by Emile Zola
“Ah! she is altered—she is altered!” repeated Rose Mignon, with her smile of dull grief.
Two more women arrived: Tatan Néné and Louise Violaine. They had been wandering about the hotel for quite twenty minutes, sent from waiter to waiter. They had gone up and down more than thirty flights of stairs, in the midst of a host of travellers who were flying from Paris, in the panic caused by the declaration of war and the commotion on the Boulevards. So, immediately on entering the room they sank into some chairs, too fatigued to think of the deceased. Just then, a great noise was heard in the next apartment; there was a moving of trunks, a knocking about of furniture, mingled with a sound of voices uttering barbarous accents. The room was occupied by a young Austrian couple. Gaga related that, during the death agony, the pair had played at running after each other; and as there was a door between the two rooms, one could hear them laughing and kissing, each time one of them was caught.
“Well, I must be off,” said Clarisse. “We can’t bring her to life again. Are you coming, Simone?”
They all glanced at the bed, without stirring. Yet they were getting ready to leave, they gently smoothed down their skirts. At the window Lucy was again leaning out, but alone. A sadness brought a lump to her throat, as though a profound melancholy arose from that yelling mob beneath. Torches continued to pass, casting flakes of fire around; in the distance the various bands, huddled together in the darkness, looked like flocks of sheep driven at night-time to the slaughter-house; and all that giddiness, those confused masses surging like the ocean, exhaled a terror, a great pity for coming massacres. They banished dull care, their shouts burst out in the intoxication of their fever rushing against the unknown, far away in the distance, behind the dark boundary of the horizon.
“To Berlin! to Berlin! to Berlin!”
Lucy turned round, her back against the balustrade of the window, and looking very pale, exclaimed, “Good heavens! what will become of us?”
The other women shook their heads. They were very grave, and full of anxiety about what was happening.
“I,” said Caroline Héquet in her sedate way; “I’m off to London the day after to-morrow. Mamma is already there preparing a house for me. I’m certainly not going to stop in Paris to be massacred.”
Her mother, like a prudent woman, had invested all her money abroad. One never knows how a war may end. But Maria Blond flew into a passion. She was patriotic; she talked of following the army.
“There’s a runaway for you! Yes, if they would let me, I would dress up as a man and go and shoot those Prussian pigs! And if we were all to croak, what next? A pretty thing our bodies are!”
Blanche de Sivry was exasperated.
“Don’t speak against the Prussians! They are men like the others, and are not for ever bothering women like your Frenchmen. They’ve just expelled the little Prussian who was with me—a fellow awfully rich and gentle as a lamb—incapable of hurting any one. It’s a disgrace; it’ll ruin me. And, do you know, if I’m bothered too much, I’ll go and join him in Germany! ”
Then, whilst each had her say, Gaga murmured in a doleful voice,
“It’s the end; I’ve no luck. Only a week ago, I paid the last instalment for my little house at Juvisy. Ah! heaven knows what trouble it cost me! Lili had to help me. And now war’s declared. The Prussians will come; they’ll burn everything. How can I commence all over again at my age?”
“Of course,” added Simone. “It will be funny. Perhaps on the contrary, we shall do—”
And she completed her thought with a smile. Tatan Néné and Louise Violaine were of the same opinion. The first one related that she had had some jolly times with soldiers—oh! delightful fellows who would do anything for a woman. But having raised their voices too high, Rose Mignon, still leaning against the woodwork at the foot of the bed, made them leave off with a gentle “hush!” They were startled, and glanced sideways towards the corpse, as though that request for silence had issued from the very shadow of the curtains; and in the heavy quiet that prevailed—that quiet of nothingness in which they were conscious of the rigidity of the corpse stretched out near them—the shouts of the mob burst out again,
“To Berlin! to Berlin! to Berlin!”
But they soon forgot their fright. Léa de Horn, who had a political salon, where some of Louis-Philippe’s ex-ministers indulged in smart epigrams, resumed in a low voice, as she shrugged her shoulders,
“What a mistake, this war! what awful stupidity! ”
Then Lucy at once defended the empire. She had been kept by one of the imperial princes; for her it was a family matter.
