still dissatisfied with her washing. She kept looking at the stain,
and every time she passed it she repeated:
"You know it's not gone yet, madame."
As a matter of fact, the pale red stain kept reappearing on one of
the white roses in the carpet pattern. It was as though, on the
very threshold of the room, a splash of blood were barring the
doorway.
"Bah!" said the joyous Nana. "That'l be rubbed out under people's
feet."
After the following day Count Muffat had likewise forgotten the
incident. For a moment or two, when in the cab which drove him to
the Rue Richelieu, he had busily sworn never to return to that
woman's house. Heaven was warning him; the misfortunes of Philippe
and Georges were, he opined, prophetic of his proper ruin. But
neither the sight of Mme Hugon in tears nor that of the boy burning
with fever had been strong enough to make him keep his vow, and the
short-lived horror of the situation had only left behind it a sense
of secret delight at the thought that he was now well quit of a
rival, the charm of whose youth had always exasperated him. His
passion had by this time grown exclusive; it was, indeed, the
passion of a man who has had no youth. He loved Nana as one who
yearned to be her sole possessor, to listen to her, to touch her, to
be breathed on by her. His was now a supersensual tenderness,
verging on pure sentiment; it was an anxious affection and as such
was jealous of the past and apt at times to dream of a day of
redemption and pardon received, when both should kneel before God
the Father. Every day religion kept regaining its influence over
him. He again became a practicing Christian; he confessed himself
and communicated, while a ceaseless struggle raged within him, and
remorse redoubled the joys of sin and of repentance. Afterward,
when his director gave him leave to spend his passion, he had made a
habit of this daily perdition and would redeem the same by ecstasies
of faith, which were full of pious humility. Very naively he
offered heaven, by way of expiatory anguish, the abominable torment
from which he was suffering. This torment grew and increased, and
he would climb his Calvary with the deep and solemn feelings of a
believer, though steeped in a harlot's fierce sensuality. That
which made his agony most poignant was this woman's continued
faithlessness. He could not share her with others, nor did he
understand her imbecile caprices. Undying, unchanging love was what
he wished for. However, she had sworn, and he paid her as having
done so. But he felt that she was untruthful, incapable of common
fidelity, apt to yield to friends, to stray passers-by, like a good-
natured animal, born to live minus a shift.
One morning when he saw Foucarmont emerging from her bedroom at an
unusual hour, he made a scene about it. But in her weariness of his
jealousy she grew angry directly. On several occasions ere that she
had behaved rather prettily. Thus the evening when he surprised her
with Georges she was the first to regain her temper and to confess
herself in the wrong. She had loaded him with caresses and dosed
him with soft speeches in order to make him swallow the business.
But he had ended by boring her to death with his obstinate refusals
to understand the feminine nature, and now she was brutal.
"Very well, yes! I've slept with Foucarmont. What then? That's
flattened you out a bit, my little rough, hasn't it?"
It was the first time she had thrown "my little rough" in his teeth.
The frank directness of her avowal took his breath away, and when he
began clenching his fists she marched up to him and looked him full
in the face.
"We've had enough of this, eh? If it doesn't suit you you'll do me
the pleasure of leaving the house. I don't want you to go yelling
in my place. Just you get it into your noodle that I mean to be
quite free. When a man pleases me I go to bed with him. Yes, I do--
that's my way! And you must make up your mind directly. Yes or
no! If it's no, out you may walk!"
She had gone and opened the door, but he did not leave. That was
her way now of binding him more closely to her. For no reason
whatever, at the slightest approach to a quarrel she would tell him
he might stop or go as he liked, and she would accompany her
permission with a flood of odious reflections. She said she could
always find better than he; she had only too many from whom to
choose; men in any quantity could be picked up in the street, and
men a good deal smarter, too, whose blood boiled in their veins. At
this he would hang his head and wait for those gentler moods when
she wanted money. She would then become affectionate, and he would
forget it all, one night of tender dalliance making up for the
tortures of a whole week. His reconciliation with his wife had
rendered his home unbearable. Fauchery, having again fallen under
Rose's dominion, the countess was running madly after other loves.
She was entering on the forties, that restless, feverish time in the
life of women, and ever hysterically nervous, she now filled her
mansion with the maddening whirl of her fashionable life. Estelle,
since her marriage, had seen nothing of her father; the undeveloped,
insignificant girl had suddenly become a woman of iron will, so
imperious withal that Daguenet trembled in her presence. In these
days he accompanied her to mass: he was converted, and he raged
against his father-in-law for ruining them with a courtesan. M.
Venot alone still remained kindly inclined toward the count, for he
was biding his time. He had even succeeded in getting into Nana's
immediate circle. In fact, he frequented both houses, where you
encountered his continual smile behind doors. So Muffat, wretched
at home, driven out by ennui and shame, still preferred to live in
the Avenue de Villiers, even though he was abused there.
Soon there was but one question between Nana and the count, and that
was "money." One day after having formally promised her ten
thousand francs he had dared keep his appointment empty handed. For
two days past she had been surfeiting him with love, and such a
breach of faith, such a waste of caresses, made her ragingly
abusive. She was white with fury.
"So you've not got the money, eh? Then go back where you came from,
my little rough, and look sharp about it! There's a bloody fool for
you! He wanted to kiss me again! Mark my words--no money, no
nothing!"
He explained matters; he would be sure to have the money the day
after tomorrow. But she interrupted him violently:
"And my bills! They'll sell me up while Monsieur's playing the
fool. Now then, look at yourself. D'ye think I love you for your
figure? A man with a mug like yours has to pay the women who are
kind enough to put up with him. By God, if you don't bring me that
ten thousand francs tonight you shan't even have the tip of my
little finger to suck. I mean it! I shall send you back to your
wife!"
