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

she was a slipshod baggage

years ago. One Sunday at La Rochefoucauld Market she had made her

peace with Satin after having flown at her with furious reproaches

about Mme Robert. But Satin had been content to answer that when

one didn’t like a thing there was no reason why one should want to

disgust others with it. And Nana, who was by way of being wide-minded, had accepted the philosophic view that you never can tell

where your tastes will lead you and had forgiven her. Her curiosity

was even excited, and she began questioning her about obscure vices

and was astounded to be adding to her information at her time of

life and with her knowledge. She burst out laughing and gave vent

to various expressions of surprise. It struck her as so queer, and

yet she was a little shocked by it, for she was really quite the

philistine outside the pale of her own habits. So she went back to

Laure’s and fed there when Fontan was dining out. She derived much

amusement from the stories and the amours and the jealousies which

inflamed the female customers without hindering their appetites in

the slightest degree. Nevertheless, she still was not quite in it,

as she herself phrased it. The vast Laure, meltingly maternal as

ever, used often to invite her to pass a day or two at her Asnieries

Villa, a country house containing seven spare bedrooms. But she

used to refuse; she was afraid. Satin, however, swore she was

mistaken about it, that gentlemen from Paris swung you in swings and

played tonneau with you, and so she promised to come at some future

time when it would be possible for her to leave town.

 

At that time Nana was much tormented by circumstances and not at all

festively inclined. She needed money, and when the Tricon did not

want her, which too often happened, she had no notion where to

bestow her charms. Then began a series of wild descents upon the

Parisian pavement, plunges into the baser sort of vice, whose

votaries prowl in muddy bystreets under the restless flicker of gas

lamps. Nana went back to the public-house balls in the suburbs,

where she had kicked up her heels in the early ill-shod days. She

revisited the dark corners on the outer boulevards, where when she

was fifteen years old men used to hug her while her father was

looking for her in order to give her a hiding. Both the women would

speed along, visiting all the ballrooms and restaurants in a quarter

and climbing innumerable staircases which were wet with spittle and

spilled beer, or they would stroll quietly about, going up streets

and planting themselves in front of carriage gates. Satin, who had

served her apprenticeship in the Quartier Latin, used to take Nana

to Bullier’s and the public houses in the Boulevard Saint-Michel.

But the vacations were drawing on, and the Quarter looked too

starved. Eventually they always returned to the principal

boulevards, for it was there they ran the best chance of getting

what they wanted. From the heights of Montmartre to the observatory

plateau they scoured the whole town in the way we have been

describing. They were out on rainy evenings, when their boots got

worn down, and on hot evenings, when their linen clung to their

skins. There were long periods of waiting and endless periods of

walking; there were jostlings and disputes and the nameless, brutal

caresses of the stray passer-by who was taken by them to some

miserable furnished room and came swearing down the greasy stairs

afterward.

 

The summer was drawing to a close, a stormy summer of burning

nights. The pair used to start out together after dinner, toward

nine o’clock. On the pavements of the Rue Notre Dame de la Lorette

two long files of women scudded along with tucked-up skirts and bent

heads, keeping close to the shops but never once glancing at the

displays in the shopwindows as they hurried busily down toward the

boulevards. This was the hungry exodus from the Quartier Breda

which took place nightly when the street lamps had just been lit.

Nana and Satin used to skirt the church and then march off along the

Rue le Peletier. When they were some hundred yards from the Cafe

Riche and had fairly reached their scene of operations they would

shake out the skirts of their dresses, which up till that moment

they had been holding carefully up, and begin sweeping the

pavements, regardless of dust. With much swaying of the hips they

strolled delicately along, slackening their pace when they crossed

the bright light thrown from one of the great cafes. With shoulders

thrown back, shrill and noisy laughter and many backward glances at

the men who turned to look at them, they marched about and were

completely in their element. In the shadow of night their

artificially whitened faces, their rouged lips and their darkened

eyelids became as charming and suggestive as if the inmates of a

make-believe trumpery oriental bazaar had been sent forth into the

open street. Till eleven at night they sauntered gaily along among

the rudely jostling crowds, contenting themselves with an occasional

“dirty ass!” hurled after the clumsy people whose boot heels had

torn a flounce or two from their dresses. Little familiar

salutations would pass between them and the cafe waiters, and at

times they would stop and chat in front of a small table and accept

of drinks, which they consumed with much deliberation, as became

people not sorry to sit down for a bit while waiting for the

theaters to empty. But as night advanced, if they had not made one

or two trips in the direction of the Rue la Rochefoucauld, they

became abject strumpets, and their hunt for men grew more ferocious

than ever. Beneath the trees in the darkening and fast-emptying

boulevards fierce bargainings took place, accompanied by oaths and

blows. Respectable family parties—fathers, mothers and daughters—

who were used to such scenes, would pass quietly by the while

without quickening their pace. Afterward, when they had walked from

the opera to the GYMNASE some half-score times and in the deepening

night men were rapidly dropping off homeward for good and all, Nana

and Satin kept to the sidewalk in the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre.

