“This is the end of all things. They’re out of their minds at the Tuileries. France ought to have driven them out yesterday. Don’t you see?”
They all violently interrupted her. What was up with her? Was she mad about the emperor? Were people not happy? Was business doing badly? Paris would never enjoy itself so thoroughly again.
Gaga was beside herself; she woke up and was very indignant.
“Be quiet! It’s idiotic! You don’t know what you’re saying. I—I’ve seen Louis Philippe’s reign: it was full of beggars and misers, my dear. And then came ’48! Oh, it was a pretty disgusting business was their republic! After February I was simply dying of starvation—yes, I, Gaga. Oh, if only you’d been through it all you would go down on your knees before the emperor, for he’s been a father to us; yes, a father to us.”
She had to be soothed but continued with pious fervor:
“O my God, do Thy best to give the emperor the victory. Preserve the empire to us!”
They all repeated this aspiration, and Blanche confessed that she burned candles for the emperor. Caroline had been smitten by him and for two whole months had walked where he was likely to pass but had failed to attract his attention. And with that the others burst forth into furious denunciations of the Republicans and talked of exterminating them on the frontiers so that Napoleon III, after having beaten the enemy, might reign peacefully amid universal enjoyment.
“That dirty Bismarck—there’s another cad for you!” Maria Blond remarked.
“To think that I should have known him!” cried Simonne. “If only I could have foreseen, I’m the one that would have put some poison in his glass.”
But Blanche, on whose heart the expulsion of her Prussian still weighed, ventured to defend Bismarck. Perhaps he wasn’t such a bad sort. To every man his trade!
“You know,” she added, “he adores women.”
“What the hell has that got to do with us?” said Clarisse. “We don’t want to cuddle him, eh?”
“There’s always too many men of that sort!” declared Louise Violaine gravely. “It’s better to do without ’em than to mix oneself up with such monsters!”
And the discussion continued, and they stripped Bismarck, and, in her Bonapartist zeal, each of them gave him a sounding kick, while Tatan Néné kept saying:
“Bismarck! Why, they’ve simply driven me crazy with the chap! Oh, I hate him! I didn’t know that there Bismarck! One can’t know everybody.”
“Never mind,” said Léa de Horn by way of conclusion, “that Bismarck will give us a jolly good threshing.”
But she could not continue. The ladies were all down on her at once. Eh, what? A threshing? It was Bismarck they were going to escort home with blows from the butt ends of their muskets. What was this bad Frenchwoman going to say next?
“Hush,” whispered Rose, for so much noise hurt her.
The cold influence of the corpse once more overcame them, and they all paused together. They were embarrassed; the dead woman was before them again; a dull thread of coming ill possessed them. On the boulevard the cry was passing, hoarse and wild:
“À Berlin! À Berlin! À Berlin!”
Presently, when they were making up their minds to go, a voice was heard calling from the passage:
“Rose! Rose!”
Gaga opened the door in astonishment and disappeared for a moment. When she returned:
“My dear,” she said, “it’s Fauchery. He’s out there at the end of the corridor. He won’t come any further, and he’s beside himself because you still stay near that body.”
Mignon had at last succeeded in urging the journalist upstairs. Lucy, who was still at the window, leaned out and caught sight of the gentlemen out on the pavement. They were looking up, making energetic signals to her. Mignon was shaking his fists in exasperation, and Steiner, Fontan, Bordenave and the rest were stretching out their arms with looks of anxious reproach, while Daguenet simply stood smoking a cigar with his hands behind his back, so as not to compromise himself.
“It’s true, dear,” said Lucy, leaving the window open; “I promised to make you come down. They’re all calling us now.”
Rose slowly and painfully left the chest.
“I’m coming down; I’m coming down,” she whispered. “It’s very certain she no longer needs me. They’re going to send in a Sister of Mercy.”
And she turned round, searching for her hat and shawl. Mechanically she filled a basin of water on the toilet table and while washing her hands and face continued:
“I don’t know! It’s been a great blow to me. We used scarcely to be nice to one another. Ah well! You see I’m quite silly over it now. Oh! I’ve got all sorts of strange ideas—I want to die myself—I feel the end of the world’s coming. Yes, I need air.”
The corpse was beginning to poison the atmosphere of the room. And after long heedlessness there ensued a panic.
“Let’s be off; let’s be off, my little pets!” Gaga kept saying. “It isn’t wholesome here.”
They went briskly out, casting a last glance at the bed as they passed it. But while Lucy, Blanche and Caroline still remained behind, Rose gave a final look round, for she wanted to leave the room in order. She drew a curtain across the window, and then it occurred to her that the lamp was not the proper thing and that a taper should take its place. So she lit one of the copper candelabra on the chimney piece and placed it on the night table beside the corpse. A brilliant light suddenly illumined the dead woman’s face. The women were horror-struck. They shuddered and escaped.
“Ah, she’s changed; she’s changed!” murmured Rose Mignon, who was the last to remain.
