scribbled note in which were the words, "Impossible tonight,
darling--I'm booked." But she was still apprehensive; the young man
might possibly wait for her in spite of everything. As she was not
playing in the third act, she had a mind to be off at once and
accordingly begged Clarisse to go and see if the man were there.
Clarisse was only due on the stage toward the end of the act, and so
she went downstairs while Simonne ran up for a minute to their
common dressing room.
In Mme Bron's drinking bar downstairs a super, who was charged with
the part of Pluto, was drinking in solitude amid the folds of a
great red robe diapered with golden flames. The little business
plied by the good portress must have been progressing finely, for
the cellarlike hole under the stairs was wet with emptied heeltaps
and water. Clarisse picked up the tunic of Iris, which was dragging
over the greasy steps behind her, but she halted prudently at the
turn in the stairs and was content simply to crane forward and peer
into the lodge. She certainly had been quick to scent things out!
Just fancy! That idiot La Faloise was still there, sitting on the
same old chair between the table and the stove! He had made
pretense of sneaking off in front of Simonne and had returned after
her departure. For the matter of that, the lodge was still full of
gentlemen who sat there gloved, elegant, submissive and patient as
ever. They were all waiting and viewing each other gravely as they
waited. On the table there were now only some dirty plates, Mme
Bron having recently distributed the last of the bouquets. A single
fallen rose was withering on the floor in the neighborhood of the
black cat, who had lain down and curled herself up while the kittens
ran wild races and danced fierce gallops among the gentlemen's legs.
Clarisse was momentarily inclined to turn La Faloise out. The idiot
wasn't fond of animals, and that put the finishing touch to him! He
was busy drawing in his legs because the cat was there, and he
didn't want to touch her.
"He'll nip you; take care!" said Pluto, who was a joker, as he went
upstairs, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
After that Clarisse gave up the idea of hauling La Faloise over the
coals. She had seen Mme Bron giving the letter to Simonne's young
man, and he had gone out to read it under the gas light in the
lobby. "Impossible tonight, darling--I'm booked." And with that he
had peaceably departed, as one who was doubtless used to the
formula. He, at any rate, knew how to conduct himself! Not so the
others, the fellows who sat there doggedly on Mme Bron's battered
straw-bottomed chairs under the great glazed lantern, where the heat
was enough to roast you and there was an unpleasant odor. What a
lot of men it must have held! Clarisse went upstairs again in
disgust, crossed over behind scenes and nimbly mounted three flights
of steps which led to the dressing rooms, in order to bring Simonne
her reply.
Downstairs the prince had withdrawn from the rest and stood talking
to Nana. He never left her; he stood brooding over her through
half-shut eyelids. Nana did not look at him but, smiling, nodded
yes. Suddenly, however, Count Muffat obeyed an overmastering
impulse, and leaving Bordenave, who was explaining to him the
working of the rollers and windlasses, he came up in order to
interrupt their confabulations. Nana lifted her eyes and smiled at
him as she smiled at His Highness. But she kept her ears open
notwithstanding, for she was waiting for her cue.
"The third act is the shortest, I believe," the prince began saying,
for the count's presence embarrassed him.
She did not answer; her whole expression altered; she was suddenly
intent on her business. With a rapid movement of the shoulders she
had let her furs slip from her, and Mme Jules, standing behind, had
caught them in her arms. And then after passing her two hands to
her hair as though to make it fast, she went on the stage in all her
nudity.
"Hush, hush!" whispered Bordenave.
The count and the prince had been taken by surprise. There was
profound silence, and then a deep sigh and the far-off murmur of a
multitude became audible. Every evening when Venus entered in her
godlike nakedness the same effect was produced. Then Muffat was
seized with a desire to see; he put his eye to the peephole. Above
and beyond the glowing arc formed by the footlights the dark body of
the house seemed full of ruddy vapor, and against this neutral-
tinted background, where row upon row of faces struck a pale,
uncertain note, Nana stood forth white and vast, so that the boxes
from the balcony to the flies were blotted from view. He saw her
from behind, noted her swelling hips, her outstretched arms, while
down on the floor, on the same level as her feet, the prompter's
head--an old man's head with a humble, honest face--stood on the
edge of the stage, looking as though it had been severed from the
body. At certain points in her opening number an undulating
movement seemed to run from her neck to her waist and to die out in
the trailing border of her tunic. When amid a tempest of applause
she had sung her last note she bowed, and the gauze floated forth
round about her limbs, and her hair swept over her waist as she bent
sharply backward. And seeing her thus, as with bending form and
with exaggerated hips she came backing toward the count's peephole,
he stood upright again, and his face was very white. The stage had
disappeared, and he now saw only the reverse side of the scenery
with its display of old posters pasted up in every direction. On
the practicable slope, among the lines of gas jets, the whole of
Olympus had rejoined the dozing Mme Drouard. They were waiting for
the close of the act. Bosc and Fontan sat on the floor with their
knees drawn up to their chins, and Prulliere stretched himself and
yawned before going on. Everybody was worn out; their eyes were
red, and they were longing to go home to sleep.
Just then Fauchery, who had been prowling about on the O.P. side
ever since Bordenave had forbidden him the other, came and
buttonholed the count in order to keep himself in countenance and
offered at the same time to show him the dressing rooms. An
increasing sense of languor had left Muffat without any power of
resistance, and after looking round for the Marquis de Chouard, who
had disappeared, he ended by following the journalist. He
experienced a mingled feeling of relief and anxiety as he left the
wings whence he had been listening to Nana's songs.
