” she murmured
with reeling senses, “I’ll explain.”
She was exasperated at being thus
surprised. Never before had she given way like
this in her own house, in her own drawing room, when
the doors were open. It was a long story:
Georges and she had had a disagreement; he had been
mad with jealousy of Philippe, and he had sobbed so
bitterly on her bosom that she had yielded to him,
not knowing how else to calm him and really very full
of pity for him at heart. And on this solitary
occasion, when she had been stupid enough to forget
herself thus with a little rascal who could not even
now bring her bouquets of violets, so short did his
mother keep him on this solitary occasion
the count turned up and came straight down on them.
’Gad, she had very bad luck! That was what
one got if one was a good-natured wench!
Meanwhile in the bedroom, into which
she had pushed Muffat, the darkness was complete.
Whereupon after some groping she rang furiously and
asked for a lamp. It was Julien’s fault
too! If there had been a lamp in the drawing
room the whole affair would not have happened.
It was the stupid nightfall which had got the better
of her heart.
“I beseech you to be reasonable,
my pet,” she said when Zoe had brought in the
lights.
The count, with his hands on his knees,
was sitting gazing at the floor. He was stupefied
by what he had just seen. He did not cry out in
anger. He only trembled, as though overtaken
by some horror which was freezing him. This dumb
misery touched the young woman, and she tried to comfort
him.
“Well, yes, I’ve done
wrong. It’s very bad what I did. You
see I’m sorry for my fault. It makes me
grieve very much because it annoys you. Come
now, be nice, too, and forgive me.”
She had crouched down at his feet
and was striving to catch his eye with a look of tender
submission. She was fain to know whether he was
very vexed with her. Presently, as he gave a
long sigh and seemed to recover himself, she grew
more coaxing and with grave kindness of manner added
a final reason:
“You see, dearie, you must try
and understand how it is: I can’t refuse
it to my poor friends.”
The count consented to give way and
only insisted that Georges should be dismissed once
for all. But all his illusions had vanished, and
he no longer believed in her sworn fidelity.
Next day Nana would deceive him anew, and he only
remained her miserable possessor in obedience to a
cowardly necessity and to terror at the thought of
living without her.
This was the epoch in her existence
when Nana flared upon Paris with redoubled splendor.
She loomed larger than heretofore on the horizon of
vice and swayed the town with her impudently flaunted
splendor and that contempt of money which made her
openly squander fortunes. Her house had become
a sort of glowing smithy, where her continual desires
were the flames and the slightest breath from her
lips changed gold into fine ashes, which the wind
hourly swept away. Never had eye beheld such a
rage of expenditure. The great house seemed to
have been built over a gulf in which men their
worldly possessions, their fortunes, their very names were
swallowed up without leaving even a handful of dust
behind them. This courtesan, who had the tastes
of a parrot and gobbled up radishes and burnt almonds
and pecked at the meat upon her plate, had monthly
table bills amounting to five thousand francs.
The wildest waste went on in the kitchen: the
place, metaphorically speaking was one great river
which stove in cask upon cask of wine and swept great
bills with it, swollen by three or four successive
manipulators. Victorine and Francois reigned
supreme in the kitchen, whither they invited friends.
In addition to these there was quite a little tribe
of cousins, who were cockered up in their homes with
cold meats and strong soup. Julien made the trades-people
give him commissions, and the glaziers never put up
a pane of glass at a cost of a franc and a half but
he had a franc put down to himself. Charles devoured
the horses’ oats and doubled the amount of their
provender, reselling at the back door what came in
at the carriage gate, while amid the general pillage,
the sack of the town after the storm, Zoe, by dint
of cleverness, succeeded in saving appearances and
covering the thefts of all in order the better to slur
over and make good her own. But the household
waste was worse than the household dishonesty.
Yesterday’s food was thrown into the gutter,
and the collection of provisions in the house was
such that the servants grew disgusted with it.
The glass was all sticky with sugar, and the gas burners
flared and flared till the rooms seemed ready to explode.
Then, too, there were instances of negligence and mischief
and sheer accident of everything, in fact,
which can hasten the ruin of a house devoured by so
many mouths. Upstairs in Madame’s quarters
destruction raged more fiercely still. Dresses,
which cost ten thousand francs and had been twice
worn, were sold by Zoe; jewels vanished as though they
had crumbled deep down in their drawers; stupid purchases
were made; every novelty of the day was brought and
left to lie forgotten in some corner the morning after
or swept up by ragpickers in the street. She
could not see any very expensive object without wanting
to possess it, and so she constantly surrounded herself
with the wrecks of bouquets and costly knickknacks
and was the happier the more her passing fancy cost.
Nothing remained intact in her hands; she broke everything,
and this object withered, and that grew dirty in the
clasp of her lithe white fingers. A perfect heap
of nameless debris, of twisted shreds and muddy rags,
followed her and marked her passage. Then amid
this utter squandering of pocket money cropped up
a question about the big bills and their settlement.
Twenty thousand francs were due to the modiste, thirty
thousand to the linen draper, twelve thousand to the
bootmaker. Her stable devoured fifty thousand
for her, and in six months she ran up a bill of a
hundred and twenty thousand francs at her ladies’
tailor. Though she had not enlarged her scheme
of expenditure, which Labordette reckoned at four
hundred thousand francs on an average, she ran up that
same year to a million. She was herself stupefied
by the amount and was unable to tell whither such
a sum could have gone. Heaps upon heaps of men,
barrowfuls of gold, failed to stop up the hole, which,
amid this ruinous luxury, continually gaped under
the floor of her house.
Meanwhile Nana had cherished her latest
caprice. Once more exercised by the notion that
her room needed redoing, she fancied she had hit on
something at last. The room should be done in
velvet of the color of tea roses, with silver buttons
and golden cords, tassels and fringes, and the hangings
should be caught up to the ceiling after the manner
of a tent. This arrangement ought to be both
rich and tender, she thought, and would form a splendid
background to her blonde vermeil-tinted skin.
However, the bedroom was only designed to serve as
a setting to the bed, which was to be a dazzling affair,
a prodigy. Nana meditated a bed such as had never
before existed; it was to be a throne, an altar, whither
Paris was to come in order to adore her sovereign nudity.
It was to be all in gold and silver beaten work it
should suggest a great piece of jewelry with its golden
roses climbing on a trelliswork of silver. On
the headboard a band of Loves should peep forth laughing
from amid the flowers, as though they were watching
the voluptuous dalliance within the shadow of the
bed curtains. Nana had applied to Labordette who
had brought two goldsmiths to see her. They were
already busy with the designs. The bed would
cost fifty thousand francs, and Muffat was to give
it her as a New Year’s present.
What most astonished the young woman
was that she was endlessly short of money amid a river
of gold, the tide of which almost enveloped her.
On certain days she was at her wit’s end for
want of ridiculously small sums sums of
only a few louis. She was driven to borrow
from Zoe, or she scraped up cash as well as she could
on her own account. But before resignedly adopting
extreme measures she tried her friends and in a joking
sort of way got the men to give her all they had about
them, even down to their coppers. For the last
three months she had been emptying Philippe’s
pockets especially, and now on days of passionate enjoyment
he never came away but he left his purse behind him.
Soon she grew bolder and asked him for loans of two
hundred francs, three hundred francs never
more than that wherewith to pay the interest
of bills or to stave off outrageous debts. And
Philippe, who in July had been appointed paymaster
to his regiment, would bring the money the day after,
apologizing at the same time for not being rich, seeing
that good Mamma Hugon now treated her sons with singular
financial severity. At the close of three months
these little oft-renewed loans mounted up to a sum
of ten thousand francs. The captain still laughed
his hearty-sounding laugh, but he was growing visibly
thinner, and sometimes he seemed absent-minded, and
a shade of suffering would pass over his face.
But one look from Nana’s eyes would transfigure
him in a sort of sensual ecstasy. She had a very
coaxing way with him and would intoxicate him with
furtive kisses and yield herself to him in sudden
fits of self-abandonment, which tied him to her apron
strings the moment he was able to escape from his
military duties.
One evening, Nana having announced
that her name, too, was Therese and that her fête
day was the fifteenth of October, the gentlemen all
sent her presents. Captain Philippe brought his
himself; it was an old comfit dish in Dresden china,
and it had a gold mount. He found her alone in
her dressing room. She had just emerged from the
bath, had nothing on save a great red-and-white flannel
bathing wrap and was very busy examining her presents,
which were ranged on a table. She had already
broken a rock-crystal flask in her attempts to unstopper
it.
“Oh, you’re too nice!”
she said. “What is it? Let’s
have a peep! What a baby you are to spend your
pennies in little fakements like that!”
She scolded him, seeing that he was
not rich, but at heart she was delighted to see him
spending his whole substance for her. Indeed,
this was the only proof of love which had power to
touch her. Meanwhile she was fiddling away at
the comfit dish, opening it and shutting it in her
desire to see how it was made.
“Take care,” he murmured, “it’s
brittle.”
But she shrugged her shoulders.
Did he think her as clumsy as a street porter?
And all of a sudden the hinge came off between her
fingers and the lid fell and was broken. She
was stupefied and remained gazing at the fragments
as she cried:
“Oh, it’s smashed!”
Then she burst out laughing.
The fragments lying on the floor tickled her fancy.
Her merriment was of the nervous kind, the stupid,
spiteful laughter of a child who delights in destruction.
Philippe had a little fit of disgust, for the wretched
girl did not know what anguish this curio had cost
him. Seeing him thoroughly upset, she tried to
contain herself.
“Gracious me, it isn’t
my fault! It was cracked; those old things barely
hold together. Besides, it was the cover!
Didn’t you see the bound it gave?”
And she once more burst into uproarious mirth.
But though he made an effort to the
contrary, tears appeared in the young man’s
eyes, and with that she flung her arms tenderly round
his neck.
“How silly you are! You
know I love you all the same. If one never broke
anything the tradesmen would never sell anything.
All that sort of thing’s made to be broken.
Now look at this fan; it’s only held together
with glue!”
She had snatched up a fan and was
dragging at the blades so that the silk was torn in
two. This seemed to excite her, and in order to
show that she scorned the other presents, the moment
she had ruined his she treated herself to a general
massacre, rapping each successive object and proving
clearly that not one was solid in that she had broken
them all. There was a lurid glow in her vacant
eyes, and her lips, slightly drawn back, displayed
her white teeth. Soon, when everything was in
fragments, she laughed cheerily again and with flushed
cheeks beat on the table with the flat of her hands,
lisping like a naughty little girl:
“All over! Got no more! Got no more!”