“Nonsense, my dear; we couldn’t allow ourselves to be insulted any longer. This war is the honour of France. Oh! you know, I don’t say that because of the prince. He was so stingy! Just fancy, every night he hid his louis in his boots, and whenever we played at bezique he used beans, because one day I seized the stakes, just for a joke. But that doesn’t prevent my being just. The Emperor was in the right.”
Léa wagged her head with an air of superiority, like a woman who repeats the opinions of eminent personages. And, raising her voice, she added:
“It’s the end. They’re all mad at the Tuileries. France ought to have sent them to the right about yesterday rather than—”
The others violently interrupted her. She was cracked. What was the matter with her? What had the Emperor ever done to her? Wasn’t everyone happy? Wasn’t business in a flourishing state? Paris could never be livelier. Gaga flew into a passion, roused with indignation.
“Shut up! it’s idiotic! you don’t know what you’re saying! I lived in Louis-Philippe’s time, an epoch of toast and water and sordidness, my dear. And then came ’48. Ah! a fine thing, a disgusting time, their Republic! After February I was actually starving, I tell you! But if you had passed through all that, you would fall on your knees before the Emperor, for he’s been our father, yes, our father.”
They had to calm her. Then she resumed in a religious outburst, “O God! give the Emperor the victory. Preserve us the Empire!”
All repeated the prayer. Blanche admitted that she burnt candles for the Emperor. Caroline, full of a religious feeling, had for two months past gone everywhere that she was likely to come across him, without succeeding in attracting his notice. And the others broke out into furious tirades against the Republicans, talked of expelling them beyond the frontier, so that Napoleon III., after vanquishing the enemy, might reign peacefully, in the midst of the universal joy.
“That beast Bismarck—there’s a scoundrel for you!” observed Maria Blond.
“To think that I once knew him!” cried Simone. “If I had only known, I would have put some poison in his glass.”
But Blanche, still feeling aggrieved at the expulsion of her Prussian, dared to take Bismarck’s part. He wasn’t a bit wicked. Each one had his own duties. She added,
“You know, he adores women.”
“What’s that to us?” said Clarisse. “You don’t think we want him, do you?”
“There are always too many men like him,” gravely declared Louise Violaine. “We had better do without them altogether than have any acquaintance with such monsters.”
And the discussion continued. They pulled Bismarck to pieces, each one gave him a kick in her Bonapartist zeal, whilst Tatan Néné said in a vexed manner,
“Bismarck! How they used to tease me about him! Oh! I owe him a grudge. I had never heard of him, that Bismarck! One can’t know every one.”
“All the same,” said Léa de Horn conclusively, “that Bismarck’s going to give us a good hiding—”
She was unable to continue. The other women all flew at her. Eh? what?—a hiding? It was Bismarck who was going to be sent back home, with kicks behind. She had better shut up, she was unworthy to be a Frenchwoman!
“Hush!” whispered Rose Mignon, feeling hurt at such a noise.
The frigidity of the corpse again impressed them. They all ceased talking, uneasy and brou
ght anew face to face with death, with the secret dread of evil. On the Boulevard the cry passed, hoarse and rending,
“To Berlin! to Berlin! to Berlin!”
Then, just as they were making up their minds to leave, a voice called from the corridor,
“Rose! Rose!”
Gaga, surprised, opened the door and disappeared for a moment. Then, when she returned, she said,
“My dear, it’s Fauchery who is there at the end of the passage. He won’t come any nearer. He is in an awful state because you persist in remaining here with the body.”
Mignon had succeeded in inciting the journalist. Lucy, still at the window, leant out; and she caught sight of the gentlemen waiting on the pavement, looking up and making signs to her. Mignon, exasperated, was holding up his fists. Steiner, Fontan, Bordenave, and the others were opening their arms in an anxious and reproachful way; whilst Daguenet, so as not to compromise himself, was quietly smoking his cigar, his hands behind his back.
“I was forgetting, my dear,” said Lucy, leaving the window open. “I promised to make you go down. They’re all beckoning for us.”
