Nana by Émile Zola (top 100 novels of all time .txt) 📕

at all, went and got his crown,

which he settled on his brow with a rap. Then dragging himself

unsteadily along in his greatcoat, he took his departure, grumbling

and looking as annoyed as a man who has been rudely disturbed.

 

“You were very amiable in your last notice,” continued Fontan,

addressing Fauchery. “Only why do you say that comedians are vain?”

 

“Yes, my little man, why d’you say that?” shouted Mignon, bringing

down his huge hands on the journalist’s slender shoulders with such

force as almost to double him up.

 

Prulliere and Clarisse refrained from laughing aloud. For some time

past the whole company had been deriving amusement from a comedy

which was going on in the wings. Mignon, rendered frantic by his

wife’s caprice and annoyed at the thought that this man Fauchery

brought nothing but a certain doubiful notoriety to his household,

had conceived the idea of revenging himself on the journalist by

overwhelming him with tokens of friendship. Every evening,

therefore, when he met him behind scenes he would shower friendly

slaps on his back and shoulders, as though fairly carried away by an

outburst of tenderness, and Fauchery, who was a frail, small man in

comparison with such a giant, was fain to take the raps with a

strained smile in order not to quarrel with Rose’s husband.

 

“Aha, my buck, you’ve insulted Fontan,” resumed Mignon, who was

doing his best to force the joke. “Stand on guard! One—two—got

him right in the middle of his chest!”

 

He lunged and struck the young man with such force that the latter

grew very pale and could not speak for some seconds. With a wink

Clarisse showed the others where Rose Mignon was standing on the

threshold of the greenroom. Rose had witnessed the scene, and she

marched straight up to the journalist, as though she had failed to

notice her husband and, standing on tiptoe, bare-armed and in baby

costume, she held her face up to him with a caressing, infantine

pout.

 

“Good evening, baby,” said Fauchery, kissing her familiarly.

 

Thus he indemnified himself. Mignon, however, did not seem to have

observed this kiss, for everybody kissed his wife at the theater.

But he laughed and gave the journalist a keen little look. The

latter would assurely have to pay for Rose’s bravado.

 

In the passage the tightly shutting door opened and closed again,

and a tempest of applause was blown as far as the greenroom.

Simonne came in after her scene.

 

“Oh, Father Bosc HAS just scored!” she cried. “The prince was

writhing with laughter and applauded with the rest as though he had

been paid to. I say, do you know the big man sitting beside the

prince in the stage box? A handsome man, with a very sedate

expression and splendid whiskers!”

 

“It’s Count Muffat,” replied Fauchery. “I know that the prince,

when he was at the empress’s the day before yesterday, invited him

to dinner for tonight. He’ll have corrupted him afterward!”

 

“So that’s Count Muffat! We know his father-in-law, eh, Auguste?”

said Rose, addressing her remark to Mignon. “You know the Marquis

de Chouard, at whose place I went to sing? Well, he’s in the house

too. I noticed him at the back of a box. There’s an old boy for

you!”

 

Prulliere, who had just put on his huge plume of feathers, turned

round and called her.

 

“Hi, Rose! Let’s go now!”

 

She ran after him, leaving her sentence unfinished. At that moment

Mme Bron, the portress of the theater, passed by the door with an

immense bouquet in her arms. Simonne asked cheerfully if it was for

her, but the porter woman did not vouchsafe an answer and only

pointed her chin toward Nana’s dressing room at the end of the

passage. Oh, that Nana! They were loading her with flowers! Then

when Mme Bron returned she handed a letter to Clarisse, who allowed

a smothered oath to escape her. That beggar La Faloise again!

There was a fellow who wouldn’t let her alone! And when she learned

the gentleman in question was waiting for her at the porter’s lodge

she shrieked:

 

“Tell him I’m coming down after this act. I’m going to catch him

one on the face.”

 

Fontan had rushed forward, shouting:

 

“Madame Bron, just listen. Please listen, Madame Bron. I want you

to send up six bottles of champagne between the acts.”

 

But the callboy had again made his appearance. He was out of

breath, and in a singsong voice he called out:

 

“All to go on the stage! It’s your turn, Monsieur Fontan. Make

haste, make haste!”

 

“Yes, yes, I’m going, Father Barillot,” replied Fontan in a flurry.

 

And he ran after Mme Bron and continued:

 

“You understand, eh? Six bottles of champagne in the greenroom

between the acts. It’s my patron saint’s day, and I’m standing the

racket.”

 

Simonne and Clarisse had gone off with a great rustling of skirts.

Everybody was swallowed up in the distance, and when the passage

door had banged with its usual hollow sound a fresh hail shower was

heard beating against the windows in the now-silent greenroom.

Barillot, a small, pale-faced ancient, who for thirty years had been

a servant in the theater, had advanced familiarly toward Mignon and

had presented his open snuffbox to him. This proffer of a pinch and

its acceptance allowed him a minute’s rest in his interminable

career up and down stairs and along the dressing-room passage. He

certainly had still to look up Mme Nana, as he called her, but she

was one of those who followed her own sweet will and didn’t care a

pin for penalties. Why, if she chose to be too late she was too

late! But he stopped short and murmured in great surprise:

 

“Well, I never! She’s ready; here she is! She must know that the

prince is here.”

