by Emile Zola
“It is too much. Oh, God! it is too much!”
He had accepted everything, but he could no longer bear it. He felt himself without strength, in that darkness where man succumbs with his reason. With an extraordinary outburst, holding high his joined hands, he sought Heaven, he called on God.
“Oh, no! I will not! Oh! come to me, my God! help me, or rather let me die! Oh, no! not that man, my God! it is ended—take me, carry me off, that I may no longer see, that I may no longer feel. Oh! I belong to Thee, my God! Our Father which art in Heaven—”
And he continued, burning with faith, and an ardent prayer came from his lips. But someone touched him on the shoulder. He raised his eyes: it was M. Venot, surprised at finding him praying before that closed door. Then, as though God Himself had replied to his appeal, he threw himself into the little old man’s arms. At last he could weep: he sobbed, and kept repeating,
“My brother, my brother—”
All his suffering humanity found relief in this cry. He bathed M. Venot’s face with his tears, he kissed him, uttering disconnected sentences.
“Oh, my brother, how I suffer! You alone are left to me, my brother. Take me away for ever, oh! for mercy’s sake, take me away.”
Then M. Venot pressed him to his bosom. He called him his brother also. But he had another blow to deal him. Since the previous day he had been seeking him to tell him that Countess Sabine had crowned her follies by eloping with a young man employed at a large linen-draper’s—a frightful scandal, of which all Paris was already gossiping. Seeing him under the influence of such a religious exaltation, he thought the moment a favourable one, and told him at once what had occurred, that flatly tragical end in which his house was foundering. The count was not affected in the least; his wife had gone off, that was nothing to him, he would see about it later on. And, again giving way to his anguish, looking at the door, the walls, the ceiling, in a terrified manner, he could do no more than utter these imploring words:
“Take me away, I can bear it no longer; take me away.”
M. Venot took him off like a child. From that time he was his entirely. Muffat once more returned to the strict duties of religion. His life was blasted. He had resigned his chamberlain’s office in accordance with the desire of the offended modesty of the Tuileries. His daughter Estelle had commenced an action against him to recover a sum of sixty thousand francs left her by an aunt, and which she ought to have received at the time of her marriage. Ruined, and living very moderately with the remnants of his great fortune, he allowed himself to be finished little by little by the countess, who devoured the leavings Nana had disdained. Sabine, corrupted by that woman’s promiscuousness, incited to extremes, became the final sapper, the very canker of the home. After various adventures she had returned, and he had taken her back in the resignation of Christian pardon. She accompanied him like his living shame. But he, becoming more and more indifferent, ended by no longer suffering from such things. Heaven had rescued him from the arms of woman to place him again in the very arms of God. It was a religious prolongation of Nana’s voluptuous pleasures, with the stutterings, the prayers, and the despondencies—the humilities of an accursed creature crushed beneath the mud of his origin. In the dark corners of churches, his knees chilled by the cold stones, he found again his enjoyments of former days, the spasms of his muscles and the delicious perturbations of his intelligence, in the same atonement of the obscure requirements of his being.
The night of the rupture Mignon called at the Avenue de Villiers. He had got accustomed to Fauchery, he had ended by discovering a thousand advantages in the presence of a husband at his wife’s. He left to him all the little cares of the home, relied on him for an active supervision, and used the money that came from his dramatic successes for the daily expenses of the household; and as, on the other hand, Fauchery behaved very reasonably—never indulging in any ridiculous jealousy, but being as accommodating as Mignon himself with regard to the opportunities Rose had—the two men got on together better than ever, delighted with their association, so fertile in every kind of happiness, and each one making his nest beside the other, in a home where neither of them any longer stood on ceremony. It was regulated, it worked very well, they rivalled each other in their exertions for the common felicity. It just happened that Mignon had called, by Fauchery’s advice, to see if he could not entice away Nana’s maid, whose wonderful intelligence the journalist had fully appreciated. Rose was in great distress. For a month past she had had to put up with inexperienced girls, who caused her continual embarrassments.