Rose moved away painfully from the foot of the bedstead. She murmured, “I will go down; I will go down. She no longer wants me now. We will send for a sister of charity.”
And she looked about without being able to find her bonnet and shawl. She mechanically filled a basin with water at the wash-stand and washed her hands and face, as she continued.
“I don’t know how it is, but it’s been a great shock to me. We were not very nice to each other. Well! now I feel quite stupid. Oh! I’ve all sorts of ideas—a longing to die myself—the end of the world. Yes, I want some fresh air.”
The dead body was beginning to fill the room with a fearful stench. There was quite a panic after such a long period of unconcern.
“Let’s be off! let’s be off, my dears!” repeated Gaga. “It isn’t healthy.”
They left the room quickly, throwing another glance towards the bed; but as Lucy, Blanche, and Caroline were still there, Rose gave a last look round to see that all was tidy. She drew the curtain before the window. Then she thought that the lamp was not proper, there ought to be a candle; and, after taking one of the brass candlesticks from the mantelpiece, she lit the candle, and placed it on the night-table beside the corpse. A bright light suddenly illuminated the face of the deceased. It was horrible. They shuddered, and hastened away.
“Ah! she is altered—she is altered!” murmured Rose Mignon, who was the last to leave the room.
She went off and closed the door. Nana was left alone, her face turned upwards in the candle-light. It was a charnel-house, a mass of matter and blood, a shovelful of putrid flesh, thrown there on the cushion. The pustules had invaded the entire face, one touching the other; and, faded, sunk in, with the greyish aspect of mud, they already seemed like a mouldiness of the earth on that shapeless pulp, in which the features were no longer recognisable. One of the eyes, the left one, had completely disappeared amidst the eruption of the purulence; the other, half open, looked like a black and tainted hole. The nose still continued to suppurate. A reddish crust starting from one of the cheeks, invaded the mouth, which it distorted in an abominable laugh; and on this horrible and grotesque mask of nothingness, the hair, that beautiful hair, retaining its sun-like fire, fell in a stream of gold. Venus was decomposing. It seemed as if the virus gathered by her in the gutters, from the tolerated carrion—that ferment with which she had poisoned a people—had ascended to her face and rotted it.
The room was deserted. A strong breath of despair mounted from the Boulevard, and swelled the curtain.
“To Berlin! to Berlin! to Berlin!”
Endnotes
1 (p. 195) Galerie Montmartre ... Galerie des Variétés... Galerie Saint-Marc: These arcades, along with the Passage des Panoramas mentioned on page 33 and the Galerie Feydeau, on page 197, were pedestrian streets with glass roofs, lined with shops—the distant ancestors of today’s shopping malls. The German critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin considered them to be the emblematic feature of nineteenth-century Paris and compiled and wrote an immense, unfinished book, The Arcades Project (1927-1940), that springs from a contemplation of their role in society. Although many arcades of the period have been demolished, these five, which are interconnected, still stand.
2 (p. 205) Fauchery’s article, entitled the “Golden Fly” ... which it entered by the windows: This article, entirely Zola’s invention, constitutes his thesis statement, baldly put forth, the least subtle detail in a book that manages to be at once deft and broad. The reference to the girl having been “born from four or five generations of drunkards” is the only direct allusion in Nana to its predecessor, LAssommoir (published in English as The Drinking Den, The Dram Shop, or The Drunkard) . The genetic notions advanced here have long been discredited, although we know that behavior is often handed down through the generations by example.
3 (p. 320) Then the conversation having turned... “may God preserve the Emperor as long as possible!”: This is another instance of Zola’s unsubtle message-bearing. We are meant to remark upon the irony of Nana—descendant of generations of alcoholics—denouncing the Republicans as drunkards, assisted, of course, by the propaganda that the right-wing Figaro fed to its readers. That newspaper called Zola a “socialist”—a contentious word—in its review of Nana, but also ran a page of illustrations of the book’s characters.
