Then Fauchery, to put him out of countenance:
"Well, well! What's your opinion of the new actress? She's being
roughly handled enough in the passages."
"Bah!" muttered Daguenet. "They're people whom she'll have had
nothing to do with!"
That was the sum of his criticism of Nana's talent. La Faloise
leaned forward and looked down at the boulevard. Over against them
the windows of a hotel and of a club were brightly lit up, while on
the pavement below a dark mass of customers occupied the tables of
the Cafe de Madrid. Despite the lateness of the hour the crowd were
still crushing and being crushed; people were advancing with
shortened step; a throng was constantly emerging from the Passage
Jouffroy; individuals stood waiting five or six minutes before they
could cross the roadway, to such a distance did the string of
carriages extend.
"What a moving mass! And what a noise!" La Faloise kept
reiterating, for Paris still astonished him.
The bell rang for some time; the foyer emptied. There was a
hurrying of people in the passages. The curtain was already up when
whole bands of spectators re-entered the house amid the irritated
expressions of those who were once more in their places. Everyone
took his seat again with an animated look and renewed attention. La
Faloise directed his first glance in Gaga's direction, but he was
dumfounded at seeing by her side the tall fair man who but recently
had been in Lucy's stage box.
"What IS that man's name?" he asked.
Fauchery failed to observe him.
"Ah yes, it's Labordette," he said at last with the same careless
movement. The scenery of the second act came as a surprise. It
represented a suburban Shrove Tuesday dance at the Boule Noire.
Masqueraders were trolling a catch, the chorus of which was
accompanied with a tapping of their heels. This 'Arryish departure,
which nobody had in the least expected, caused so much amusement
that the house encored the catch. And it was to this entertainment
that the divine band, let astray by Iris, who falsely bragged that
he knew the Earth well, were now come in order to proceed with their
inquiry. They had put on disguises so as to preserve their
incognito. Jupiter came on the stage as King Dagobert, with his
breeches inside out and a huge tin crown on his head. Phoebus
appeared as the Postillion of Lonjumeau and Minerva as a Norman
nursemaid. Loud bursts of merriment greeted Mars, who wore an
outrageous uniform, suggestive of an Alpine admiral. But the shouts
of laughter became uproarious when Neptune came in view, clad in a
blouse, a high, bulging workman's cap on his head, lovelocks glued
to his temples. Shuffling along in slippers, he cried in a thick
brogue.
"Well, I'm blessed! When ye're a masher it'll never do not to let
'em love yer!"
There were some shouts of "Oh! Oh!" while the ladies held their fans
one degree higher. Lucy in her stage box laughed so obstreperously
that Caroline Hequet silenced her with a tap of her fan.
From that moment forth the piece was saved--nay, more, promised a
great success. This carnival of the gods, this dragging in the mud
of their Olympus, this mock at a whole religion, a whole world of
poetry, appeared in the light of a royal entertainment. The fever
of irreverence gained the literary first-night world: legend was
trampled underfoot; ancient images were shattered. Jupiter's make-
up was capital. Mars was a success. Royalty became a farce and the
army a thing of folly. When Jupiter, grown suddenly amorous of a
little laundress, began to knock off a mad cancan, Simonne, who was
playing the part of the laundress, launched a kick at the master of
the immortals' nose and addressed him so drolly as "My big daddy!"
that an immoderate fit of laughter shook the whole house. While
they were dancing Phoebus treated Minerva to salad bowls of negus,
and Neptune sat in state among seven or eight women who regaled him
with cakes. Allusions were eagerly caught; indecent meanings were
attached to them; harmless phrases were diverted from their proper
significations in the light of exclamations issuing from the stalls.
For a long time past the theatrical public had not wallowed in folly
more irreverent. It rested them.
Nevertheless, the action of the piece advanced amid these fooleries.