As Zoé admitted him, he pushed her at once into the dining-room. At the first word she smiled. It was impossible. She was leaving madame, she was about to set up in business on her own account; and she added, with an air of discreet vanity, that every day she was receiving proposals—all the ladies wanted her. Madame Blanche had offered her a bridge of gold to get her back. Zoé was going to acquire old Tricon’s business, an old project which she had nursed for a long while, an ambition to realise a fortune, in which she was about to invest her savings. She was full of great ideas. She dreamed of enlarging the concern, of taking a mansion, and collecting in it every pleasure. It was for this that she had even tried to get hold of Satin, a little blockhead who was now dying in the hospital, she had so ruined her health.
Mignon having persisted in his offer, mentioning the risks one runs in business, Zoé, without explaining herself as to the nature of her projected establishment, contented herself with saying, with a self-satisfied smile, just as though she had taken a confectioner’s shop,
“Oh! affairs of luxury always succeed. You see I have been so long with the others that now I wish the others to be with me.”
And a ferocious feeling made her curl her lip. She would at last be “madame.” She would have at her feet, for the sum of a few louis, those women whose slops she had been emptying for fifteen years past.
Mignon wished to see Nana, and Zoé left him for a minute, after saying that madame had passed a very unpleasant day. He had only called there once, he did not know the house at all. The dining-room, with its Gobelin tapestry, its sideboard, and its silver plate, amazed him. He familiarly opened the doors, and visited the drawing-room and the winter garden, and then returned to the hall; and this excessive luxury—the gilded furniture, the silks, and the velvets—filled him little by little with an admiration which caused his heart to bump. When Zoé came downstairs to fetch him, she offered to show him the other rooms—the bed-room, the dressing-room. Then, in the bedroom, Mignon’s heart almost burst. He was excited to the highest point of enthusiasm. That confounded Nana astounded him, he who was not easily surprised at anything. In the midst of the downfall of the establishment, of the waste and the massacring gallop of the servants, there was a pile of riches which stopped up the holes and covered the ruins.
And Mignon, in the face of that magisterial monument, recalled many great works he had seen. Near Marseilles he had been shown an aqueduct, the stone arches of which spanned an abyss—a Cyclopean work which had cost millions and ten years of struggle. At Cherbourg he had seen the new harbour in course of construction—a gigantic undertaking, hundreds of men sweating in the sunshine, machines filling the sea with huge masses of rock, erecting a wall where at times workmen were squashed to a bloody pulp. But all that seemed small to him now. Nana exalted him far more; and in contemplating her work, he experienced once again that sensation of respect experienced by him one night at an entertainment in a château which a sugar refiner had had built—a palace the royal splendour of which had been paid for by one single thing, sugar. She had paid with something different, a bit of fun at which one laughed—a little of her delicate nudity. It was with this shameful and yet so mighty a nothing, the power of which excited the world, that all alone, without workmen, without machinery invented by engineers, she had shaken Paris and built up that fortune beneath which dead bodies were slumbering.
“Ah! damn it all! what a tool!”
exclaimed Mignon enraptured, and with a return of personal gratitude.
Nana little by little had become very sorrowful. At first the meeting of the marquis and the count had thrown her into a nervous fever, accompanied by a slight touch of gaiety. Then, the thought of the old fellow who had gone off in a cab, half dead, and of her poor muff whom she would never see again, after having so often vexed him, brought about the beginning of a sentimental melancholy. After this she had got quite angry on hearing of Satin’s illness. The girl had disappeared a fortnight before, and was now gradually dying at the Lariboisière Hospital, Madame Robert having put her into such a frightful state. As she was ordering the carriage to go and see the little baggage once more, Zoé had quietly given her a week’s notice to leave. That threw her into despair. It seemed as though she was losing one of her family; and she implored Zoé to remain. The latter, highly flattered by madame’s grief, ended by kissing her, to show that there was no ill-feeling at parting. She was obliged to go; the heart was silent when business was in question. But that was a day of worries. Nana, thoroughly disgusted, no longer thinking of going out, was wandering about her parlour, when Labordette, who had come to tell her of some magnificent lace to be had at a bargain, mentioned between two other phrases about nothing at all that George was dead. She turned icy cold.