Then Philippe was overcome by the
same mad excitement, and, pushing her down, he merrily
kissed her bosom. She abandoned herself to him
and clung to his shoulders with such gleeful energy
that she could not remember having enjoyed herself
so much for an age past. Without letting go of
him she said caressingly:
“I say, dearie, you ought certainly
to bring me ten louis tomorrow. It’s
a bore, but there’s the baker’s bill worrying
me awfully.”
He had grown pale. Then imprinting
a final kiss on her forehead, he said simply:
“I’ll try.”
Silence reigned. She was dressing,
and he stood pressing his forehead against the windowpanes.
A minute passed, and he returned to her and deliberately
continued:
“Nana, you ought to marry me.”
This notion straightway so tickled
the young woman that she was unable to finish tying
on her petticoats.
“My poor pet, you’re ill!
D’you offer me your hand because I ask you for
ten louis? No, never! I’m too
fond of you. Good gracious, what a silly question!”
And as Zoe entered in order to put
her boots on, they ceased talking of the matter.
The lady’s maid at once espied the presents lying
broken in pieces on the table. She asked if she
should put these things away, and, Madame having bidden
her get rid of them, she carried the whole collection
off in the folds of her dress. In the kitchen
a sorting-out process began, and Madame’s debris
were shared among the servants.
That day Georges had slipped into
the house despite Nana’s orders to the contrary.
Francois had certainly seen him pass, but the servants
had now got to laugh among themselves at their good
lady’s embarrassing situations. He had
just slipped as far as the little drawing room when
his brother’s voice stopped him, and, as one
powerless to tear himself from the door, he overheard
everything that went on within, the kisses, the offer
of marriage. A feeling of horror froze him, and
he went away in a state bordering on imbecility, feeling
as though there were a great void in his brain.
It was only in his own room above his mother’s
flat in the Rue Richelieu that his heart broke in
a storm of furious sobs. This time there could
be no doubt about the state of things; a horrible
picture of Nana in Philippe’s arms kept rising
before his mind’s eye. It struck him in
the light of an incest. When he fancied himself
calm again the remembrance of it all would return,
and in fresh access of raging jealousy he would throw
himself on the bed, biting the coverlet, shouting
infamous accusations which maddened him the more.
Thus the day passed. In order to stay shut up
in his room he spoke of having a sick headache.
But the night proved more terrible still; a murder
fever shook him amid continual nightmares. Had
his brother lived in the house, he would have gone
and killed him with the stab of a knife. When
day returned he tried to reason things out. It
was he who ought to die, and he determined to throw
himself out of the window when an omnibus was passing.
Nevertheless, he went out toward ten o’clock
and traversed Paris, wandered up and down on the bridges
and at the last moment felt an unconquerable desire
to see Nana once more. With one word, perhaps,
she would save him. And three o’clock was
striking when he entered the house in the Avenue de
Villiers.
Toward noon a frightful piece of news
had simply crushed Mme Hugon. Philippe had been
in prison since the evening of the previous day, accused
of having stolen twelve thousand francs from the chest
of his regiment. For the last three months he
had been withdrawing small sums therefrom in the hope
of being able to repay them, while he had covered
the deficit with false money. Thanks to the negligence
of the administrative committee, this fraud had been
constantly successful. The old lady, humbled
utterly by her child’s crime, had at once cried
out in anger against Nana. She knew Philippe’s
connection with her, and her melancholy had been the
result of this miserable state of things which kept
her in Paris in constant dread of some final catastrophe.
But she had never looked forward to such shame as
this, and now she blamed herself for refusing him
money, as though such refusal had made her accessory
to his act. She sank down on an armchair; her
legs were seized with paralysis, and she felt herself
to be useless, incapable of action and destined to
stay where she was till she died. But the sudden
thought of Georges comforted her. Georges was
still left her; he would be able to act, perhaps to
save them. Thereupon, without seeking aid of anyone
else for she wished to keep these matters
shrouded in the bosom of her family she
dragged herself up to the next story, her mind possessed
by the idea that she still had someone to love about
her. But upstairs she found an empty room.
The porter told her that M. Georges had gone out at
an early hour. The room was haunted by the ghost
of yet another calamity; the bed with its gnawed bedclothes
bore witness to someone’s anguish, and a chair
which lay amid a heap of clothes on the ground looked
like something dead. Georges must be at that woman’s
house, and so with dry eyes and feet that had regained
their strength Mme Hugon went downstairs. She
wanted her sons; she was starting to reclaim them.
Since morning Nana had been much worried.
First of all it was the baker, who at nine o’clock
had turned up, bill in hand. It was a wretched
story. He had supplied her with bread to the amount
of a hundred and thirty-three francs, and despite
her royal housekeeping she could not pay it.
In his irritation at being put off he had presented
himself a score of times since the day he had refused
further credit, and the servants were now espousing
his cause. Francois kept saying that Madame would
never pay him unless he made a fine scene; Charles
talked of going upstairs, too, in order to get an
old unpaid straw bill settled, while Victorine advised
them to wait till some gentleman was with her, when
they would get the money out of her by suddenly asking
for it in the middle of conversation. The kitchen
was in a savage mood: the tradesmen were all
kept posted in the course events were taking, and there
were gossiping consultations, lasting three or four
hours on a stretch, during which Madame was stripped,
plucked and talked over with the wrathful eagerness
peculiar to an idle, overprosperous servants’
hall. Julien, the house steward, alone pretended
to defend his mistress. She was quite the thing,
whatever they might say! And when the others
accused him of sleeping with her he laughed fatuously,
thereby driving the cook to distraction, for she would
have liked to be a man in order to “spit on
such women’s backsides,” so utterly would
they have disgusted her. Francois, without informing
Madame of it, had wickedly posted the baker in the
hall, and when she came downstairs at lunch time she
found herself face to face with him. Taking the
bill, she told him to return toward three o’clock,
whereupon, with many foul expressions, he departed,
vowing that he would have things properly settled and
get his money by hook or by crook.
Nana made a very bad lunch, for the
scene had annoyed her. Next time the man would
have to be definitely got rid of. A dozen times
she had put his money aside for him, but it had as
constantly melted away, sometimes in the purchase
of flowers, at others in the shape of a subscription
got up for the benefit of an old gendarme. Besides,
she was counting on Philippe and was astonished not
to see him make his appearance with his two hundred
francs. It was regular bad luck, seeing that the
day before yesterday she had again given Satin an
outfit, a perfect trousseau this time, some twelve
hundred francs’ worth of dresses and linen, and
now she had not a louis remaining.
Toward two o’clock, when Nana
was beginning to be anxious, Labordette presented
himself. He brought with him the designs for the
bed, and this caused a diversion, a joyful interlude
which made the young woman forget all her troubles.
She clapped her hands and danced about. After
which, her heart bursting wish curiosity, she leaned
over a table in the drawing room and examined the
designs, which Labordette proceeded to explain to
her.
“You see,” he said, “this
is the body of the bed. In the middle here there’s
a bunch of roses in full bloom, and then comes a garland
of buds and flowers. The leaves are to be in
yellow and the roses in red-gold. And here’s
the grand design for the bed’s head; Cupids dancing
in a ring on a silver trelliswork.”
But Nana interrupted him, for she
was beside herself with ecstasy.
“Oh, how funny that little one
is, that one in the corner, with his behind in the
air! Isn’t he now? And what a sly laugh!
They’ve all got such dirty, wicked eyes!
You know, dear boy, I shall never dare play any silly
tricks before them!”
Her pride was flattered beyond measure.
The goldsmiths had declared that no queen anywhere
slept in such a bed. However, a difficulty presented
itself. Labordette showed her two designs for
the footboard, one of which reproduced the pattern
on the sides, while the other, a subject by itself,
represented Night wrapped in her veil and discovered
by a faun in all her splendid nudity. He added
that if she chose this last subject the goldsmiths
intended making Night in her own likeness. This
idea, the taste of which was rather risky, made her
grow white with pleasure, and she pictured herself
as a silver statuette, symbolic of the warm, voluptuous
delights of darkness.
“Of course you will only sit
for the head and shoulders,” said Labordette.
She looked quietly at him.
“Why? The moment a work
of art’s in question I don’t mind the sculptor
that takes my likeness a blooming bit!”
Of course it must be understood that
she was choosing the subject. But at this he
interposed.
“Wait a moment; it’s six thousand francs
extra.”
“It’s all the same to
me, by Jove!” she cried, bursting into a laugh.
“Hasn’t my little rough got the rhino?”
Nowadays among her intimates she always
spoke thus of Count Muffat, and the gentlemen had
ceased to inquire after him otherwise.
“Did you see your little rough
last night?” they used to say.
“Dear me, I expected to find the little rough
here!”
It was a simple familiarity enough,
which, nevertheless, she did not as yet venture on
in his presence.
Labordette began rolling up the designs
as he gave the final explanations. The goldsmiths,
he said, were undertaking to deliver the bed in two
months’ time, toward the twenty-fifth of December,
and next week a sculptor would come to make a model
for the Night. As she accompanied him to the
door Nana remembered the baker and briskly inquired:
“By the by, you wouldn’t be having ten
louis about you?”
Labordette made it a solemn rule,
which stood him in good stead, never to lend women
money. He used always to make the same reply.
“No, my girl, I’m short.
But would you like me to go to your little rough?”
She refused; it was useless.
Two days before she had succeeded in getting five
thousand francs out of the count. However, she
soon regretted her discreet conduct, for the moment
Labordette had gone the baker reappeared, though it
was barely half-past two, and with many loud oaths
roughly settled himself on a bench in the hall.
The young woman listened to him from the first floor.
She was pale, and it caused her especial pain to hear
the servants’ secret rejoicings swelling up louder
and louder till they even reached her ears. Down
in the kitchen they were dying of laughter. The
coachman was staring across from the other side of
the court; Francois was crossing the hall without any
apparent reason. Then he hurried off to report
progress, after sneering knowingly at the baker.
They didn’t care a damn for Madame; the walls
were echoing to their laughter, and she felt that
she was deserted on all hands and despised by the
servants’ hall, the inmates of which were watching
her every movement and liberally bespattering her
with the filthiest of chaff. Thereupon she abandoned
the intention of borrowing the hundred and thirty-three
francs from Zoe; she already owed the maid money, and
she was too proud to risk a refusal now. Such
a burst of feeling stirred her that she went back
into her room, loudly remarking:
“Come, come, my girl, don’t
count on anyone but yourself. Your body’s
your own property, and it’s better to make use
of it than to let yourself be insulted.”