 

Indeed, Nana appeared in the corridor. She was dressed as a fish

hag: her arms and face were plastered with white paint, and she had

a couple of red dabs under her eyes. Without entering the greenroom

she contented herself by nodding to Mignon and Fauchery.

 

“How do? You’re all right?”

 

Only Mignon shook her outstretched hand, and she hied royally on her

way, followed by her dresser, who almost trod on her heels while

stooping to adjust the folds of her skirt. In the rear of the

dresser came Satin, closing the procession and trying to look quite

the lady, though she was already bored to death.

 

“And Steiner?” asked Mignon sharply.

 

“Monsieur Steiner has gone away to the Loiret,” said Barillot,

preparing to return to the neighborhood of the stage. “I expect

he’s gone to buy a country place in those parts.”

 

“Ah yes, I know, Nana’s country place.”

 

Mignon had grown suddenly serious. Oh, that Steiner! He had

promised Rose a fine house in the old days! Well, well, it wouldn’t

do to grow angry with anybody. Here was a position that would have

to be won again. From fireplace to console table Mignon paced, sunk

in thought yet still unconquered by circumstances. There was no one

in the greenroom now save Fauchery and himself. The journalist was

tired and had flung himself back into the recesses of the big

armchair. There he stayed with half-closed eyes and as quiet as

quiet could be, while the other glanced down at him as he passed.

When they were alone Mignon scorned to slap him at every turn. What

good would it have done, since nobody would have enjoyed the

spectacle? He was far too disinterested to be personally

entertained by the farcical scenes in which he figured as a

bantering husband. Glad of this short-lived respite, Fauchery

stretched his feet out languidly toward the fire and let his

upturned eyes wander from the barometer to the clock. In the course

of his march Mignon planted himself in front of Potier’s bust,

looked at it without seeming to see it and then turned back to the

window, outside which yawned the darkling gulf of the courtyard.

The rain had ceased, and there was now a deep silence in the room,

which the fierce heat of the coke fire and the flare of the gas jets

rendered still more oppressive. Not a sound came from the wings:

the staircase and the passages were deadly still.

 

That choking sensation of quiet, which behind the scenes immediately

precedes the end of an act, had begun to pervade the empty

greenroom. Indeed, the place seemed to be drowsing off through very

breathlessness amid that faint murmur which the stage gives forth

when the whole troupe are raising the deafening uproar of some grand

finale.

 

“Oh, the cows!” Bordenave suddeniy shouted in his hoarse voice.

 

He had only just come up, and he was already howling complaints

about two chorus girls who had nearly fallen flat on the stage

because they were playing the fool together. When his eye lit on

Mignon and Fauchery he called them; he wanted to show them

something. The prince had just notified a desire to compliment Nana

in her dressing room during the next interval. But as he was

leading them into the wings the stage manager passed.

 

“Just you find those hags Fernande and Maria!” cried Bordenave

savagely.

 

Then calming down and endeavoring to assume the dignified expression

worn by “heavy fathers,” he wiped his face with his pocket

handkerchief and added:

 

“I am now going to receive His Highness.”

 

The curtain fell amid a long-drawn salvo of applause. Then across

the twilight stage, which was no longer lit up by the footlights,

there followed a disorderly retreat. Actors and supers and chorus

made haste to get back to their dressing rooms while the

sceneshifters rapidly changed the scenery. Simonne and Clarisse,

however, had remained “at the top,” talking together in whispers.

On the stage, in an interval between their lines, they had just

settled a little matter. Clarisse, after viewing the thing in every

light, found she preferred not to see La Faloise, who could never

decide to leave her for Gaga, and so Simonne was simply to go and

explain that a woman ought not to be palled up to in that fashion!

At last she agreed to undertake the mission.

 

Then Simonne, in her theatrical laundress’s attire but with furs

over her shoulders, ran down the greasy steps of the narrow, winding

stairs which led between damp walls to the porter’s lodge. This

lodge, situated between the actors’ staircase and that of the

management, was shut in to right and left by large glass partitions

and resembled a huge transparent lantern in which two gas jets were

flaring.

 

There was a set of pigeonholes in the place in which were piled

letters and newspapers, while on the table various bouquets lay

awaiting their recipients in close proximity to neglected heaps of

dirty plates and to an old pair of stays, the eyelets of which the

portress was busy mending. And in the middle of this untidy, ill-kept storeroom sat four fashionable, white-gloved society men. They

occupied as many ancient straw-bottomed chairs and, with an

expression at once patient and submissive, kept sharply turning

their heads in Mme Bron’s direction every time she came down from

the theater overhead, for on such occasions she was the bearer of

replies. Indeed, she had but now handed a note to a young man who

had hurried out to open it beneath the gaslight in the vestibule,

where he had grown slightly pale on reading the classic phrase—how

often had others read it in that very place!—“Impossible tonight,

my dearie! I’m booked!” La Faloise sat on one of these chairs at

the back of the