There up till two o’clock in the morning restaurants, bars and ham-and-beef shops were brightly lit up, while a noisy mob of women hung

obstinately round the doors of the cafes. This suburb was the only

corner of night Paris which was still alight and still alive, the

only market still open to nocturnal bargains. These last were

openly struck between group and group and from one end of the street

to the other, just as in the wide and open corridor of a disorderly

house. On such evenings as the pair came home without having had

any success they used to wrangle together. The Rue Notre Dame de la

Lorette stretched dark and deserted in front of them. Here and

there the crawling shadow of a woman was discernible, for the

Quarter was going home and going home late, and poor creatures,

exasperated at a night of fruitless loitering, were unwilling to

give up the chase and would still stand, disputing in hoarse voices

with any strayed reveler they could catch at the corner of the Rue

Breda or the Rue Fontaine.

 

Nevertheless, some windfalls came in their way now and then in the

shape of louis picked up in the society of elegant gentlemen, who

slipped their decorations into their pockets as they went upstairs

with them. Satin had an especially keen scent for these. On rainy

evenings, when the dripping city exhaled an unpleasant odor

suggestive of a great untidy bed, she knew that the soft weather and

the fetid reek of the town’s holes and corners were sure to send the

men mad. And so she watched the best dressed among them, for she

knew by their pale eyes what their state was. On such nights it was

as though a fit of fleshly madness were passing over Paris. The

girl was rather nervous certainly, for the most modish gentlemen

were always the most obscene. All the varnish would crack off a

man, and the brute beast would show itself, exacting, monstrous in

lust, a past master in corruption. But besides being nervous, that

trollop of a Satin was lacking in respect. She would blurt out

awful things in front of dignified gentlemen in carriages and assure

them that their coachmen were better bred than they because they

behaved respectfully toward the women and did not half kill them

with their diabolical tricks and suggestions. The way in which

smart people sprawled head over heels into all the cesspools of vice

still caused Nana some surprise, for she had a few prejudices

remaining, though Satin was rapidly destroying them.

 

“Well then,” she used to say when talking seriously about the

matter, “there’s no such thing as virtue left, is there?”

 

From one end of the social ladder to the other everybody was on the

loose! Good gracious! Some nice things ought to be going on in

Paris between nine o’clock in the evening and three in the morning!

And with that she began making very merry and declaring that if one

could only have looked into every room one would have seen some

funny sights—the little people going it head over ears and a good

lot of swells, too, playing the swine rather harder than the rest.

Oh, she was finishing her education!

 

One evenlng when she came to call for Satin she recognized the

Marquis de Chouard. He was coming downstairs with quaking legs; his

face was ashen white, and he leaned heavily on the banisters. She

pretended to be blowing her nose. Upstairs she found Satin amid

indescribable filth. No household work had been done for a week;

her bed was disgusting, and ewers and basins were standing about in

all directions. Nana expressed surprise at her knowing the marquis.

Oh yes, she knew him! He had jolly well bored her confectioner and

her when they were together. At present he used to come back now

and then, but he nearly bothered her life out, going sniffing into

all the dirty corners—yes, even into her slippers!

 

“Yes, dear girl, my slippers! Oh, he’s the dirtiest old beast,

always wanting one to do things!”

 

The sincerity of these low debauches rendered Nana especially

uneasy. Seeing the courtesans around her slowly dying of it every

day, she recalled to mind the comedy of pleasure she had taken part

in when she was in the heyday of success. Moreover, Satin inspired

her with an awful fear of the police. She was full of anecdotes

about them. Formerly she had been the mistress of a plainclothes

man, had consented to this in order to be left in peace, and on two

occasions he had prevented her from being put “on the lists.” But

at present she was in a great fright, for if she were to be nabbed

again there was a clear case against her. You had only to listen to

her! For the sake of perquisites the police used to take up as many

women as possible. They laid hold of everybody and quieted you with

a slap if you shouted, for they were sure of being defended in their

actions and rewarded, even when they had taken a virtuous girl among

the rest. In the summer they would swoop upon the boulevard in

parties of twelve or fifteen, surround a whole long reach of

sidewalk and fish up as many as thirty women in an evening. Satin,

however, knew the likely places, and the moment she saw a plainclothes man heaving in sight she took to her heels, while the long

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