And without even summoning Zoe she
dressed herself with feverish haste in order to run
round to the Tricon’s. In hours of great
embarrassment this was her last resource. Much
sought after and constantly solicited by the old lady,
she would refuse or resign herself according to her
needs, and on these increasingly frequent occasions
when both ends would not meet in her royally conducted
establishment, she was sure to find twenty-five louis
awaiting her at the other’s house. She used
to betake herself to the Tricon’s with the ease
born of use, just as the poor go to the pawnshop.
But as she left her own chamber Nana
came suddenly upon Georges standing in the middle
of the drawing room. Not noticing his waxen pallor
and the somber fire in his wide eyes, she gave a sigh
of relief.
“Ah, you’ve come from your brother.”
“No,” said the lad, growing yet paler.
At this she gave a despairing shrug.
What did he want? Why was he barring her way?
She was in a hurry yes, she was. Then
returning to where he stood:
“You’ve no money, have you?”
“No.”
“That’s true. How
silly of me! Never a stiver; not even their omnibus
fares Mamma doesn’t wish it! Oh, what a
set of men!”
And she escaped. But he held
her back; he wanted to speak to her. She was
fairly under way and again declared she had no time,
but he stopped her with a word.
“Listen, I know you’re going to marry
my brother.”
Gracious! The thing was too funny!
And she let herself down into a chair in order to
laugh at her ease.
“Yes,” continued the lad,
“and I don’t wish it. It’s I
you’re going to marry. That’s why
I’ve come.”
“Eh, what? You too?”
she cried. “Why, it’s a family disease,
is it? No, never! What a fancy, to be sure!
Have I ever asked you to do anything so nasty?
Neither one nor t’other of you! No, never!”
The lad’s face brightened.
Perhaps he had been deceiving himself! He continued:
“Then swear to me that you don’t
go to bed with my brother.”
“Oh, you’re beginning
to bore me now!” said Nana, who had risen with
renewed impatience. “It’s amusing
for a little while, but when I tell you I’m
in a hurry I go to bed with your brother
if it pleases me. Are you keeping me are
you paymaster here that you insist on my making a
report? Yes, I go to bed with your brother.”
He had caught hold of her arm and
squeezed it hard enough to break it as he stuttered:
“Don’t say that! Don’t say
that!”
With a slight blow she disengaged herself from his
grasp.
“He’s maltreating me now!
Here’s a young ruffian for you! My chicken,
you’ll leave this jolly sharp. I used to
keep you about out of niceness. Yes, I did!
You may stare! Did you think I was going to be
your mamma till I died? I’ve got better
things to do than to bring up brats.”
He listened to her stark with anguish,
yet in utter submission. Her every word cut him
to the heart so sharply that he felt he should die.
She did not so much as notice his suffering and continued
delightedly to revenge herself on him for the annoyance
of the morning.
“It’s like your brother;
he’s another pretty Johnny, he is! He promised
me two hundred francs. Oh, dear me; yes, I can
wait for ’em. It isn’t his money
I care for! I’ve not got enough to pay for
hair oil. Yes, he’s leaving me in a jolly
fix! Look here, d’you want to know how matters
stand? Here goes then: it’s all owing
to your brother that I’m going out to earn twenty-five
louis with another man.”
At these words his head spun, and
he barred her egress. He cried; he besought her
not to go, clasping his hands together and blurting
out:
“Oh no! Oh no!”
“I want to, I do,” she said. “Have
you the money?”
No, he had not got the money.
He would have given his life to have the money!
Never before had he felt so miserable, so useless,
so very childish. All his wretched being was
shaken with weeping and gave proof of such heavy suffering
that at last she noticed it and grew kind. She
pushed him away softly.
“Come, my pet, let me pass;
I must. Be reasonable. You’re a baby
boy, and it was very nice for a week, but nowadays
I must look after my own affairs. Just think
it over a bit. Now your brother’s a man;
what I’m saying doesn’t apply to him.
Oh, please do me a favor; it’s no good telling
him all this. He needn’t know where I’m
going. I always let out too much when I’m
in a rage.”
She began laughing. Then taking
him in her arms and kissing him on the forehead:
“Good-by, baby,” she said;
“it’s over, quite over between us; d’you
understand? And now I’m off!”
And she left him, and he stood in
the middle of the drawing room. Her last words
rang like the knell of a tocsin in his ears: “It’s
over, quite over!” And he thought the ground
was opening beneath his feet. There was a void
in his brain from which the man awaiting Nana had
disappeared. Philippe alone remained there in
the young woman’s bare embrace forever and ever.
She did not deny it: she loved him, since she
wanted to spare him the pain of her infidelity.
It was over, quite over. He breathed heavily
and gazed round the room, suffocating beneath a crushing
weight. Memories kept recurring to him one after
the other memories of merry nights at La
Mignotte, of amorous hours during which he had fancied
himself her child, of pleasures stolen in this very
room. And now these things would never, never
recur! He was too small; he had not grown up
quickly enough; Philippe was supplanting him because
he was a bearded man. So then this was the end;
he could not go on living. His vicious passion
had become transformed into an infinite tenderness,
a sensual adoration, in which his whole being was merged.
Then, too, how was he to forget it all if his brother
remained his brother, blood of his blood,
a second self, whose enjoyment drove him mad with
jealousy? It was the end of all things; he wanted
to die.
All the doors remained open, as the
servants noisily scattered over the house after seeing
Madame make her exit on foot. Downstairs on the
bench in the hall the baker was laughing with Charles
and Francois. Zoe came running across the drawing
room and seemed surprised at sight of Georges.
She asked him if he were waiting for Madame. Yes,
he was waiting for her; he had for-gotten to give
her an answer to a question. And when he was
alone he set to work and searched. Finding nothing
else to suit his purpose, he took up in the dressing
room a pair of very sharply pointed scissors with
which Nana had a mania for ceaselessly trimming herself,
either by polishing her skin or cutting off little
hairs. Then for a whole hour he waited patiently,
his hand in his pocket and his fingers tightly clasped
round the scissors.
“Here’s Madame,”
said Zoe, returning. She must have espied her
through the bedroom window.
There was a sound of people racing
through the house, and laughter died away and doors
were shut. Georges heard Nana paying the baker
and speaking in the curtest way. Then she came
upstairs.
“What, you’re here still!”
she said as she noticed him. “Aha!
We’re going to grow angry, my good man!”
He followed her as she walked toward her bedroom.
“Nana, will you marry me?”
She shrugged her shoulders. It
was too stupid; she refused to answer any more and
conceived the idea of slamming the door in his face.
“Nana, will you marry me?”
She slammed the door. He opened
it with one hand while he brought the other and the
scissors out of his pocket. And with one great
stab he simply buried them in his breast.
Nana, meanwhile, had felt conscious
that something dreadful would happen, and she had
turned round. When she saw him stab himself she
was seized with indignation.
“Oh, what a fool he is!
What a fool! And with my scissors! Will you
leave off, you naughty little rogue? Oh, my God!
Oh, my God!”
She was scared. Sinking on his
knees, the boy had just given himself a second stab,
which sent him down at full length on the carpet.
He blocked the threshold of the bedroom. With
that Nana lost her head utterly and screamed with
all her might, for she dared not step over his body,
which shut her in and prevented her from running to
seek assistance.
“Zoe! Zoe! Come at
once. Make him leave off. It’s getting
stupid a child like that! He’s
killing himself now! And in my place too!
Did you ever see the like of it?”
He was frightening her. He was
all white, and his eyes were shut. There was
scarcely any bleeding only a little blood,
a tiny stain which was oozing down into his waistcoat.
She was making up her mind to step over the body when
an apparition sent her starting back. An old lady
was advancing through the drawing-room door, which
remained wide open opposite. And in her terror
she recognized Mme Hugon but could not explain her
presence. Still wearing her gloves and hat, Nana
kept edging backward, and her terror grew so great
that she sought to defend herself, and in a shaky
voice:
“Madame,” she cried, “it
isn’t I; I swear to you it isn’t.
He wanted to marry me, and I said no, and he’s
killed himself!”
Slowly Mme Hugon drew near she
was in black, and her face showed pale under her white
hair. In the carriage, as she drove thither, the
thought of Georges had vanished and that of Philippe’s
misdoing had again taken complete possession of her.
It might be that this woman could afford explanations
to the judges which would touch them, and so she conceived
the project of begging her to bear witness in her son’s
favor. Downstairs the doors of the house stood
open, but as she mounted to the first floor her sick
feet failed her, and she was hesitating as to which
way to go when suddenly horror-stricken cries directed
her. Then upstairs she found a man lying on the
floor with bloodstained shirt. It was Georges it
was her other child.
Nana, in idiotic tones, kept saying:
“He wanted to marry me, and I said no, and he’s
killed himself.”
Uttering no cry, Mme Hugon stooped
down. Yes, it was the other one; it was Georges.
The one was brought to dishonor, the other murdered!
It caused her no surprise, for her whole life was
ruined. Kneeling on the carpet, utterly forgetting
where she was, noticing no one else, she gazed fixedly
at her boy’s face and listened with her hand
on his heart. Then she gave a feeble sigh she
had felt the heart beating. And with that she
lifted her head and scrutinized the room and the woman
and seemed to remember. A fire glowed forth in
her vacant eyes, and she looked so great and terrible
in her silence that Nana trembled as she continued
to defend herself above the body that divided them.
“I swear it, madame!
If his brother were here he could explain it to you.”
“His brother has robbed he
is in prison,” said the mother in a hard voice.
Nana felt a choking sensation.
Why, what was the reason of it all? The other
had turned thief now! They were mad in that family!
She ceased struggling in self-defense; she seemed
no longer mistress in her own house and allowed Mme
Hugon to give what orders she liked. The servants
had at last hurried up, and the old lady insisted on
their carrying the fainting Georges down to her carriage.
She preferred killing him rather than letting him
remain in that house. With an air of stupefaction
Nana watched the retreating servants as they supported
poor, dear Zizi by his legs and shoulders. The
mother walked behind them in a state of collapse;
she supported herself against the furniture; she felt
as if all she held dear had vanished in the void.
On the landing a sob escaped her; she turned and twice
ejaculated:
“Oh, but you’ve done us
infinite harm! You’ve done us infinite harm!”
That was all. In her stupefaction
Nana had sat down; she still wore her gloves and her
hat. The house once more lapsed into heavy silence;
the carriage had driven away, and she sat motionless,
not knowing what to do next, her head swimming after
all she had gone through. A quarter of an hour
later Count Muffat found her thus, but at sight of
him she relieved her feelings in an overflowing current
of talk. She told him all about the sad incident,
repeated the same details twenty times over, picked
up the bloodstained scissors in order to imitate Zizi’s
gesture when he stabbed himself. And above all
she nursed the idea of proving her own innocence.