“Zizi! dead!” she cried.
And her glance, by an involuntary movement, sought the pink stain on the carpet. But it had vanished at last; the footsteps had worn it away. Labordette, however, gave her some particulars. One did not know exactly how it had happened: some talked of a wound having opened, others told the story of a suicide—a plunge into one of the fountains at Les Fondettes. Nana kept repeating,
“Dead! dead!”
Then she burst into sobs, and relieved her feelings pent up since the morning. It was an infinite sadness—something profound and immense which overwhelmed her. Labordette having tried to console her about George, she waved her hand to make him desist, and said in broken tones,
“It’s not only him, it’s all, it’s everything. I’m very unhappy, Oh! I know! they’ll again say that I’m an abominable woman. That mother who is weeping there, and that poor man who was moaning this morning at my door, and the others who are all ruined, after having squandered their sous with me. That’s right, give it to Nana, give it to the beast! Oh! I’ve a broad back, I can hear them as though I was there. That dirty strumpet who entices everyone; who clears out some, and kills the others; who causes pain to no end of people—”
She was forced to interrupt herself; suffocated by her tears, she had fallen in her anguish across a sofa, with her head buried in a cushion. The misfortunes she felt around her, those miseries that she had caused, enveloped her in a warm and continuous flow of sensibility; and her voice became lost in the plaintive accents of a little girl.
“Oh! I suffer—oh! I suffer. I cannot, it’s stifling me. It’s too hard not to be understood, to see everyone put themselves against you, because they’re the strongest. Yet, when one has nothing to reproach oneself with, when one has a free conscience—well, no! well, no—”
Her anger changed to indignation. She got up, wiped her eyes; and paced agitatedly about the room.
“Well, no! they may say what they like, it isn’t my fault! Am I cruel? I give all I have—I wouldn’t hurt a fly. It’s they; yes, it’s they! I never wanted to be unpleasant to any of them. And they were always hanging about my skirts, and now they croak, or beg, and all pretend to be in despair.”
Then, stopping in front of Labordette, and tapping him on the shoulders, she continued,
“Come now, you were there, speak the truth. Was it I who led them on? Weren’t there always a dozen exerting themselves to invent something more abominable than the others? They disgusted me! I held myself aloof so as not to follow in their wake, I was afraid. Here’s an instance—they all wanted to marry me. A nice idea! Eh! yes, my dear fellow, I might have been twenty times a baroness or a countess if I had consented. Well! I refused, because I was reasonable. Ah! I preserved them from many detestable actions and many crimes! They would have stolen, murdered, killed father and mother. I had but to say a word, and I didn’t say it. To-day, you see my reward. It’s like that Daguenet whom I got married—a half-starved wretch whose position I made, after keeping him for nothing for weeks together. Yesterday, I met him; he turned away his head. Well! go to the devil, pig! I’m not so foul as you are!”
She was walking about again; she violently banged her fist down on a small round table.
“Damn it all! it’s not just! Society is badly constructed. The women are abused, when it’s the men who are entirely to blame, they expect such things. Listen! I can tell you now—in all I’ve ever had to do with men, well! I never had the least pleasure—no, not the least. They always bored me, on my word of honour! So, I ask you now if there’s any fault of mine in all this? Ah, yes! they almost badgered me out of my life! Without them, my dear fellow, and what they’ve made me, I should be now in a convent praying, for I’ve always been religious. And, hang ’em! after all, if they have left their money and their skin, it’s their own fault! I’ve nothing to do with it!”
“Of course,” said Labordette, convinced.