Fauchery had already preceded him up the staircase, which was closed
on the first and second floors by low-paneled doors. It was one of
those stairways which you find in miserable tenements. Count Muffat
had seen many such during his rounds as member of the Benevolent
Organization. It was bare and dilapidated: there was a wash of
yellow paint on its walls; its steps had been worn by the incessant
passage of feet, and its iron balustrade had grown smooth under the
friction of many hands. On a level with the floor on every
stairhead there was a low window which resembled a deep, square
venthole, while in lanterns fastened to the walls flaring gas jets
crudely illuminatcd the surrounding squalor and gave out a glowing
heat which, as it mounted up the narrow stairwell, grew ever more
intense.
When he reached the foot of the stairs the count once more felt the
hot breath upon his neck and shoulders. As of old it was laden with
the odor of women, wafted amid floods of light and sound from the
dressing rooms above, and now with every upward step he took the
musky scent of powders and the tart perfume of toilet vinegars
heated and bewildered him more and more. On the first floor two
corridors ran backward, branching sharply off and presenting a set
of doors to view which were painted yellow and numbered with great
white numerals in such a way as to suggest a hotel with a bad
reputation. The tiles on the floor had been many of them unbedded,
and the old house being in a state of subsidence, they stuck up like
hummocks. The count dashed recklessly forward, glanced through a
half-open door and saw a very dirty room which resembled a barber's
shop in a poor part of the town. In was furnished with two chairs,
a mirror and a small table containing a drawer which had been
blackened by the grease from brushes and combs. A great perspiring
fellow with smoking shoulders was changing his linen there, while in
a similar room next door a woman was drawing on her gloves
preparatory to departure. Her hair was damp and out of curl, as
though she had just had a bath. But Fauchery began calling the
count, and the latter was rushing up without delay when a furious
"damn!" burst from the corridor on the right. Mathilde, a little
drab of a miss, had just broken her washhand basin, the soapy water
from which was flowing out to the stairhead. A dressing room door
banged noisily. Two women in their stays skipped across the
passage, and another, with the hem of her shift in her mouth,
appeared and immediately vanished from view. Then followed a sound
of laughter, a dispute, the snatch of a song which was suddenly
broken off short. All along the passage naked gleams, sudden
visions of white skin and wan underlinen were observable through
chinks in doorways. Two girls were making very merry, showing each
other their birthmarks. One of them, a very young girl, almost a
child, had drawn her skirts up over her knees in order to sew up a
rent in her drawers, and the dressers, catching sight of the two
men, drew some curtains half to for decency's sake. The wild
stampede which follows the end of a play had already begun, the
grand removal of white paint and rouge, the reassumption amid clouds
of rice powder of ordinary attire. The strange animal scent came in
whiffs of redoubled intensity through the lines of banging doors.
On the third story Muffat abandoned himself to the feeling of
intoxication which was overpowering him. For the chorus girls'
dressing room was there, and you saw a crowd of twenty women and a
wild display of soaps and flasks of lavender water. The place
resembled the common room in a slum lodging house. As he passed by
he heard fierce sounds of washing behind a closed door and a perfect
storm raging in a washhand basin. And as he was mounting up to the
topmost story of all, curiosity led him to risk one more little peep
through an open loophole. The room was empty, and under the flare
of the gas a solitary chamber pot stood forgotten among a heap of
petticoats trailing on the floor. This room afforded him his
ultimate impression. Upstairs on the fourth floor he was well-nigh
suffocated. All the scents, all the blasts of heat, had found their
goal there. The yellow ceiling looked as if it had been baked, and
a lamp burned amid fumes of russet-colored fog. For some seconds he
leaned upon the iron balustrade which felt warm and damp and well-
nigh human to the touch. And he shut his eyes and drew a long
breath and drank in the sexual atmosphere of the place. Hitherto he
had been utterly ignorant of it, but now it beat full in his face.
"Do come here," shouted Fauchery, who had vanished some moments ago.
"You're being asked for."
At the end of the corridor was the dressing room belonging to
Clarisse and Simonne. It was a long, ill-built room under the roof
with a garret ceiling and sloping walls. The light penetrated to it
from two deep-set openings high up in the wall, but at that hour of
the night the dressing room was lit by flaring gas. It was papered
with a paper at seven sous a roll with a pattern of roses twining
over green trelliswork. Two boards, placed near one another and
covered with oilcloth, did duty for dressing tables. They were
black with spilled water, and underneath them was a fine medley of
dinted zinc jugs, slop pails and coarse yellow earthenware crocks.
There was an array of fancy articles in the room--a battered, soiled
and well-worn array of chipped basins, of toothless combs, of all
those manifold untidy trifles which, in their hurry and
carelessness, two women will leave scattered about when they undress
and wash together amid purely temporary surroundings, the dirty
aspect of which has ceased to concern them.
"Do come here," Fauchery repeated with the good-humored familiarity
which men adopt among their fallen sisters. "Clarisse is wanting to
kiss you."
Muffat entered the room at last. But what was his surprise when he
found the Marquis de Chouard snugly enscounced on a chair between
the two dressing tables! The marquis had withdrawn thither some
time ago. He was spreading his feet apart because a pail was
leaking and letting a whitish flood spread over the floor. He was
visibly much at his ease, as became a man who knew all the snug
corners, and had grown quite merry in the close dressing room, where
people might have been bathing, and amid those quietly immodest
feminine surroundings which the uncleanness of the little place
rendered at once natural and poignant.
"D'you go with the old boy?" Simonne asked Clarisse in a whisper.
"Rather!" replied the latter aloud.
The dresser, a very ugly and extremely familiar young girl, who was
helping Simonne into her coat, positively writhed with laughter.
The three pushed each other and babbled little phrases which
redoubled their merriment.
"Come, Clarisse, kiss the gentleman," said Fauchery. "You know,
he's got the rhino."
And turning to the count:
"You'll see, she's very nice! She's going to kiss you!"
But Clarisse was disgusted by the men. She spoke in violent terms