“Look you here, dearie, is it
my fault? If you were the judge would you condemn
me? I certainly didn’t tell Philippe to
meddle with the till any more than I urged that wretched
boy to kill himself. I’ve been most unfortunate
throughout it all. They come and do stupid things
in my place; they make me miserable; they treat me
like a hussy.”
And she burst into tears. A fit
of nervous expansiveness rendered her soft and doleful,
and her immense distress melted her utterly.
“And you, too, look as if you
weren’t satisfied. Now do just ask Zoe if
I’m at all mixed up in it. Zoe, do speak:
explain to Monsieur ”
The lady’s maid, having brought
a towel and a basin of water out of the dressing room,
had for some moments past been rubbing the carpet in
order to remove the bloodstains before they dried.
“Oh, monsieur,” she declared,
“Madame is utterly miserable!”
Muffat was still stupefied; the tragedy
had frozen him, and his imagination was full of the
mother weeping for her sons. He knew her greatness
of heart and pictured her in her widow’s weeds,
withering solitarily away at Les Fondettes. But
Nana grew ever more despondent, for now the memory
of Zizi lying stretched on the floor, with a red hole
in his shirt, almost drove her senseless.
“He used to be such a darling,
so sweet and caressing. Oh, you know, my pet I’m
sorry if it vexes you I loved that baby!
I can’t help saying so; the words must out.
Besides, now it ought not to hurt you at all.
He’s gone. You’ve got what you wanted;
you’re quite certain never to surprise us again.”
And this last reflection tortured
her with such regret that he ended by turning comforter.
Well, well, he said, she ought to be brave; she was
quite right; it wasn’t her fault! But she
checked her lamentations of her own accord in order
to say:
“Listen, you must run round
and bring me news of him. At once! I wish
it!”
He took his hat and went to get news
of Georges. When he returned after some three
quarters of an hour he saw Nana leaning anxiously out
of a window, and he shouted up to her from the pavement
that the lad was not dead and that they even hoped
to bring him through. At this she immediately
exchanged grief for excess of joy and began to sing
and dance and vote existence delightful. Zoe,
meanwhile, was still dissatisfied with her washing.
She kept looking at the stain, and every time she
passed it she repeated:
“You know it’s not gone yet, madame.”
As a matter of fact, the pale red
stain kept reappearing on one of the white roses in
the carpet pattern. It was as though, on the very
threshold of the room, a splash of blood were barring
the doorway.
“Bah!” said the joyous
Nana. “That’ll be rubbed out under
people’s feet.”
After the following day Count Muffat
had likewise forgotten the incident. For a moment
or two, when in the cab which drove him to the Rue
Richelieu, he had busily sworn never to return to that
woman’s house. Heaven was warning him;
the misfortunes of Philippe and Georges were, he opined,
prophetic of his proper ruin. But neither the
sight of Mme Hugon in tears nor that of the boy burning
with fever had been strong enough to make him keep
his vow, and the short-lived horror of the situation
had only left behind it a sense of secret delight at
the thought that he was now well quit of a rival,
the charm of whose youth had always exasperated him.
His passion had by this time grown exclusive; it was,
indeed, the passion of a man who has had no youth.
He loved Nana as one who yearned to be her sole possessor,
to listen to her, to touch her, to be breathed on
by her. His was now a supersensual tenderness,
verging on pure sentiment; it was an anxious affection
and as such was jealous of the past and apt at times
to dream of a day of redemption and pardon received,
when both should kneel before God the Father.
Every day religion kept regaining its influence over
him. He again became a practicing Christian;
he confessed himself and communicated, while a ceaseless
struggle raged within him, and remorse redoubled the
joys of sin and of repentance. Afterward, when
his director gave him leave to spend his passion,
he had made a habit of this daily perdition and would
redeem the same by ecstasies of faith, which were
full of pious humility. Very naively he offered
heaven, by way of expiatory anguish, the abominable
torment from which he was suffering. This torment
grew and increased, and he would climb his Calvary
with the deep and solemn feelings of a believer, though
steeped in a harlot’s fierce sensuality.
That which made his agony most poignant was this woman’s
continued faithlessness. He could not share her
with others, nor did he understand her imbecile
caprices. Undying, unchanging love was what
he wished for. However, she had sworn, and he
paid her as having done so. But he felt that
she was untruthful, incapable of common fidelity,
apt to yield to friends, to stray passers-by, like
a good-natured animal, born to live minus a shift.
One morning when he saw Foucarmont
emerging from her bedroom at an unusual hour, he made
a scene about it. But in her weariness of his
jealousy she grew angry directly. On several occasions
ere that she had behaved rather prettily. Thus
the evening when he surprised her with Georges she
was the first to regain her temper and to confess herself
in the wrong. She had loaded him with caresses
and dosed him with soft speeches in order to make
him swallow the business. But he had ended by
boring her to death with his obstinate refusals to
understand the feminine nature, and now she was brutal.
“Very well, yes! I’ve
slept with Foucarmont. What then? That’s
flattened you out a bit, my little rough, hasn’t
it?”
It was the first time she had thrown
“my little rough” in his teeth. The
frank directness of her avowal took his breath away,
and when he began clenching his fists she marched
up to him and looked him full in the face.
“We’ve had enough of this,
eh? If it doesn’t suit you you’ll
do me the pleasure of leaving the house. I don’t
want you to go yelling in my place. Just you
get it into your noodle that I mean to be quite free.
When a man pleases me I go to bed with him. Yes,
I do that’s my way! And you
must make up your mind directly. Yes or no!
If it’s no, out you may walk!”
She had gone and opened the door,
but he did not leave. That was her way now of
binding him more closely to her. For no reason
whatever, at the slightest approach to a quarrel she
would tell him he might stop or go as he liked, and
she would accompany her permission with a flood of
odious reflections. She said she could always
find better than he; she had only too many from whom
to choose; men in any quantity could be picked up
in the street, and men a good deal smarter, too, whose
blood boiled in their veins. At this he would
hang his head and wait for those gentler moods when
she wanted money. She would then become affectionate,
and he would forget it all, one night of tender dalliance
making up for the tortures of a whole week. His
reconciliation with his wife had rendered his home
unbearable. Fauchery, having again fallen under
Rose’s dominion, the countess was running madly
after other loves. She was entering on the forties,
that restless, feverish time in the life of women,
and ever hysterically nervous, she now filled her mansion
with the maddening whirl of her fashionable life.
Estelle, since her marriage, had seen nothing of her
father; the undeveloped, insignificant girl had suddenly
become a woman of iron will, so imperious withal that
Daguenet trembled in her presence. In these days
he accompanied her to mass: he was converted,
and he raged against his father-in-law for ruining
them with a courtesan. M. Venot alone still remained
kindly inclined toward the count, for he was biding
his time. He had even succeeded in getting into
Nana’s immediate circle. In fact, he frequented
both houses, where you encountered his continual smile
behind doors. So Muffat, wretched at home, driven
out by ennui and shame, still preferred to live in
the Avenue de Villiers, even though he was abused
there.
Soon there was but one question between
Nana and the count, and that was “money.”
One day after having formally promised her ten thousand
francs he had dared keep his appointment empty handed.
For two days past she had been surfeiting him with
love, and such a breach of faith, such a waste of
caresses, made her ragingly abusive. She was white
with fury.
“So you’ve not got the
money, eh? Then go back where you came from, my
little rough, and look sharp about it! There’s
a bloody fool for you! He wanted to kiss me again!
Mark my words no money, no nothing!”
He explained matters; he would be
sure to have the money the day after tomorrow.
But she interrupted him violently:
“And my bills! They’ll
sell me up while Monsieur’s playing the fool.
Now then, look at yourself. D’ye think I
love you for your figure? A man with a mug like
yours has to pay the women who are kind enough to put
up with him. By God, if you don’t bring
me that ten thousand francs tonight you shan’t
even have the tip of my little finger to suck.
I mean it! I shall send you back to your wife!”
At night he brought the ten thousand
francs. Nana put up her lips, and he took a long
kiss which consoled him for the whole day of anguish.
What annoyed the young woman was to have him continually
tied to her apron strings. She complained to
M. Venot, begging him to take her little rough off
to the countess. Was their reconciliation good
for nothing then? She was sorry she had mixed
herself up in it, since despite everything he was
always at her heels. On the days when, out of
anger, she forgot her own interest, she swore to play
him such a dirty trick that he would never again be
able to set foot in her place. But when she slapped
her leg and yelled at him she might quite as well have
spat in his face too: he would still have stayed
and even thanked her. Then the rows about money
matters kept continually recurring. She demanded
money savagely; she rowed him over wretched little
amounts; she was odiously stingy with every minute
of her time; she kept fiercely informing him that
she slept with him for his money, not for any other
reasons, and that she did not enjoy it a bit, that,
in fact, she loved another and was awfully unfortunate
in needing an idiot of his sort! They did not
even want him at court now, and there was some talk
of requiring him to send in his resignation.
The empress had said, “He is too disgusting.”
It was true enough. So Nana repeated the phrase
by way of closure to all their quarrels.
“Look here! You disgust me!”
Nowadays she no longer minded her
ps and qs; she had regained the most perfect freedom.
Every day she did her round of the
lake, beginning acquaintanceships which ended elsewhere.
Here was the happy hunting ground par excellence,
where courtesans of the first water spread their nets
in open daylight and flaunted themselves amid the
tolerating smiles and brilliant luxury of Paris.
Duchesses pointed her out to one another with a passing
look rich shopkeepers’ wives copied
the fashion of her hats. Sometimes her landau,
in its haste to get by, stopped a file of puissant
turnouts, wherein sat plutocrats able to buy up all
Europe or Cabinet ministers with plump fingers tight-pressed
to the throat of France. She belonged to this
Bois society, occupied a prominent place in it, was
known in every capital and asked about by every foreigner.
The splendors of this crowd were enhanced by the madness
of her profligacy as though it were the very crown,
the darling passion, of the nation. Then there
were unions of a night, continual passages of desire,
which she lost count of the morning after, and these
sent her touring through the grand restaurants and
on fine days, as often as not, to “Madrid.”
The staffs of all the embassies visited her, and she,
Lucy Stewart, Caroline Hequet and Maria Blond would
dine in the society of gentlemen who murdered the
French language and paid to be amused, engaging them
by the evening with orders to be funny and yet proving
so blase and so worn out that they never even touched
them. This the ladies called “going on a
spree,” and they would return home happy at
having been despised and would finish the night in
the arms of the lovers of their choice.