Vulcan, as an elegant young man clad, down to his gloves, entirely
in yellow and with an eyeglass stuck in his eye, was forever running
after Venus, who at last made her appearance as a fishwife, a
kerchief on her head and her bosom, covered with big gold trinkets,
in great evidence. Nana was so white and plump and looked so
natural in a part demanding wide hips and a voluptuous mouth that
she straightway won the whole house. On her account Rose Mignon was
forgotten, though she was made up as a delicious baby, with a
wicker-work burlet on her head and a short muslin frock and had just
sighed forth Diana's plaints in a sweetly pretty voice. The other
one, the big wench who slapped her thighs and clucked like a hen,
shed round her an odor of life, a sovereign feminine charm, with
which the public grew intoxicated. From the second act onward
everything was permitted her. She might hold herself awkwardly; she
might fail to sing some note in tune; she might forget her words--it
mattered not: she had only to turn and laugh to raise shouts of
applause. When she gave her famous kick from the hip the stalls
were fired, and a glow of passion rose upward, upward, from gallery
to gallery, till it reached the gods. It was a triumph, too, when
she led the dance. She was at home in that: hand on hip, she
enthroned Venus in the gutter by the pavement side. And the music
seemed made for her plebeian voice--shrill, piping music, with
reminiscences of Saint-Cloud Fair, wheezings of clarinets and
playful trills on the part of the little flutes.
Two numbers were again encored. The opening waltz, that waltz with
the naughty rhythmic beat, had returned and swept the gods with it.
Juno, as a peasant woman, caught Jupiter and his little laundress
cleverly and boxed his ears. Diana, surprising Venus in the act of
making an assignation with Mars, made haste to indicate hour and
place to Vulcan, who cried, "I've hit on a plan!" The rest of the
act did not seem very clear. The inquiry ended in a final galop
after which Jupiter, breathless, streaming with perspiration and
minus his crown, declared that the little women of Earth were
delicious and that the men were all to blame.
The curtain was falling, when certain voices, rising above the storm
of bravos, cried uproariously:
"All! All!"
Thereupon the curtain rose again; the artistes reappeared hand in
hand. In the middle of the line Nana and Rose Mignon stood side by
side, bowing and curtsying. The audience applauded; the clappers
shouted acclamations. Then little by little the house emptied.
"I must go and pay my respects to the Countess Muffat," said La
Faloise. "Exactly so; you'll present me," replied Fauchery; "we'll
go down afterward."
But it was not easy to get to the first-tier boxes. In the passage
at the top of the stairs there was a crush. In order to get forward
at all among the various groups you had to make yourself small and
to slide along, using your elbows in so doing. Leaning under a
copper lamp, where a jet of gas was burning, the bulky critic was
sitting in judgment on the piece in presence of an attentive circle.
People in passing mentioned his name to each other in muttered
tones. He had laughed the whole act through--that was the rumor
going the round of the passages--nevertheless, he was now very
severe and spoke of taste and morals. Farther off the thin-lipped
critic was brimming over with a benevolence which had an unpleasant
aftertaste, as of milk turned sour.
Fauchery glanced along, scrutinizing the boxes through the round
openings in each door. But the Count de Vandeuvres stopped him with
a question, and when he was informed that the two cousins were going
to pay their respects to the Muffats, he pointed out to them box
seven, from which he had just emerged. Then bending down and
whispering in the journalist's ear:
"Tell me, my dear fellow," he said, "this Nana--surely she's the
girl we saw one evening at the corner of the Rue de Provence?"
"By Jove, you're right!" cried Fauchery. "I was saying that I had
come across her!"
La Faloise presented his cousin to Count Muffat de Beuville, who
appeared very frigid. But on hearing the name Fauchery the countess
raised her head and with a certain reserve complimented the
paragraphist on his articles in the Figaro. Leaning on the velvet-
covered support in front of her, she turned half round with a pretty
movement of the shoulders. They talked for a short time, and the
Universal Exhibition was mentioned.
