different scents, such, for instance, as the strong savor of Russia
leather, the perfume of vanilla emanating from a chocolate dealer's
basement, the savor of musk blown in whiffs from the open doors of
the perfumers. But he did not dare linger under the gaze of the
pale shopwomen, who looked placidly at him as though they knew him
by sight. For one instant he seemed to be studying the line of
little round windows above the shops, as though he had never noticed
them before among the medley of signs. Then once again he went up
to the boulevard and stood still a minute or two. A fine rain was
now falling, and the cold feel of it on his hands calmed him. He
thought of his wife who was staying in a country house near Macon,
where her friend Mme de Chezelles had been ailing a good deal since
the autumn. The carriages in the roadway were rolling through a
stream of mud. The country, he thought, must be detestable in such
vile weather. But suddenly he became anxious and re-entered the
hot, close passage down which he strode among the strolling people.
A thought struck him: if Nana were suspicious of his presence there
she would be off along the Galerie Montmartre.
After that the count kept a sharp lookout at the very door of the
theater, though he did not like this passage end, where he was
afraid of being recognized. It was at the corner between the
Galerie des Varietes and the Galerie Saint-Marc, an equivocal corner
full of obscure little shops. Of these last one was a shoemaker's,
where customers never seemed to enter. Then there were two or three
upholsterers', deep in dust, and a smoky, sleepy reading room and
library, the shaded lamps in which cast a green and slumberous light
all the evening through. There was never anyone in this corner save
well-dressed, patient gentlemen, who prowled about the wreckage
peculiar to a stage door, where drunken sceneshifters and ragged
chorus girls congregate. In front of the theater a single gas jet
in a ground-glass globe lit up the doorway. For a moment or two
Muffat thought of questioning Mme Bron; then he grew afraid lest
Nana should get wind of his presence and escape by way of the
boulevard. So he went on the march again and determined to wait
till he was turned out at the closing of the gates, an event which
had happened on two previous occasions. The thought of returning
home to his solitary bed simply wrung his heart with anguish. Every
time that golden-haired girls and men in dirty linen came out and
stared at him he returned to his post in front of the reading room,
where, looking in between two advertisements posted on a windowpane,
he was always greeted by the same sight. It was a little old man,
sitting stiff and solitary at the vast table and holding a green
newspaper in his green hands under the green light of one of the
lamps. But shortly before ten o'clock another gentleman, a tall,
good-looking, fair man with well-fitting gloves, was also walking up
and down in front of the stage door. Thereupon at each successive
turn the pair treated each other to a suspicious sidelong glance.
The count walked to the corner of the two galleries, which was
adorned with a high mirror, and when he saw himself therein, looking
grave and elegant, he was both ashamed and nervous.
Ten o'clock struck, and suddenly it occurred to Muffat that it would
be very easy to find out whether Nana were in her dressing room or
not. He went up the three steps, crossed the little yellow-painted
lobby and slipped into the court by a door which simply shut with a
latch. At that hour of the night the narrow, damp well of a court,
with its pestiferous water closets, its fountain, its back view ot
the kitchen stove and the collection of plants with which the
portress used to litter the place, was drenched in dark mist; but
the two walls, rising pierced with windows on either hand, were
flaming with light, since the property room and the firemen's office
were situated on the ground floor, with the managerial bureau on the
left, and on the right and upstairs the dressing rooms of the
company. The mouths of furnaces seemed to be opening on the outer
darkness from top to bottom of this well. The count had at once
marked the light in the windows of the dressing room on the first
floor, and as a man who is comforted and happy, he forgot where he
was and stood gazing upward amid the foul mud and faint decaying
smell peculiar to the premises of this antiquated Parisian building.
Big drops were dripping from a broken waterspout, and a ray of
gaslight slipped from Mme Bron's window and cast a yellow glare over
a patch of moss-clad pavement, over the base of a wall which had
been rotted by water from a sink, over a whole cornerful of nameless
filth amid which old pails and broken crocks lay in fine confusion
round a spindling tree growing mildewed in its pot. A window
fastening creaked, and the count fled.
Nana was certainly going to come down. He returned to his post in
front of the reading room; among its slumbering shadows, which
seemed only broken by the glimmer of a night light, the little old
man still sat motionless, his side face sharply outlined against his
newspaper. Then Muffat walked again and this time took a more
prolonged turn and, crossing the large gallery, followed the Galerie
des Varietes as far as that of Feydeau. The last mentioned was cold
and deserted and buried in melancholy shadow. He returned from it,
passed by the theater, turned the corner of the Galerie Saint-Marc
and ventured as far as the Galerie Montmartre, where a sugar-
chopping machine in front of a grocer's interested him awhile. But
when he was taking his third turn he was seized with such dread lest
Nana should escape behind his back that he lost all self-respect.
Thereupon he stationed himself beside the fair gentleman in front of
the very theater. Both exchanged a glance of fraternal humility
with which was mingled a touch of distrust, for it was possible they
might yet turn out to be rivals. Some sceneshifters who came out
smoking their pipes between the acts brushed rudely against them,
but neither one nor the other ventured to complain. Three big
wenches with untidy hair and dirty gowns appeared on the doorstep.
They were munching apples and spitting out the cores, but the two
men bowed their heads and patiently braved their impudent looks and
rough speeches, though they were hustled and, as it were, soiled by
these trollops, who amused themselves by pushing each other down
upon them.
At that very moment Nana descended the three steps. She grew very
pale when she noticed Muffat.
"Oh, it's you!" she stammered.
The sniggering extra ladies were quite frightened when they
recognized her, and they formed in line and stood up, looking as
stiff and serious as servants whom their mistress has caught
behaving badly. The tall fair gentleman had moved away; he was at
once reassured and sad at heart.