When she did not actually throw the
men at his head Count Muffat pretended not to know
about all this. However, he suffered not a little
from the lesser indignities of their daily life.
The mansion in the Avenue de Villiers was becoming
a hell, a house full of mad people, in which every
hour of the day wild disorders led to hateful complications.
Nana even fought with her servants. One moment
she would be very nice with Charles, the coachman.
When she stopped at a restaurant she would send him
out beer by the waiter and would talk with him from
the inside of her carriage when he slanged the cabbies
at a block in the traffic, for then he struck her
as funny and cheered her up. Then the next moment
she called him a fool for no earthly reason. She
was always squabbling over the straw, the bran or
the oats; in spite of her love for animals she thought
her horses ate too much. Accordingly one day when
she was settling up she accused the man of robbing
her. At this Charles got in a rage and called
her a whore right out; his horses, he said, were distinctly
better than she was, for they did not sleep with everybody.
She answered him in the same strain, and the count
had to separate them and give the coachman the sack.
This was the beginning of a rebellion among the servants.
When her diamonds had been stolen Victorine and Francois
left. Julien himself disappeared, and the tale
ran that the master had given him a big bribe and
had begged him to go, because he slept with the mistress.
Every week there were new faces in the servants’
hall. Never was there such a mess; the house was
like a passage down which the scum of the registry
offices galloped, destroying everything in their path.
Zoe alone kept her place; she always looked clean,
and her only anxiety was how to organize this riot
until she had got enough together to set up on her
own account in fulfillment of a plan she had been
hatching for some time past.
These, again, were only the anxieties
he could own to. The count put up with the stupidity
of Mme Maloir, playing bezique with her in spite of
her musty smell. He put up with Mme Lerat and
her encumbrances, with Louiset and the mournful complaints
peculiar to a child who is being eaten up with the
rottenness inherited from some unknown father.
But he spent hours worse than these. One evening
he had heard Nana angrily telling her maid that a
man pretending to be rich had just swindled her a
handsome man calling himself an American and owning
gold mines in his own country, a beast who had gone
off while she was asleep without giving her a copper
and had even taken a packet of cigarette papers with
him. The count had turned very pale and had gone
downstairs again on tiptoe so as not to hear more.
But later he had to hear all. Nana, having been
smitten with a baritone in a music hall and having
been thrown over by him, wanted to commit suicide
during a fit of sentimental melancholia. She
swallowed a glass of water in which she had soaked
a box of matches. This made her terribly sick
but did not kill her. The count had to nurse
her and to listen to the whole story of her passion,
her tearful protests and her oaths never to take to
any man again. In her contempt for those swine,
as she called them, she could not, however, keep her
heart free, for she always had some sweetheart round
her, and her exhausted body inclined to incomprehensible
fancies and perverse tastes. As Zoe designedly
relaxed her efforts the service of the house had got
to such a pitch that Muffat did not dare to push open
a door, to pull a curtain or to unclose a cupboard.
The bells did not ring; men lounged about everywhere
and at every moment knocked up against one another.
He had now to cough before entering a room, having
almost caught the girl hanging round Francis’
neck one evening that he had just gone out of the
dressing room for two minutes to tell the coachman
to put the horses to, while her hairdresser was finishing
her hair. She gave herself up suddenly behind
his back; she took her pleasure in every corner, quickly,
with the first man she met. Whether she was in
her chemise or in full dress did not matter. She
would come back to the count red all over, happy at
having cheated him. As for him, he was plagued
to death; it was an abominable infliction!
In his jealous anguish the unhappy
man was comparatively at peace when he left Nana and
Satin alone together. He would have willingly
urged her on to this vice, to keep the men off her.
But all was spoiled in this direction too. Nana
deceived Satin as she deceived the count, going mad
over some monstrous fancy or other and picking up girls
at the street corners. Coming back in her carriage,
she would suddenly be taken with a little slut that
she saw on the pavement; her senses would be captivated,
her imagination excited. She would take the little
slut in with her, pay her and send her away again.
Then, disguised as a man, she would go to infamous
houses and look on at scenes of debauch to while away
hours of boredom. And Satin, angry at being thrown
over every moment, would turn the house topsy-turvy
with the most awful scenes. She had at last acquired
a complete ascendancy over Nana, who now respected
her. Muffat even thought of an alliance between
them. When he dared not say anything he let Satin
loose. Twice she had compelled her darling to
take up with him again, while he showed himself obliging
and effaced himself in her favor at the least sign.
But this good understanding lasted no time, for Satin,
too, was a little cracked. On certain days she
would very nearly go mad and would smash everything,
wearing herself out in tempest of love and anger,
but pretty all the time. Zoe must have excited
her, for the maid took her into corners as if she wanted
to tell her about her great design of which she as
yet spoke to no one.
At times, however, Count Muffat was
still singularly revolted. He who had tolerated
Satin for months, who had at last shut his eyes to
the unknown herd of men that scampered so quickly
through Nana’s bedroom, became terribly enraged
at being deceived by one of his own set or even by
an acquaintance. When she confessed her relations
with Foucarmont he suffered so acutely, he thought
the treachery of the young man so base, that he wished
to insult him and fight a duel. As he did not
know where to find seconds for such an affair, he
went to Labordette. The latter, astonished, could
not help laughing.
“A duel about Nana? But,
my dear sir, all Paris would be laughing at you.
Men do not fight for Nana; it would be ridiculous.”
The count grew very pale and made a violent gesture.
“Then I shall slap his face in the open street.”
For an hour Labordette had to argue
with him. A blow would make the affair odious;
that evening everyone would know the real reason of
the meeting; it would be in all the papers. And
Labordette always finished with the same expression:
“It is impossible; it would be ridiculous.”
Each time Muffat heard these words
they seemed sharp and keen as a stab. He could
not even fight for the woman he loved; people would
have burst out laughing. Never before had he
felt more bitterly the misery of his love, the contrast
between his heavy heart and the absurdity of this
life of pleasure in which it was now lost. This
was his last rebellion; he allowed Labordette to convince
him, and he was present afterward at the procession
of his friends, who lived there as if at home.
Nana in a few months finished them
up greedily, one after the other. The growing
needs entailed by her luxurious way of life only added
fuel to her desires, and she finished a man up at
one mouthful. First she had Foucarmont, who did
not last a fortnight. He was thinking of leaving
the navy, having saved about thirty thousand francs
in his ten years of service, which he wished to invest
in the United States. His instincts, which were
prudential, even miserly, were conquered; he gave her
everything, even his signature to notes of hand, which
pledged his future. When Nana had done with him
he was penniless. But then she proved very kind;
she advised him to return to his ship. What was
the good of getting angry? Since he had no money
their relations were no longer possible. He ought
to understand that and to be reasonable. A ruined
man fell from her hands like a ripe fruit, to rot on
the ground by himself.
Then Nana took up with Steiner without
disgust but without love. She called him a dirty
Jew; she seemed to be paying back an old grudge, of
which she had no distinct recollection. He was
fat; he was stupid, and she got him down and took
two bites at a time in order the quicker to do for
this Prussian. As for him, he had thrown Simonne
over. His Bosphorous scheme was getting shaky,
and Nana hastened the downfall by wild expenses.
For a month he struggled on, doing miracles of finance.
He filled Europe with posters, advertisements and prospectuses
of a colossal scheme and obtained money from the most
distant climes. All these savings, the pounds
of speculators and the pence of the poor, were swallowed
up in the Avenue de Villiers. Again he was partner
in an ironworks in Alsace, where in a small provincial
town workmen, blackened with coal dust and soaked
with sweat, day and night strained their sinews and
heard their bones crack to satisfy Nana’s pleasures.
Like a huge fire she devoured all the fruits of stock-exchange
swindling and the profits of labor. This time
she did for Steiner; she brought him to the ground,
sucked him dry to the core, left him so cleaned out
that he was unable to invent a new roguery. When
his bank failed he stammered and trembled at the idea
of prosecution. His bankruptcy had just been
published, and the simple mention of money flurried
him and threw him into a childish embarrassment.
And this was he who had played with millions.
One evening at Nana’s he began to cry and asked
her for a loan of a hundred francs wherewith to pay
his maidservant. And Nana, much affected and
amused at the end of this terrible old man who had
squeezed Paris for twenty years, brought it to him
and said:
“I say, I’m giving it
you because it seems so funny! But listen to me,
my boy, you are too old for me to keep. You must
find something else to do.”
Then Nana started on La Faloise at
once. He had for some time been longing for the
honor of being ruined by her in order to put the finishing
stroke on his smartness. He needed a woman to
launch him properly; it was the one thing still lacking.
In two months all Paris would be talking of him, and
he would see his name in the papers. Six weeks
were enough. His inheritance was in landed estate,
houses, fields, woods and farms. He had to sell
all, one after the other, as quickly as he could.
At every mouthful Nana swallowed an acre. The
foliage trembling in the sunshine, the wide fields
of ripe grain, the vineyards so golden in September,
the tall grass in which the cows stood knee-deep,
all passed through her hands as if engulfed by an abyss.
Even fishing rights, a stone quarry and three mills
disappeared. Nana passed over them like an invading
army or one of those swarms of locusts whose flight
scours a whole province. The ground was burned
up where her little foot had rested. Farm by
farm, field by field, she ate up the man’s patrimony
very prettily and quite inattentively, just as she
would have eaten a box of sweet-meats flung into her
lap between mealtimes. There was no harm in it
all; they were only sweets! But at last one evening
there only remained a single little wood. She
swallowed it up disdainfully, as it was hardly worth
the trouble opening one’s mouth for. La
Faloise laughed idiotically and sucked the top of his
stick. His debts were crushing him; he was not
worth a hundred francs a year, and he saw that he
would be compelled to go back into the country and
live with his maniacal uncle. But that did not
matter; he had achieved smartness; the Figaro had
printed his name twice. And with his meager neck
sticking up between the turndown points of his collar
and his figure squeezed into all too short a coat,
he would swagger about, uttering his parrotlike exclamations
and affecting a solemn listlessness suggestive of
an emotionless marionette. He so annoyed Nana
that she ended by beating him.
Meanwhile Fauchery had returned, his
cousin having brought him. Poor Fauchery had
now set up housekeeping. After having thrown over
the countess he had fallen into Rose’s hands,
and she treated him as a lawful wife would have done.
Mignon was simply Madame’s major-domo.
Installed as master of the house, the journalist lied
to Rose and took all sorts of precautions when he
deceived her. He was as scrupulous as a good
husband, for he really wanted to settle down at last.