Zoé ushered in Mignon. Nana received him smiling; she had had a good cry, but now it was over. He complimented her on her abode, still warmed with enthusiasm; but she soon let him see that she had had enough of her mansion. Now she was dreaming of something else—she would get rid of it all, one fine day. Then, as he mentioned as a pretext for his visit a benefit performance to be given for old Bosc, who was tied to his chair by an attack of paralysis, she expressed a great deal of sorrow, and took two boxes. Zoé, however, having said that the carriage was waiting, she asked for her bonnet; and as she tied the strings, she related the story of poor Satin’s mishap, then added:
“I’m off to the hospital. No one ever loved me as she did. Ah! one is quite right in accusing men of having no hearts! Who knows? she’s perhaps dead already. All the same, I shall ask to see her. I must kiss her once more.”
Labordette and Mignon smiled. She was no longer sad, she smiled also, for those two did not count, they could understand. And they both admired her, in a thoughtful silence, as she finished buttoning her gloves. She alone stood erect, in the midst of the piled-up wealth of her mansion, with a crowd of men trampled beneath her feet. Like those antique monsters whose dreaded domain was covered with bones, she trod on skulls, and catastrophe surrounded her: Vandeuvres’s furious conflagration; the melancholy of Foucarmont, drowned in the China seas; the collapse of Steiner, now forced to live as an honest man; the satisfied imbecility of La Faloise, and the tragical downfall of the Muffats; and George’s white corpse watched over by Philippe, discharged from prison the day before. Her work of ruin and death was accomplished, the fly that had taken its flight from the filth of the slums, carrying with it the ferment of social decay, had poisoned those men merely by touching them. It was good, it was just; she had avenged her people, the rogues and the vagabonds from whom she sprang. And whilst in a halo her sex ascended and shone on her scattered victims like a rising sun lighting up a field of carnage, she retained her unconsciousness of a superb beast, ignorant of her work, always good-natured. She remained big and plump, with beautiful health and unalloyed gaiety. But all that no longer counted. Her mansion seemed to her idiotic—it was so small, and full of a heap of furniture which was always in her way. A mere nothing, she only wanted to commence again. She dreamed, too, of something better; and she went off in a gorgeous costume to kiss Satin a last time—clean, solid, looking quite new, as though she had never been in use.
CHAPTER XIV
Nana abruptly disappeared—another plunge, a wild prank, a flight into strange lands. Before her departure she procured herself the emotion of a sale by auction, sweeping everything off—the mansion, the furniture, the jewellery, and even the dresses and the linen. Figures were quoted. The five days produced mor
e than six hundred thousand francs. For a last time Paris had seen her in a fairy piece, “Mélusine,” at the Gaiety Theatre, that Bordenave had audaciously taken without a sou. She was there with Prullière and Fontan. Her part was a dumb one, all show, but a real hit—three plastic postures of a powerful and silent fairy. Then in the midst of this great success, when Bordenave, advertising-mad, was covering Paris with colossal posters, it was stated one fine morning that the night before she had left for Cairo—a simple discussion with her manager, a word that had not pleased her, the caprice of a woman too rich to allow herself to be annoyed. Besides, it was a fad of hers. For a long time past she had longed to go and see the Turks.
Months passed by. She was forgotten. Whenever her name was mentioned amongst her friends, the strangest stories circulated. Each gave contrary and prodigious information. She had captivated the viceroy; she reigned in the innermost recesses of a palace, over two hundred slaves, whose heads she cut off to make her laugh. Not at all. She had ruined herself with a big negro—a filthy infatuation which had left her without a chemise, in the midst of the crapulous debauchery of Cairo. A fortnight later there was universal astonishment. Some one swore he had met her in Russia. A legend gradually developed. She was the mistress of a prince; her diamonds were talked about. All the women were soon acquainted with them, through the descriptions that were current, without any one being able to give their source—rings, bracelets, earrings, a diamond necklace as broad as two fingers, and a queenly diadem surmounted by a central brilliant as big as one’s thumb. In the unknown of these far-oft lands, she assumed the mysterious radiance of an idol covered with precious stones. Now, she was only mentioned gravely, with the pensive respect for that fortune made amongst the barbarians.