a present of his seven thousand francs. Indeed, that was how their
liaison ended.
One evening Nana came in toward eleven o'clock and found the door
bolted. She tapped once--there was no answer; twice--still no
answer. Meanwhile she saw light under the door, and Fontan inside
did not trouble to move. She rapped again unwearyingly; she called
him and began to get annoyed. At length Fontan's voice became
audible; he spoke slowly and rather unctuously and uttered but this
one word.
"MERDE!"
She beat on the door with her fists.
"MERDE!"
She banged hard enough to smash in the woodwork.
"MERDE!"
And for upward of a quarter of an hour the same foul expression
buffeted her, answering like a jeering echo to every blow wherewith
she shook the door. At length, seeing that she was not growing
tired, he opened sharply, planted himself on the threshold, folded
his arms and said in the same cold, brutal voice:
"By God, have you done yet? What d'you want? Are you going to let
us sleep in peace, eh? You can quite see I've got company tonight."
He was certainly not alone, for Nana perceived the little woman from
the Bouffes with the untidy tow hair and the gimlet-hole eyes,
standing enjoying herself in her shift among the furniture she had
paid for. But Fontan stepped out on the landing. He looked
terrible, and he spread out and crooked his great fingers as if they
were pincers.
"Hook it or I'll strangle you!"
rhereupon Nana burst into a nervous fit of sobbing. She was
frightened and she made off. This time it was she that was being
kicked out of doors. And in her fury the thought of Muffat suddenly
occurred to her. Ah, to be sure, Fontan, of all men, ought never to
have done her such a turn!
When she was out in the street her first thought was to go and sleep
with Satin, provided the girl had no one with her. She met her in
front of her house, for she, too, had been turned out of doors by
her landlord. He had just had a padlock affixed to her door--quite
illegally, of course, seeing that she had her own furniture. She
swore and talked of having him up before the commissary of police.
In the meantime, as midnight was striking, they had to begin
thinking of finding a bed. And Satin, deeming it unwise to let the
plain-clothes men into her secrets, ended by taking Nana to a woman
who kept a little hotel in the Rue de Laval. Here they were
assigned a narrow room on the first floor, the window of which
opened on the courtyard. Satin remarked:
"I should gladly have gone to Mme Robert's. There's always a corner
there for me. But with you it's out of the question. She's getting
absurdly jealous; she beat me the other night."
When they had shut themselves in, Nana, who had not yet relieved her
feelings, burst into tears and again and again recounted Fontan's
dirty behavior. Satin listened complaisantly, comforted her, grew
even more angry than she in denunciation of the male sex.
"Oh, the pigs, the pigs! Look here, we'll have nothing more to do
with them!"
Then she helped Nana to undress with all the small, busy attentions,
becoming a humble little friend. She kept saying coaxingly:
"Let's go to bed as fast as we can, pet. We shall be better off
there! Oh, how silly you are to get crusty about things! I tell
you, they're dirty brutes. Don't think any more about 'em. I--I
love you very much. Don't cry, and oblige your own little darling
girl."
And once in bed, she forthwith took Nana in her arms and soothed and
comforted her. She refused to hear Fontan's name mentioned again,
and each time it recurred to her friend's lips she stopped it with a
kiss. Her lips pouted in pretty indignation; her hair lay loose
about her, and her face glowed with tenderness and childlike beauty.
Little by little her soft embrace compelled Nana to dry her tears.
She was touched and replied to Satin's caresses. When two o'clock
struck the candle was still burning, and a sound of soft, smothered
laughter and lovers' talk was audible in the room.
But suddenly a loud noise came up from the lower floors of the
hotel, and Satin, with next to nothing on, got up and listened
intently.
"The police!" she said, growing very pale.
"Oh, blast our bad luck! We're bloody well done for!"