"Well, give me your arm," Nana continued impatiently.
They walked quietly off. The count had been getting ready to
question her and now found nothing to say.
It was she who in rapid tones told a story to the effect that she
had been at her aunt's as late as eight o'clock, when, seeing
Louiset very much better, she had conceived the idea of going down
to the theater for a few minutes.
"On some important business?" he queried.
'Yes, a new piece," she replied after some slight hesitation. "They
wanted my advice."
He knew that she was not speaking the truth, but the warm touch of
her arm as it leaned firmly on his own, left him powerless. He felt
neither anger nor rancor after his long, long wait; his one thought
was to keep her where she was now that he had got hold of her.
Tomorrow, and not before, he would try and find out what she had
come to her dressing room after. But Nana still appeared to
hesitate; she was manifestly a prey to the sort of secret anguish
that besets people when they are trying to regain lost ground and to
initiate a plan of action. Accordingly, as they turned the corner
of the Galerie des Varietes, she stopped in front of the show in a
fan seller's window.
"I say, that's pretty," she whispered; "I mean that mother-of-pearl
mount with the feathers."
Then, indifferently:
"So you're seeing me home?"
"Of course," he said, with some surprise, "since your child's
better."
She was sorry she had told him that story. Perhaps Louiset was
passing through another crisis! She talked of returning to the
Batignolles. But when he offered to accompany her she did not
insist on going. For a second or two she was possessed with the
kind of white-hot fury which a woman experiences when she feels
herself entrapped and must, nevertheless, behave prettily. But in
the end she grew resigned and determined to gain time. If only she
could get rid of the count toward midnight everything would happen
as she wished.
"Yes, it's true; you're a bachelor tonight," she murmured. "Your
wife doesn't return till tomorrow, eh?"
"Yes," replied Muffat. It embarrassed him somewhat to hear her
talking familiarly about the countess.
But she pressed him further, asking at what time the train was due
and wanting to know whether he were going to the station to meet
her. She had begun to walk more slowly than ever, as though the
shops interested her very much.
"Now do look!" she said, pausing anew before a jeweler's window,
"what a funny bracelet!"
She adored the Passage des Panoramas. The tinsel of the ARTICLE DE
PARIS, the false jewelry, the gilded zinc, the cardboard made to
look like leather, had been the passion of her early youth. It
remained, and when she passed the shop-windows she could not tear
herself away from them. It was the same with her today as when she
was a ragged, slouching child who fell into reveries in front of the
chocolate maker's sweet-stuff shows or stood listening to a musical
box in a neighboring shop or fell into supreme ecstasies over cheap,
vulgarly designed knickknacks, such as nutshell workboxes,
ragpickers' baskets for holding toothpicks, Vendome columns and
Luxor obelisks on which thermometers were mounted. But that evening
she was too much agitated and looked at things without seeing them.
When all was said and done, it bored her to think she was not free.
An obscure revolt raged within her, and amid it all she felt a wild
desire to do something foolish. It was a great thing gained,
forsooth, to be mistress of men of position! She had been devouring
the prince's substance and Steiner's, too, with her childish
caprices, and yet she had no notion where her money went. Even at
this time of day her flat in the Boulevard Haussmann was not
entirely furnished. The drawing room alone was finished, and with
its red satin upholsteries and excess of ornamentation and furnirure
it struck a decidedly false note. Her creditors, moreover, would
now take to tormenting her more than ever before whenever she had no
money on hand, a fact which caused her constant surprise, seeing
that she was wont to quote her self as a model of economy. For a
month past that thief Steiner had been scarcely able to pay up his
thousand francs on the occasions when she threatened to kick him out
of doors in case he failed to bring them. As to Muffat, he was an
idiot: he had no notion as to what it was usual to give, and she
could not, therefore, grow angry with him on the score of
miserliness. Oh, how gladly she would have turned all these folks
off had she not repeated to herself a score of times daily a whole
string of economical maxims!
One ought to be sensible, Zoe kept saying every morning, and Nana
herself was constantly haunted by the queenly vision seen at
Chamont. It had now become an almost religious memory with her, and
through dint of being ceaselessly recalled it grew even more
grandiose. And for these reasons, though trembling with repressed
indignation, she now hung submissively on the count's arm as they
went from window to window among the fast-diminishing crowd. The
pavement was drying outside, and a cool wind blew along the gallery,
swept the close hot air up beneath the glass that imprisoned it and
shook the colored lanterns and the lines of gas jets and the giant
fan which was flaring away like a set piece in an illumination. At
the door of the restaurant a waiter was putting out the gas, while
the motionless attendants in the empty, glaring shops looked as
though they had dropped off to sleep with their eyes open.
"Oh, what a duck!" continued Nana, retracing her steps as far as the
last of the shops in order to go into ecstasies over a porcelain
greyhound standing with raised forepaw in front of a nest hidden
among roses.
At length they quitted the passage, but she refused the offer of a
cab. It was very pleasant out she said; besides, they were in no
hurry, and it would be charming to return home on foot. When they
were in front of the Cafe Anglais she had a sudden longing to eat
oysters. Indeed, she said that owing to Louiset's illness she had
tasted nothing since morning. Muffat dared not oppose her. Yet as
he did not in those days wish to be seen about with her he asked for
a private supper room and hurried to it along the corridors. She
followed him with the air of a woman familiar with the house, and
they were on the point of entering a private room, the door of which
a waiter held open, when from a neighboring saloon, whence issued a
perfect tempest of shouts and laughter, a man rapidiy emerged. It
was Daguenet.
"By Jove, it's Nana!" he cried.