Nana’s triumph consisted in possessing and in
ruining a newspaper that he had started with a friend’s
capital. She did not proclaim her triumph; on
the contrary, she delighted in treating him as a man
who had to be circumspect, and when she spoke of Rose
it was as “poor Rose.” The newspaper
kept her in flowers for two months. She took all
the provincial subscriptions; in fact, she took everything,
from the column of news and gossip down to the dramatic
notes. Then the editorial staff having been turned
topsy-turvy and the management completely disorganized,
she satisfied a fanciful caprice and had a winter garden
constructed in a corner of her house: that carried
off all the type. But then it was no joke after
all! When in his delight at the whole business
Mignon came to see if he could not saddle Fauchery
on her altogether, she asked him if he took her for
a fool. A penniless fellow living by his articles
and his plays not if she knew it! That
sort of foolishness might be all very well for a clever
woman like her poor, dear Rose! She grew distrustful:
she feared some treachery on Mignon’s part, for
he was quite capable of preaching to his wife, and
so she gave Fauchery his Congé as he now only
paid her in fame.
But she always recollected him kindly.
They had both enjoyed themselves so much at the expense
of that fool of a La Faloise! They would never
have thought of seeing each other again if the delight
of fooling such a perfect idiot had not egged them
on! It seemed an awfully good joke to kiss each
other under his very nose. They cut a regular
dash with his coin; they would send him off full speed
to the other end of Paris in order to be alone and
then when he came back, they would crack jokes and
make allusions he could not understand. One day,
urged by the journalist, she bet that she would smack
his face, and that she did the very same evening and
went on to harder blows, for she thought it a good
joke and was glad of the opportunity of showing how
cowardly men were. She called him her “slapjack”
and would tell him to come and have his smack!
The smacks made her hands red, for as yet she was not
up to the trick. La Faloise laughed in his idiotic,
languid way, though his eyes were full of tears.
He was delighted at such familiarity; he thought it
simply stunning.
One night when he had received sundry
cuffs and was greatly excited:
“Now, d’you know,”
he said, “you ought to marry me. We should
be as jolly as grigs together, eh?”
This was no empty suggestion.
Seized with a desire to astonish Paris, he had been
slyly projecting this marriage. “Nana’s
husband! Wouldn’t that sound smart, eh?”
Rather a stunning apotheosis that! But Nana gave
him a fine snubbing.
“Me marry you! Lovely!
If such an idea had been tormenting me I should have
found a husband a long time ago! And he’d
have been a man worth twenty of you, my pippin!
I’ve had a heap of proposals. Why, look
here, just reckon ’em up with me: Philippe,
Georges, Foucarmont, Steiner that makes
four, without counting the others you don’t know.
It’s a chorus they all sing. I can’t
be nice, but they forthwith begin yelling, ’Will
you marry me? Will you marry me?’”
She lashed herself up and then burst
out in fine indignation:
“Oh dear, no! I don’t
want to! D’you think I’m built that
way? Just look at me a bit! Why, I shouldn’t
be Nana any longer if I fastened a man on behind!
And, besides, it’s too foul!”
And she spat and hiccuped with disgust,
as though she had seen all the dirt in the world spread
out beneath her.
One evening La Faloise vanished, and
a week later it became known that he was in the country
with an uncle whose mania was botany. He was
pasting his specimens for him and stood a chance of
marrying a very plain, pious cousin. Nana shed
no tears for him. She simply said to the count:
“Eh, little rough, another rival
less! You’re chortling today. But he
was becoming serious! He wanted to marry me.”
He waxed pale, and she flung her arms
round his neck and hung there, laughing, while she
emphasized every little cruel speech with a caress.
“You can’t marry Nana!
Isn’t that what’s fetching you, eh?
When they’re all bothering me with their marriages
you’re raging in your corner. It isn’t
possible; you must wait till your wife kicks the bucket.
Oh, if she were only to do that, how you’d come
rushing round! How you’d fling yourself
on the ground and make your offer with all the grand
accompaniments sighs and tears and vows!
Wouldn’t it be nice, darling, eh?”
Her voice had become soft, and she
was chaffing him in a ferociously wheedling manner.
He was deeply moved and began blushing as he paid her
back her kisses. Then she cried:
“By God, to think I should have
guessed! He’s thought about it; he’s
waiting for his wife to go off the hooks! Well,
well, that’s the finishing touch! Why,
he’s even a bigger rascal than the others!”
Muffat had resigned himself to “the
others.” Nowadays he was trusting to the
last relics of his personal dignity in order to remain
“Monsieur” among the servants and intimates
of the house, the man, in fact, who because he gave
most was the official lover. And his passion grew
fiercer. He kept his position because he paid
for it, buying even smiles at a high price. He
was even robbed and he never got his money’s
worth, but a disease seemed to be gnawing his vitals
from which he could not prevent himself suffering.
Whenever he entered Nana’s bedroom he was simply
content to open the windows for a second or two in
order to get rid of the odors the others left behind
them, the essential smells of fair-haired men and
dark, the smoke of cigars, of which the pungency choked
him. This bedroom was becoming a veritable thoroughfare,
so continually were boots wiped on its threshold.
Yet never a man among them was stopped by the bloodstain
barring the door. Zoe was still preoccupied by
this stain; it was a simple mania with her, for she
was a clean girl, and it horrified her to see it always
there. Despite everything her eyes would wander
in its direction, and she now never entered Madame’s
room without remarking:
“It’s strange that don’t
go. All the same, plenty of folk come in this
way.”
Nana kept receiving the best news
from Georges, who was by that time already convalescent
in his mother’s keeping at Les Fondettes, and
she used always to make the same reply.
“Oh, hang it, time’s all
that’s wanted. It’s apt to grow paler
as feet cross it.”
As a matter of fact, each of the gentlemen,
whether Foucarmont, Steiner, La Faloise or Fauchery,
had borne away some of it on their bootsoles.
And Muffat, whom the bloodstain preoccupied as much
as it did Zoe, kept studying it in his own despite,
as though in its gradual rosy disappearance he would
read the number of men that passed. He secretly
dreaded it and always stepped over it out of a vivid
fear of crushing some live thing, some naked limb
lying on the floor.
But in the bedroom within he would
grow dizzy and intoxicated and would forget everything the
mob of men which constantly crossed it, the sign of
mourning which barred its door. Outside, in the
open air of the street, he would weep occasionally
out of sheer shame and disgust and would vow never
to enter the room again. And the moment the portiere
had closed behind him he was under the old influence
once more and felt his whole being melting in the
damp warm air of the place, felt his flesh penetrated
by a perfume, felt himself overborne by a voluptuous
yearning for self-annihilation. Pious and habituated
to ecstatic experiences in sumptuous chapels, he there
re-encountered precisely the same mystical sensations
as when he knelt under some painted window and gave
way to the intoxication of organ music and incense.
Woman swayed him as jealously and despotically as
the God of wrath, terrifying him, granting him moments
of delight, which were like spasms in their keenness,
in return for hours filled with frightful, tormenting
visions of hell and eternal tortures. In Nana’s
presence, as in church, the same stammering accents
were his, the same prayers and the same fits of despair nay,
the same paroxysms of humility peculiar to an accursed
creature who is crushed down in the mire from whence
he has sprung. His fleshly desires, his spiritual
needs, were confounded together and seemed to spring
from the obscure depths of his being and to bear but
one blossom on the tree of his existence. He
abandoned himself to the power of love and of faith,
those twin levers which move the world. And despite
all the struggles of his reason this bedroom of Nana’s
always filled him with madness, and he would sink
shuddering under the almighty dominion of sex, just
as he would swoon before the vast unknown of heaven.
Then when she felt how humble he was
Nana grew tyrannously triumphant. The rage for
debasing things was inborn in her. It did not
suffice her to destroy them; she must soil them too.
Her delicate hands left abominable traces and themselves
decomposed whatever they had broken. And he in
his imbecile condition lent himself to this sort of
sport, for he was possessed by vaguely remembered
stories of saints who were devoured by vermin and
in turn devoured their own excrements. When once
she had him fast in her room and the doors were shut,
she treated herself to a man’s infamy.
At first they joked together, and she would deal him
light blows and impose quaint tasks on him, making
him lisp like a child and repeat tags of sentences.
“Say as I do: ’tonfound
it! Ickle man damn vell don’t tare about
it!”
He would prove so docile as to reproduce her very
accent.
“’Tonfound it! Ickle man damn vell
don’t tare about it!”
Or again she would play bear, walking
on all fours on her rugs when she had only her chemise
on and turning round with a growl as though she wanted
to eat him. She would even nibble his calves for
the fun of the thing. Then, getting up again:
“It’s your turn now; try it a bit.
I bet you don’t play bear like me.”
It was still charming enough.
As bear she amused him with her white skin and her
fell of ruddy hair. He used to laugh and go down
on all fours, too, and growl and bite her calves,
while she ran from him with an affectation of terror.
“Are we beasts, eh?” she
would end by saying. “You’ve no notion
how ugly you are, my pet! Just think if they
were to see you like that at the Tuileries!”
But ere long these little games were
spoiled. It was not cruelty in her case, for
she was still a good-natured girl; it was as though
a passing wind of madness were blowing ever more strongly
in the shut-up bedroom. A storm of lust disordered
their brains, plunged them into the delirious imaginations
of the flesh. The old pious terrors of their sleepless
nights were now transforming themselves into a thirst
for bestiality, a furious longing to walk on all fours,
to growl and to bite. One day when he was playing
bear she pushed him so roughly that he fell against
a piece of furniture, and when she saw the lump on
his forehead she burst into involuntary laughter.
After that her experiments on La Faloise having whetted
her appetite, she treated him like an animal, threshing
him and chasing him to an accompaniment of kicks.
“Gee up! Gee up! You’re
a horse. Hoi! Gee up! Won’t you
hurry up, you dirty screw?”
At other times he was a dog.
She would throw her scented handkerchief to the far
end of the room, and he had to run and pick it up with
his teeth, dragging himself along on hands and knees.
“Fetch it, Cæsar! Look
here, I’ll give you what for if you don’t
look sharp! Well done, Cæsar! Good dog!
Nice old fellow! Now behave pretty!”
And he loved his abasement and delighted
in being a brute beast. He longed to sink still
further and would cry:
“Hit harder. On, on! I’m wild!
Hit away!”