Often had she told stories about the raids on hotel made by the
plainclothes men. But that particular night neither of them had
suspected anything when they took shelter in the Rue de Laval. At
the sound of the word "police" Nana lost her head. She jumped out
of bed and ran across the room with the scared look of a madwoman
about to jump out of the window. Luckily, however, the little
courtyard was roofed with glass, which was covered with an iron-wire
grating at the level of the girls' bedroom. At sight of this she
ceased to hesitate; she stepped over the window prop, and with her
chemise flying and her legs bared to the night air she vanished in
the gloom.
"Stop! Stop!" said Satin in a great fright. "You'll kill
yourself."
Then as they began hammering at the door, she shut the window like a
good-natured girl and threw her friend's clothes down into a
cupboard. She was already resigned to her fate and comforted
herself with the thought that, after all, if she were to be put on
the official list she would no longer be so "beastly frightened" as
of yore. So she pretended to be heavy with sleep. She yawned; she
palavered and ended by opening the door to a tall, burly fellow with
an unkempt beard, who said to her:
"Show your hands! You've got no needle pricks on them: you don't
work. Now then, dress!"
"But I'm not a dressmaker; I'm a burnisher," Satin brazenly
declared.
Nevertheless, she dressed with much docility, knowing that argument
was out of the question. Cries were ringing through the hotel; a
girl was clinging to doorposts and refusing to budge an inch.
Another girl, in bed with a lover, who was answering for her
legality, was acting the honest woman who had been grossly insulted
and spoke of bringing an action against the prefect of police. For
close on an hour there was a noise of heavy shoes on the stairs, of
fists hammering on doors, of shrill disputes terminating in sobs, of
petticoats rustling along the walls, of all the sounds, in fact,
attendant on the sudden awakening and scared departure of a flock of
women as they were roughly packed off by three plain-clothes men,
headed by a little oily-mannered, fair-haired commissary of police.
After they had gone the hotel relapsed into deep silence.
Nobody had betrayed her; Nana was saved. Shivering and half dead
with fear, she came groping back into the room. Her bare feet were
cut and bleeding, for they had been torn by the grating. For a long
while she remained sitting on the edge of the bed, listening and
listening. Toward morning, however, she went to sleep again, and at
eight o'clock, when she woke up, she escaped from the hotel and ran
to her aunt's. When Mme Lerat, who happened just then to be
drinking her morning coffee with Zoe, beheld her bedraggled plight
and haggard face, she took note of the hour and at once understood
the state of the case.
"It's come to it, eh?" she cried. "I certainly told you that he
would take the skin off your back one of these days. Well, well,
come in; you'll always find a kind welcome here."
Zoe had risen from her chair and was muttering with respectful
familiarity:
"Madame is restored to us at last. I was waiting for Madame."
But Mme Lerat insisted on Nana's going and kissing Louiset at once,
because, she said, the child took delight in his mother's nice ways.
Louiset, a sickly child with poor blood, was still asleep, and when
Nana bent over his white, scrofulous face, the memory of all she had
undergone during the last few months brought a choking lump into her
throat.
"Oh, my poor little one, my poor little one!" she gasped, bursting
into a final fit of sobbing.
CHAPTER IX
The Petite Duchesse was being rehearsed at the Varietes. The first
act had just been carefully gone through, and the second was about
to begin. Seated in old armchairs in front of the stage, Fauchery
and Bordenave were discussing various points while the prompter,
Father Cossard, a little humpbacked man perched on a straw-bottomed
chair, was turning over the pages of the manuscript, a pencil
between his lips.
"Well, what are they waiting for?" cried Bordenave on a sudden,
tapping the floor savagely with his heavy cane. "Barillot, why
don't they begin?"
"It's Monsieur Bosc that has disappeared," replied Barillot, who was
acting as second stage manager.'
Then there arose a tempest, and everybody shouted for Bosc while
Bordenave swore.
"Always the same thing, by God! It's all very well ringing for 'em:
they're always where they've no business to be. And then they
grumble when they're kept till after four o'clock."