4 (p. 387) But the waltz still continued its voluptuous whirl . . . saucy rhythm of the music: In its foreshadowing of the events of the following two years—the Siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War and the subsequent Commune (an insurrection against the French government in the spring of 1871), and the burning of many official edifices and homes of the rich during the week of the Commune’s suppression—this passage harks back to much of the literature evoking the dawn of the Revolution, seen by many in the following century as having been a sort of divine punishment for the decadence of the aristocracy. Nana appears here as the agent of that wrath, and we are perhaps meant to see her as a harbinger of the pétroleuses, the women who were alleged to have started the fires in Paris in May 1871.
5 (p. 436) During the day the Corps Législatif had voted for a declaration of war: This dates the scene exactly, to July 19, 1870. Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who was then in the process of uniting the disparate duchies and principalities of Germany into a single state, actively welcomed war with France, both to exhaust his country’s nearest rival and to annex the German-speaking French provinces Alsace and Lorraine. He was too smart to declare war himself, however. When a member of the Hohenzollern family—a relative of the German emperor—was proposed as king of Spain, France took the fatal step. One military defeat followed another in quick succession, and the war was over by January, with France decisively trounced.
Inspired by Nana
One of the most ambitious projects in Western literature, Émile Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart, a cycle of twenty novels, was published between 1871 and 1893. Nana is the ninth novel in the sequence, which is subtitled The Natural and Social History of a Family Under the Second Empire. The first book, Les Fortune des Rougon (1871; The Fortune of the Rougons or The Rougon Family Fortune) , introduces the powerful Rougons and the lower-class Macquarts. Zola was deeply fascinated and philosophically driven by social determinism; he believed that human character was shaped by heredity, environment, and the cultural moment. He coined the term “naturalism” to describe this approach to literature, and it quickly became a movement of which Zola was the acknowledged leader.
In the Rougon-Macquart books, Zola places his characters in different socio-economic and professional contexts—including the Provençal countryside, a laundress’s working-class neighborhood, the Parisian art scene, and the bleak battlefield at Sedan in 1870—and documents their behavior and development. Though the results are deeply imaginative, Zola regarded his novels as “experiments.” Rather than a creati
ve excursion, each book is akin to a study in which the author records his observations with strict, even scientific, exactitude. Zola’s cycle pays homage to French fiction writer Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), who is widely credited with introducing realism to literature. Balzac’s titanic series La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy) comprises roughly ninety novels and novellas. Conversely, Zola’s almost detached approach to his fiction runs counter to that of Marcel Proust (1871-1922) in his seven-part cycle À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past), in which the narrator’s subjectivity determines the course of the honeycombed narrative.
The novels of Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle, in order of their appearance, are:
La Fortune des Rougon (1871; The Fortune of the Rougons or The Rougon Family)
La Curée (1872; The Kill)
Le Ventre de Paris (1873; The Belly of Paris or Savage Paris)
La Conquête de Plassans (1874; The Conquest of Plassans) La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (1875; The Sin of Father Mouret)
Son Excellence Eugène Rougon (1876; His Excellency Eugène Rougon)
L’Assommoir (1877; The Drinking Den, The Dram Shop, or The Drunkard)
Une Page d’amour (1878; A Page of Love or A Love Affair)
Nana (1880)
Pot-Bouille (1882; Restless House)
Au Bonheur des dames (1883; Ladies’ Delight or A Ladies’ Paradise)
La Joie de vivre (1884; The Joy of Life or Zest for Life)
Germinal (1885)
L’Oeuvre (1886; The Masterpiece)
La Terre (1887; Earth or The Soil)
La Rêve (1888; The Dream)
La Bête humaine (1890; The Human Beast or The Beast in Man)
LArgent (1891; Money)
La Débâcle (1892; The Debacle or The Collapse)
Le Docteur Pascal (1893; Doctor Pascal)
After the Rougon-Macquart cycle, Zola wrote two shorter series: Les Trois Villes (Three Cities: Lourdes, 1894; Rome, 1896; Paris, 1898), the first two comprising a scathing attack on the Catholic Church; and Les Quatre Évangiles (1899-1903; The Four Gospels) , the last volume of which was left unfinished at Zola’s death.