She was seized with a whim and insisted
on his coming to her one night clad in his magnificent
chamberlain’s costume. Then how she did
laugh and make fun of him when she had him there in
all his glory, with the sword and the cocked hat and
the white breeches and the full-bottomed coat of red
cloth laced with gold and the symbolic key hanging
on its left-hand skirt. This key made her especially
merry and urged her to a wildly fanciful and extremely
filthy discussion of it. Laughing without cease
and carried away by her irreverence for pomp and by
the joy of debasing him in the official dignity of
his costume, she shook him, pinched him, shouted,
“Oh, get along with ye, Chamberlain!” and
ended by an accompaniment of swinging kicks behind.
Oh, those kicks! How heartily she rained them
on the Tuileries and the majesty of the imperial court,
throning on high above an abject and trembling people.
That’s what she thought of society! That
was her revenge! It was an affair of unconscious
hereditary spite; it had come to her in her blood.
Then when once the chamberlain was undressed and his
coat lay spread on the ground she shrieked, “Jump!”
And he jumped. She shrieked, “Spit!”
And he spat. With a shriek she bade him walk
on the gold, on the eagles, on the decorations, and
he walked on them. Hi tiddly hi ti! Nothing
was left; everything was going to pieces. She
smashed a chamberlain just as she smashed a flask
or a comfit box, and she made filth of him, reduced
him to a heap of mud at a street corner.
Meanwhile the goldsmiths had failed
to keep their promise, and the bed was not delivered
till one day about the middle of January. Muffat
was just then in Normandy, whither he had gone to
sell a last stray shred of property, but Nana demanded
four thousand francs forthwith. He was not due
in Paris till the day after tomorrow, but when his
business was once finished he hastened his return
and without even paying a flying visit in the Rue
Miromesnil came direct to the Avenue de Villiers.
Ten o’clock was striking. As he had a key
of a little door opening on the Rue Cardinet, he went
up unhindered. In the drawing room upstairs Zoe,
who was polishing the bronzes, stood dumfounded at
sight of him, and not knowing how to stop him, she
began with much circumlocution, informing him that
M. Venot, looking utterly beside himself, had been
searching for him since yesterday and that he had
already come twice to beg her to send Monsieur to
his house if Monsieur arrived at Madame’s before
going home. Muffat listened to her without in
the least understanding the meaning of her recital;
then he noticed her agitation and was seized by a
sudden fit of jealousy of which he no longer believed
himself capable. He threw himself against the
bedroom door, for he heard the sound of laughter within.
The door gave; its two flaps flew asunder, while Zoe
withdrew, shrugging her shoulders. So much the
worse for Madame! As Madame was bidding good-by
to her wits, she might arrange matters for herself.
And on the threshold Muffat uttered
a cry at the sight that was presented to his view.
“My God! My God!”
The renovated bedroom was resplendent
in all its royal luxury. Silver buttons gleamed
like bright stars on the tea-rose velvet of the hangings.
These last were of that pink flesh tint which the skies
assume on fine evenings, when Venus lights her fires
on the horizon against the clear background of fading
daylight. The golden cords and tassels hanging
in corners and the gold lace-work surrounding the panels
were like little flames of ruddy strands of loosened
hair, and they half covered the wide nakedness of
the room while they emphasized its pale, voluptuous
tone. Then over against him there was the gold
and silver bed, which shone in all the fresh splendor
of its chiseled workmanship, a throne this of sufficient
extent for Nana to display the outstretched glory
of her naked limbs, an altar of Byzantine sumptuousness,
worthy of the almighty puissance of Nana’s sex,
which at this very hour lay nudely displayed there
in the religious immodesty befitting an idol of all
men’s worship. And close by, beneath the
snowy reflections of her bosom and amid the triumph
of the goddess, lay wallowing a shameful, decrepit
thing, a comic and lamentable ruin, the Marquis de
Chouard in his nightshirt.
The count had clasped his hands together
and, shaken by a paroxysmal shuddering, he kept crying:
“My God! My God!”
It was for the Marquis de Chouard,
then, that the golden roses flourished on the side
panels, those bunches of golden roses blooming among
the golden leaves; it was for him that the Cupids leaned
forth with amorous, roguish laughter from their tumbling
ring on the silver trelliswork. And it was for
him that the faun at his feet discovered the nymph
sleeping, tired with dalliance, the figure of Night
copied down to the exaggerated thighs which
caused her to be recognizable of all from
Nana’s renowned nudity. Cast there like
the rag of something human which has been spoiled
and dissolved by sixty years of debauchery, he suggested
the charnelhouse amid the glory of the woman’s
dazzling contours. Seeing the door open, he had
risen up, smitten with sudden terror as became an
infirm old man. This last night of passion had
rendered him imbecile; he was entering on his second
childhood; and, his speech failing him, he remained
in an attitude of flight, half-paralyzed, stammering,
shivering, his nightshirt half up his skeleton shape,
and one leg outside the clothes, a livid leg, covered
with gray hair. Despite her vexation Nana could
not keep from laughing.
“Do lie down! Stuff yourself
into the bed,” she said, pulling him back and
burying him under the coverlet, as though he were some
filthy thing she could not show anyone.
Then she sprang up to shut the door
again. She was decidedly never lucky with her
little rough. He was always coming when least
wanted. And why had he gone to fetch money in
Normandy? The old man had brought her the four
thousand francs, and she had let him have his will
of her. She pushed back the two flaps of the
door and shouted:
“So much the worse for you!
It’s your fault. Is that the way to come
into a room? I’ve had enough of this sort
of thing. Ta ta!”
Muffat remained standing before the
closed door, thunderstruck by what he had just seen.
His shuddering fit increased. It mounted from
his feet to his heart and brain. Then like a
tree shaken by a mighty wind, he swayed to and fro
and dropped on his knees, all his muscles giving way
under him. And with hands despairingly outstretched
he stammered:
“This is more than I can bear,
my God! More than I can bear!”
He had accepted every situation but
he could do so no longer. He had come to the
end of his strength and was plunged in the dark void
where man and his reason are together overthrown.
In an extravagant access of faith he raised his hands
ever higher and higher, searching for heaven, calling
on God.
“Oh no, I do not desire it!
Oh, come to me, my God! Succor me; nay, let me
die sooner! Oh no, not that man, my God!
It is over; take me, carry me away, that I may not
see, that I may not feel any longer! Oh, I belong
to you, my God! Our Father which art in heaven ”
And burning with faith, he continued
his supplication, and an ardent prayer escaped from
his lips. But someone touched him on the shoulder.
He lifted his eyes; it was M. Venot. He was surprised
to find him praying before that closed door.
Then as though God Himself had responded to his appeal,
the count flung his arms round the little old gentleman’s
neck. At last he could weep, and he burst out
sobbing and repeated:
“My brother, my brother.”
All his suffering humanity found comfort
in that cry. He drenched M. Venot’s face
with tears; he kissed him, uttering fragmentary ejaculations.
“Oh, my brother, how I am suffering!
You only are left me, my brother. Take me away
forever oh, for mercy’s sake, take
me away!”
Then M. Venot pressed him to his bosom
and called him “brother” also. But
he had a fresh blow in store for him. Since yesterday
he had been searching for him in order to inform him
that the Countess Sabine, in a supreme fit of moral
aberration, had but now taken flight with the manager
of one of the departments in a large, fancy emporium.
It was a fearful scandal, and all Paris was already
talking about it. Seeing him under the influence
of such religious exaltation, Venot felt the opportunity
to be favorable and at once told him of the meanly
tragic shipwreck of his house. The count was
not touched thereby. His wife had gone?
That meant nothing to him; they would see what would
happen later on. And again he was seized with
anguish, and gazing with a look of terror at the door,
the walls, the ceiling, he continued pouring forth
his single supplication:
“Take me away! I cannot
bear it any longer! Take me away!”
M. Venot took him away as though he
had been a child. From that day forth Muffat
belonged to him entirely; he again became strictly
attentive to the duties of religion; his life was utterly
blasted. He had resigned his position as chamberlain
out of respect for the outraged modesty of the Tuileries,
and soon Estelle, his daughter, brought an action
against him for the recovery of a sum of sixty thousand
francs, a legacy left her by an aunt to which she
ought to have succeeded at the time of her marriage.
Ruined and living narrowly on the remains of his great
fortune, he let himself be gradually devoured by the
countess, who ate up the husks Nana had rejected.
Sabine was indeed ruined by the example of promiscuity
set her by her husband’s intercourse with the
wanton. She was prone to every excess and proved
the ultimate ruin and destruction of his very hearth.
After sundry adventures she had returned home, and
he had taken her back in a spirit of Christian resignation
and forgiveness. She haunted him as his living
disgrace, but he grew more and more indifferent and
at last ceased suffering from these distresses.
Heaven took him out of his wife’s hands in order
to restore him to the arms of God, and so the voluptuous
pleasures he had enjoyed with Nana were prolonged
in religious ecstasies, accompanied by the old stammering
utterances, the old prayers and despairs, the old fits
of humility which befit an accursed creature who is
crushed beneath the mire whence he sprang. In
the recesses of churches, his knees chilled by the
pavement, he would once more experience the delights
of the past, and his muscles would twitch, and his
brain would whirl deliciously, and the satisfaction
of the obscure necessities of his existence would be
the same as of old.
On the evening of the final rupture
Mignon presented himself at the house in the Avenue
de Villiers. He was growing accustomed to Fauchery
and was beginning at last to find the presence of his
wife’s husband infinitely advantageous to him.
He would leave all the little household cares to the
journalist and would trust him in the active superintendence
of all their affairs. Nay, he devoted the money
gained by his dramatic successes to the daily expenditure
of the family, and as, on his part, Fauchery behaved
sensibly, avoiding ridiculous jealousy and proving
not less pliant than Mignon himself whenever Rose found
her opportunity, the mutual understanding between
the two men constantly improved. In fact, they
were happy in a partnership which was so fertile in
all kinds of amenities, and they settled down side
by side and adopted a family arrangement which no
longer proved a stumbling block. The whole thing
was conducted according to rule; it suited admirably,
and each man vied with the other in his efforts for
the common happiness. That very evening Mignon
had come by Fauchery’s advice to see if he could
not steal Nana’s lady’s maid from her,
the journalist having formed a high opinion of the
woman’s extraordinary intelligence. Rose
was in despair; for a month past she had been falling
into the hands of inexperienced girls who were causing
her continual embarrassment. When Zoe received
him at the door he forthwith pushed her into the dining
room. But at his opening sentence she smiled.
The thing was impossible, she said, for she was leaving
Madame and establishing herself on her own account.
And she added with an expression of discreet vanity
that she was daily receiving offers, that the ladies
were fighting for her and that Mme Blanche would give
a pile of gold to have her back.