At night he brought the ten thousand francs. Nana put up her lips,
and he took a long kiss which consoled him for the whole day of
anguish. What annoyed the young woman was to have him continually
tied to her apron strings. She complained to M. Venot, begging him
to take her little rough off to the countess. Was their
reconciliation good for nothing then? She was sorry she had mixed
herself up in it, since despite everything he was always at her
heels. On the days when, out of anger, she forgot her own interest,
she swore to play him such a dirty trick that he would never again
be able to set foot in her place. But when she slapped her leg and
yelled at him she might quite as well have spat in his face too: he
would still have stayed and even thanked her. Then the rows about
money matters kept continually recurring. She demanded money
savagely; she rowed him over wretched little amounts; she was
odiously stingy with every minute of her time; she kept fiercely
informing him that she slept with him for his money, not for any
other reasons, and that she did not enjoy it a bit, that, in fact,
she loved another and was awfully unfortunate in needing an idiot of
his sort! They did not even want him at court now, and there was
some talk of requiring him to send in his resignation. The empress
had said, "He is too disgusting." It was true enough. So Nana
repeated the phrase by way of closure to all their quarrels.
"Look here! You disgust me!"
Nowadays she no longer minded her ps and qs; she had regained the
most perfect freedom.
Every day she did her round of the lake, beginning acquaintanceships
which ended elsewhere. Here was the happy hunting ground par
excellence, where courtesans of the first water spread their nets in
open daylight and flaunted themselves amid the tolerating smiles and
brilliant luxury of Paris. Duchesses pointed her out to one another
with a passing look--rich shopkeepers' wives copied the fashion of
her hats. Sometimes her landau, in its haste to get by, stopped a
file of puissant turnouts, wherein sat plutocrats able to buy up all
Europe or Cabinet ministers with plump fingers tight-pressed to the
throat of France. She belonged to this Bois society, occupied a
prominent place in it, was known in every capital and asked about by
every foreigner. The splendors of this crowd were enhanced by the
madness of her profligacy as though it were the very crown, the
darling passion, of the nation. Then there were unions of a night,
continual passages of desire, which she lost count of the morning
after, and these sent her touring through the grand restaurants and
on fine days, as often as not, to "Madrid." The staffs of all the
embassies visited her, and she, Lucy Stewart, Caroline Hequet and
Maria Blond would dine in the society of gentlemen who murdered the
French language and paid to be amused, engaging them by the evening
with orders to be funny and yet proving so blase and so worn out
that they never even touched them. This the ladies called "going on
a spree," and they would return home happy at having been despised
and would finish the night in the arms of the lovers of their
choice.
When she did not actually throw the men at his head Count Muffat
pretended not to know about all this. However, he suffered not a
little from the lesser indignities of their daily life. The mansion
in the Avenue de Villiers was becoming a hell, a house full of mad
people, in which every hour of the day wild disorders led to hateful
complications. Nana even fought with her servants. One moment she
would be very nice with Charles, the coachman. When she stopped at
a restaurant she would send him out beer by the waiter and would
talk with him from the inside of her carriage when he slanged the
cabbies at a block in the traffic, for then he struck her as funny
and cheered her up. Then the next moment she called him a fool for
no earthly reason. She was always squabbling over the straw, the
bran or the oats; in spite of her love for animals she thought her
horses ate too much. Accordingly one day when she was settling up
she accused the man of robbing her. At this Charles got in a rage
and called her a whore right out; his horses, he said, were
distinctly better than she was, for they did not sleep with
everybody. She answered him in the same strain, and the count had
to separate them and give the coachman the sack. This was the
beginning of a rebellion among the servants. When her diamonds had
been stolen Victorine and Francois left. Julien himself
disappeared, and the tale ran that the master had given him a big
bribe and had begged him to go, because he slept with the mistress.
Every week there were new faces in the servants' hall. Never was
there such a mess; the house was like a passage down which the scum
of the registry offices galloped, destroying everything in their
path. Zoe alone kept her place; she always looked clean, and her
only anxiety was how to organize this riot until she had got enough
together to set up on her own account in fulfillment of a plan she
had been hatching for some time past.
These, again, were only the anxieties he could own to. The count
put up with the stupidity of Mme Maloir, playing bezique with her in
spite of her musty smell. He put up with Mme Lerat and her
encumbrances, with Louiset and the mournful complaints peculiar to a
child who is being eaten up with the rottenness inherited from some
unknown father. But he spent hours worse than these. One evening
he had heard Nana angrily telling her maid that a man pretending to
be rich had just swindled her--a handsome man calling himself an
American and owning gold mines in his own country, a beast who had
gone off while she was asleep without giving her a copper and had
even taken a packet of cigarette papers with him. The count had
turned very pale and had gone downstairs again on tiptoe so as not
to hear more. But later he had to hear all. Nana, having been
smitten with a baritone in a music hall and having been thrown over
by him, wanted to commit suicide during a fit of sentimental
melancholia. She swallowed a glass of water in which she had soaked
a box of matches. This made her terribly sick but did not kill her.
The count had to nurse her and to listen to the whole story of her
passion, her tearful protests and her oaths never to take to any man
again. In her contempt for those swine, as she called them, she
could not, however, keep her heart free, for she always had some
sweetheart round her, and her exhausted body inclined to
incomprehensible fancies and perverse tastes. As Zoe designedly
relaxed her efforts the service of the house had got to such a pitch