"It will be very fine," said the count, whose square-cut, regular-
featured face retained a certain gravity.
"I visited the Champ de Mars today and returned thence truly
astonished."
"They say that things won't be ready in time," La Faloise ventured
to remark. "There's infinite confusion there--"
But the count interrupted him in his severe voice:
"Things will be ready. The emperor desires it."
Fauchery gaily recounted how one day, when he had gone down thither
in search of a subject for an article, he had come near spending all
his time in the aquarium, which was then in course of construction.
The countess smiled. Now and again she glanced down at the body of
the house, raising an arm which a white glove covered to the elbow
and fanning herself with languid hand. The house dozed, almost
deserted. Some gentlemen in the stalls had opened out newspapers,
and ladies received visits quite comfortably, as though they were at
their own homes. Only a well-bred whispering was audible under the
great chandelier, the light of which was softened in the fine cloud
of dust raised by the confused movements of the interval. At the
different entrances men were crowding in order to talk to ladies who
remained seated. They stood there motionless for a few seconds,
craning forward somewhat and displaying the great white bosoms of
their shirt fronts.
"We count on you next Tuesday," said the countess to La Faloise, and
she invited Fauchery, who bowed.
Not a word was said of the play; Nana's name was not once mentioned.
The count was so glacially dignified that he might have been
supposed to be taking part at a sitting of the legislature. In
order to explain their presence that evening he remarked simply that
his father-in-law was fond of the theater. The door of the box must
have remained open, for the Marquis de Chouard, who had gone out in
order to leave his seat to the visitors, was back again. He was
straightening up his tall, old figure. His face looked soft and
white under a broad-brimmed hat, and with his restless eyes he
followed the movements of the women who passed.
The moment the countess had given her invitation Fauchery took his
leave, feeling that to talk about the play would not be quite the
thing. La Faloise was the last to quit the box. He had just
noticed the fair-haired Labordette, comfortably installed in the
Count de Vandeuvres's stage box and chatting at very close quarters
with Blanche de Sivry.
"Gad," he said after rejoining his cousin, "that Labordette knows
all the girls then! He's with Blanche now."
"Doubtless he knows them all," replied Fauchery quietly. "What
d'you want to be taken for, my friend?"
The passage was somewhat cleared of people, and Fauchery was just
about to go downstairs when Lucy Stewart called him. She was quite
at the other end of the corridor, at the door of her stage box.
They were getting cooked in there, she said, and she took up the
whole corridor in company with Caroline Hequet and her mother, all
three nibbling burnt almonds. A box opener was chatting maternally
with them. Lucy fell out with the journalist. He was a pretty
fellow; to be sure! He went up to see other women and didn't even
come and ask if they were thirsty! Then, changing the subject:
"You know, dear boy, I think Nana very nice."
She wanted him to stay in the stage box for the last act, but he
made his escape, promising to catch them at the door afterward.
Downstairs in front of the theater Fauchery and La Faloise lit
cigarettes. A great gathering blocked the sidewalk, a stream of men
who had come down from the theater steps and were inhaling the fresh
night air in the boulevards, where the roar and battle had
diminished.
Meanwhile Mignon had drawn Steiner away to the Cafe des Varietes.
Seeing Nana's success, he had set to work to talk enthusiastically
about her, all the while observing the banker out of the corners of
his eyes. He knew him well; twice he had helped him to deceive Rose
and then, the caprice being over, had brought him back to her,
faithful and repentant. In the cafe the too numerous crowd of
customers were squeezing themselves round the marble-topped tables.
Several were standing up, drinking in a great hurry. The tall
mirrors reflected this thronging world of heads to infinity and
magnified the narrow room beyond measure with its three chandeliers,
its moleskin-covered seats and its winding staircase draped with
red. Steiner went and seated himself at a table in the first
saloon, which opened full on the boulevard, its doors having been
removed rather early for the time of year. As Fauchery and La