Zoe was taking the Tricon’s
establishment. It was an old project and had
been long brooded over. It was her ambition to
make her fortune thereby, and she was investing all
her savings in it. She was full of great ideas
and meditated increasing the business and hiring a
house and combining all the delights within its walls.
It was with this in view that she had tried to entice
Satin, a little pig at that moment dying in hospital,
so terribly had she done for herself.
Mignon still insisted with his offer
and spoke of the risks run in the commercial life,
but Zoe, without entering into explanations about the
exact nature of her establishment, smiled a pinched
smile, as though she had just put a sweetmeat in her
mouth, and was content to remark:
“Oh, luxuries always pay.
You see, I’ve been with others quite long enough,
and now I want others to be with me.”
And a fierce look set her lip curling.
At last she would be “Madame,” and for
the sake of earning a few louis all those women
whose slops she had emptied during the last fifteen
years would prostrate themselves before her.
Mignon wished to be announced, and
Zoe left him for a moment after remarking that Madame
had passed a miserable day. He had only been at
the house once before, and he did not know it at all.
The dining room with its Gobelin tapestry, its sideboard
and its plate filled him with astonishment. He
opened the doors familiarly and visited the drawing
room and the winter garden, returning thence into the
hall. This overwhelming luxury, this gilded furniture,
these silks and velvets, gradually filled him with
such a feeling of admiration that it set his heart
beating. When Zoe came down to fetch him she offered
to show him the other rooms, the dressing room, that
is to say, and the bedroom. In the latter Mignon’s
feelings overcame him; he was carried away by them;
they filled him with tender enthusiasm.
That damned Nana was simply stupefying
him, and yet he thought he knew a thing or two.
Amid the downfall of the house and the servants’
wild, wasteful race to destruction, massed-up riches
still filled every gaping hole and overtopped every
ruined wall. And Mignon, as he viewed this lordly
monument of wealth, began recalling to mind the various
great works he had seen. Near Marseilles they
had shown him an aqueduct, the stone arches of which
bestrode an abyss, a Cyclopean work which cost millions
of money and ten years of intense labor. At Cherbourg
he had seen the new harbor with its enormous works,
where hundreds of men sweated in the sun while cranes
filled the sea with huge squares of rock and built
up a wall where a workman now and again remained crushed
into bloody pulp. But all that now struck him
as insignificant. Nana excited him far more.
Viewing the fruit of her labors, he once more experienced
the feelings of respect that had overcome him one festal
evening in a sugar refiner’s chateau. This
chateau had been erected for the refiner, and its
palatial proportions and royal splendor had been paid
for by a single material sugar. It
was with something quite different, with a little
laughable folly, a little delicate nudity it
was with this shameful trifle, which is so powerful
as to move the universe, that she alone, without workmen,
without the inventions of engineers, had shaken Paris
to its foundations and had built up a fortune on the
bodies of dead men.
“Oh, by God, what an implement!”
Mignon let the words escape him in
his ecstasy, for he felt a return of personal gratitude.
Nana had gradually lapsed into a most
mournful condition. To begin with, the meeting
of the marquis and the count had given her a severe
fit of feverish nervousness, which verged at times
on laughter. Then the thought of this old man
going away half dead in a cab and of her poor rough,
whom she would never set eyes on again now that she
had driven him so wild, brought on what looked like
the beginnings of melancholia. After that she
grew vexed to hear about Satin’s illness.
The girl had disappeared about a fortnight ago and
was now ready to die at Lariboisiere, to such a damnable
state had Mme Robert reduced her. When she ordered
the horses to be put to in order that she might have
a last sight of this vile little wretch Zoe had just
quietly given her a week’s notice. The
announcement drove her to desperation at once!
It seemed to her she was losing a member of her own
family. Great heavens! What was to become
of her when left alone? And she besought Zoe to
stay, and the latter, much flattered by Madame’s
despair, ended by kissing her to show that she was
not going away in anger. No, she had positively
to go: the heart could have no voice in matters
of business.
But that day was one of annoyances.
Nana was thoroughly disgusted and gave up the idea
of going out. She was dragging herself wearily
about the little drawing room when Labordette came
up to tell her of a splendid chance of buying magnificent
lace and in the course of his remarks casually let
slip the information that Georges was dead. The
announcement froze her.
“Zizi dead!” she cried.
And involuntarily her eyes sought
the pink stain on the carpet, but it had vanished
at last; passing footsteps had worn it away. Meanwhile
Labordette entered into particulars. It was not
exactly known how he died. Some spoke of a wound
reopening, others of suicide. The lad had plunged,
they said, into a tank at Les Fondettes. Nana
kept repeating:
“Dead! Dead!”
She had been choking with grief since
morning, and now she burst out sobbing and thus sought
relief. Hers was an infinite sorrow: it
overwhelmed her with its depth and immensity.
Labordette wanted to comfort her as touching Georges,
but she silenced him with a gesture and blurted out:
“It isn’t only he; it’s
everything, everything. I’m very wretched.
Oh yes, I know! They’ll again be saying
I’m a hussy. To think of the mother mourning
down there and of the poor man who was groaning in
front of my door this morning and of all the other
people that are now ruined after running through all
they had with me! That’s it; punish Nana;
punish the beastly thing! Oh, I’ve got
a broad back! I can hear them as if I were actually
there! ’That dirty wench who lies with everybody
and cleans out some and drives others to death and
causes a whole heap of people pain!’”
She was obliged to pause, for tears
choked her utterance, and in her anguish she flung
herself athwart a divan and buried her face in a cushion.
The miseries she felt to be around her, miseries of
which she was the cause, overwhelmed her with a warm,
continuous stream of self-pitying tears, and her voice
failed as she uttered a little girl’s broken
plaint:
“Oh, I’m wretched!
Oh, I’m wretched! I can’t go on like
this: it’s choking me. It’s
too hard to be misunderstood and to see them all siding
against you because they’re stronger. However,
when you’ve got nothing to reproach yourself
with and your conscious is clear, why, then I say,
‘I won’t have it! I won’t have
it!’”
In her anger she began rebeling against
circumstances, and getting up, she dried her eyes,
and walked about in much agitation.
“I won’t have it!
They can say what they like, but it’s not my
fault! Am I a bad lot, eh? I give away all
I’ve got; I wouldn’t crush a fly!
It’s they who are bad! Yes, it’s
they! I never wanted to be horrid to them.
And they came dangling after me, and today they’re
kicking the bucket and begging and going to ruin on
purpose.”
Then she paused in front of Labordette
and tapped his shoulders.
“Look here,” she said,
“you were there all along; now speak the truth:
did I urge them on? Weren’t there always
a dozen of ’em squabbling who could invent the
dirtiest trick? They used to disgust me, they
did! I did all I knew not to copy them:
I was afraid to. Look here, I’ll give you
a single instance: they all wanted to marry me!
A pretty notion, eh? Yes, dear boy, I could have
been countess or baroness a dozen times over and more,
if I’d consented. Well now, I refused because
I was reasonable. Oh yes, I saved ’em some
crimes and other foul acts! They’d have
stolen, murdered, killed father and mother. I
had only to say one word, and I didn’t say it.
You see what I’ve got for it today. There’s
Daguenet, for instance; I married that chap off!
I made a position for the beggarly fellow after keeping
him gratis for weeks! And I met him yesterday,
and he looks the other way! Oh, get along, you
swine! I’m less dirty than you!”
She had begun pacing about again,
and now she brought her fist violently down on a round
table.
“By God it isn’t fair!
Society’s all wrong. They come down on the
women when it’s the men who want you to do things.
Yes, I can tell you this now: when I used to
go with them see? I didn’t enjoy
it; no, I didn’t enjoy it one bit. It bored
me, on my honor. Well then, I ask you whether
I’ve got anything to do with it! Yes, they
bored me to death! If it hadn’t been for
them and what they made of me, dear boy, I should be
in a convent saying my prayers to the good God, for
I’ve always had my share of religion. Dash
it, after all, if they have dropped their money and
their lives over it, what do I care? It’s
their fault. I’ve had nothing to do with
it!”
“Certainly not,” said Labordette with
conviction.
Zoe ushered in Mignon, and Nana received
him smilingly. She had cried a good deal, but
it was all over now. Still glowing with enthusiasm,
he complimented her on her installation, but she let
him see that she had had enough of her mansion and
that now she had other projects and would sell everything
up one of these days. Then as he excused himself
for calling on the ground that he had come about a
benefit performance in aid of old Bose, who was tied
to his armchair by paralysis, she expressed extreme
pity and took two boxes. Meanwhile Zoe announced
that the carriage was waiting for Madame, and she
asked for her hat and as she tied the strings told
them about poor, dear Satin’s mishap, adding:
“I’m going to the hospital.
Nobody ever loved me as she did. Oh, they’re
quite right when they accuse the men of heartlessness!
Who knows? Perhaps I shan’t see her alive.
Never mind, I shall ask to see her: I want to
give her a kiss.”
Labordette and Mignon smiled, and
as Nana was no longer melancholy she smiled too.
Those two fellows didn’t count; they could enter
into her feelings. And they both stood and admired
her in silent abstraction while she finished buttoning
her gloves. She alone kept her feet amid the
heaped-up riches of her mansion, while a whole generation
of men lay stricken down before her. Like those
antique monsters whose redoubtable domains were covered
with skeletons, she rested her feet on human skulls.
She was ringed round with catastrophes. There
was the furious immolation of Vandeuvres; the melancholy
state of Foucarmont, who was lost in the China seas;
the smashup of Steiner, who now had to live like an
honest man; the satisfied idiocy of La Faloise, and
the tragic shipwreck of the Muffats. Finally
there was the white corpse of Georges, over which
Philippe was now watching, for he had come out of prison
but yesterday. She had finished her labor of
ruin and death. The fly that had flown up from
the ordure of the slums, bringing with it the leaven
of social rottenness, had poisoned all these men by
merely alighting on them. It was well done it
was just. She had avenged the beggars and the
wastrels from whose caste she issued. And while,
metaphorically speaking, her sex rose in a halo of
glory and beamed over prostrate victims like a mounting
sun shining brightly over a field of carnage, the
actual woman remained as unconscious as a splendid
animal, and in her ignorance of her mission was the
good-natured courtesan to the last. She was still
big; she was still plump; her health was excellent,
her spirits capital. But this went for nothing
now, for her house struck her as ridiculous.
It was too small; it was full of furniture which got
in her way. It was a wretched business, and the
long and the short of the matter was she would have
to make a fresh start. In fact, she was meditating
something much better, and so she went off to kiss
Satin for the last time. She was in all her finery
and looked clean and solid and as brand new as if
she had never seen service before.