But Bosc just then came in with supreme tranquillity.
"Eh? What? What do they want me for? Oh, it's my turn! You ought
to have said so. All right! Simonne gives the cue: 'Here are the
guests,' and I come in. Which way must I come in?"
"Through the door, of course," cried Fauchery in great exasperation.
"Yes, but where is the door?"
At this Bordenave fell upon Barillot and once more set to work
swearing and hammering the boards with his cane.
"By God! I said a chair was to be put there to stand for the door,
and every day we have to get it done again. Barillot! Where's
Barillot? Another of 'em! Why, they're all going!"
Nevertheless, Barillot came and planted the chair down in person,
mutely weathering the storm as he did so. And the rehearsal began
again. Simonne, in her hat and furs, began moving about like a
maidservant busy arranging furniture. She paused to say:
"I'm not warm, you know, so I keep my hands in my muff."
Then changing her voice, she greeted Bosc with a little cry:
"La, it's Monsieur le Comte. You're the first to come, Monsieur le
Comte, and Madame will be delighted."
Bosc had muddy trousers and a huge yellow overcoat, round the collar
of which a tremendous comforter was wound. On his head he wore an
old hat, and he kept his hands in his pockets. He did not act but
dragged himself along, remarking in a hollow voice:
"Don't disturb your mistress, Isabelle; I want to take her by
surprise."
The rehearsal took its course. Bordenave knitted his brows. He had
slipped down low in his armchair and was listening with an air of
fatigue. Fauchery was nervous and kept shifting about in his seat.
Every few minutes he itched with the desire to interrupt, but he
restrained himself. He heard a whispering in the dark and empty
house behind him.
"Is she there?" he asked, leaning over toward Bordenave.
The latter nodded affirmatively. Before accepting the part of
Geraldine, which he was offering her, Nana had been anxious to see
the piece, for she hesitated to play a courtesan's part a second
time. She, in fact, aspired to an honest woman's part. Accordingly
she was hiding in the shadows of a corner box in company with
Labordette, who was managing matters for her with Bordenave.
Fauchery glanced in her direction and then once more set himself to
follow the rehearsal.
Only the front of the stage was lit up. A flaring gas burner on a
support, which was fed by a pipe from the footlights, burned in
front of a reflector and cast its full brightness over the immediate
foreground. It looked like a big yellow eye glaring through the
surrounding semiobscurity, where it flamed in a doubtful, melancholy
way. Cossard was holding up his manuscript against the slender stem
of this arrangement. He wanted to see more clearly, and in the
flood of light his hump was sharply outlined. As to Bordenave and
Fauchery, they were already drowned in shadow. It was only in the
heart of this enormous structure, on a few square yards of stage,
that a faint glow suggested the light cast by some lantern nailed up
in a railway station. It made the actors look like eccentric
phantoms and set their shadows dancing after them. The remainder of
the stage was full of mist and suggested a house in process of being
pulled down, a church nave in utter ruin. It was littered with
ladders, with set pieces and with scenery, of which the faded
painting suggested heaped-up rubbish. Hanging high in air, the
scenes had the appearance of great ragged clouts suspended from the
rafters of some vast old-clothes shop, while above these again a ray
of bright sunlight fell from a window and clove the shadow round the
flies with a bar of gold.
Meanwhile actors were chatting at the back of the stage while
awaiting their cues. Little by little they had raised their voices.
"Confound it, will you be silent?" howled Bordenave, raging up and
down in his chair. "I can't hear a word. Go outside if you want to
talk; WE are at work. Barillot, if there's any more talking I clap
on fines all round!"
They were silent for a second or two. They were sitting in a little
group on a bench and some rustic chairs in the corner of a scenic
garden, which was standing ready to be put in position as it would
be used in the opening act the same evening. In the middle of this
group Fontan and Prulliere were listening to Rose Mignon, to whom