She went away; she shut the door. Nana was left alone with upturned face in the light cast by the candle. She was fruit of the charnel house, a heap of matter and blood, a shovelful of corrupted flesh thrown down on the pillow. The pustules had invaded the whole of the face, so that each touched its neighbor. Fading and sunken, they had assumed the grayish hue of mud; and on that formless pulp, where the features had ceased to be traceable, they already resembled some decaying damp from the grave. One eye, the left eye, had completely foundered among bubbling purulence, and the other, which remained half open, looked like a deep, black, ruinous hole. The nose was still suppurating. Quite a reddish crush was peeling from one of the cheeks and invading the mouth, which it distorted into a horrible grin. And over this loathsome and grotesque mask of death the hair, the beautiful hair, still blazed like sunlight and flowed downward in rippling gold. Venus was rotting. It seemed as though the poison she had assimilated in the gutters and on the carrion tolerated by the roadside, the leaven with which she had poisoned a whole people, had but now remounted to her face and turned it to corruption.
The room was empty. A great despairing breath came up from the boulevard and swelled the curtain.
“À Berlin! À Berlin! À Berlin!”
The End
About the Author
Émile Zola was a French writer who is recognized as an exemplar of literary naturalism and for his contributions to the development of theatrical naturalism. Zola’s best-known literary works include the twenty-volume Les Rougon-Macquart, an epic work that examined the influences of violence, alcohol and prostitution on French society through the experiences of two families, the Rougons and the Macquarts. Other remarkable works by Zola include Contes à Ninon, Les Mystères de Marseille, and Thérèse Raquin.
In addition to his literary contributions, Zola played a key role in the Dreyfus Affair of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. His newspaper article J’Accuse accused the highest levels of the French military and government of obstruction of justice and anti-semitism, for which he was convicted of libel in 1898. After a brief period of exile in England, Zola returned to France where he died in 1902. Émile Zola is buried in the Panthéon al
ongside other esteemed literary figures Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas.
The Autobiography of a Flea
Stanislas de Rhodes
CONTENTS
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
About the Author
Chapter I
Born I was—but how, when, or where I cannot say; so I must leave the reader to accept the assertion per se, and believe it if he will. One thing is equally certain, the fact of my birth is not one atom less veracious than the reality of these memoirs, and if the intelligent student of, these pages wonders how it came to pass that one in my walk—or perhaps, I should have said jump—in life, became possessed of the learning, observation and power of commit-ting to memory the whole of the wonderful facts and disclosures I am about to relate. I can only remind him that there are intelligences, little suspected by the vulgar, and laws in nature, the very existence of which have not yet been detected by the advanced among the scientific world.
I have heard it somewhere remarked that my province was to get my living by blood sucking. I am not the lowest by any means of that universal fraternity, and if I sustain a precarious existence upon the bodies of those with whom I come in contact, my own experience proves that I do so in a marked and peculiar manner, with a warning of my employment which is seldom given by those in other grades of my profession. But I submit that I have other and nobler aims than the mere sustaining of my being by the contributions of the unwary. I have been conscious of this original defect, and, with a soul far above the vulgar instincts of my race. I jumped by degrees to heights of mental perception and erudition which placed me forever upon a pinnacle of insect-grandeur.
It is this attainment to learning which I shall evoke in describing the scenes of which I have been a witness—nay, even a partaker. I shall not stop to explain by what means I am possessed of human powers of thinking and observing, but, in my lucubrations, leave you simply to perceive that I possess them and wonder accordingly.
You will thus perceive that I am not common flea; indeed, when it is born in mind the company in which I have been accustomed to mingle, the familiarity with which I have been suffered to treat persons the most exalted, and the opportunities I have possessed to make the most of my acquaintances, the reader will no doubt agree with me that I am in very truth a most wonderful and exalted insect.
My earliest recollections lead me back to a period when I found myself within a church. There was a rolling of rich music and a slow monotonous chanting which then filled me with surprise and admiration, but I have long since learnt the true important of such influences, and the attitudes of the worshippers are now taken by me for the outward semblance of inward emotions which are very generally non-existent. Be this as it may, I was engaged upon professional business connected with the plump white leg of a young lady of some fourteen years of age, the taste of whose delicious blood I well remember, and the flavour of whose—But I am digressing.
Soon after commencing in a quiet and friendly way my little attentions, the young girl in common with the rest of the congregation rose to depart, and I, as a matter of course, determined to accompany her.
I am very sharp of sight as well as of hearing, and that is, how I saw a young gentleman slip a small folded piece of white paper into the young lady’s pretty gloved hand, as she passed through the crowded porch. I had noticed the name Bella neatly worked upon the soft silk stocking which had at first attracted me, and I now saw that the same word appeared alone upon the outside of the billet-doux. She was with her Aunt, a tall, stately dame, with whom I did not care to get upon terms of intimacy.
Bella was a beauty—just fourteen—a perfect figure, and although so young, her soft bosom was already budding into those proportions which delight the other sex. Her face was charming in its frankness; her breath sweet as the perfumes of Arabia, and, as I have always said, her skin as soft as velvet. Bella was evidently well aware of her good looks, and carried her head as proudly and as coquettishly as a queen. That she inspired admiration was not difficult to see by the wistful and longing glances which the young men, and sometimes also those of the more nature years, cast upon her. There was a general hush of conversation outside the building, and a turning of glances generally towards the pretty Bella, which told more plainly than words that she was the admired one of all eyes and the desired one of all hearts—at any rate among the male sex.
Paying, however very little attention to what was evidently a matter of everyday occurrence, the young lady walked sharply homewards with her Aunt, and after arrival at the neat and genteel residence, went quickly to her room.
I will not say I followed, but I “went with her,” and beheld the gentle girl raise one dainty leg across the other and remove the tiniest of tight and elegant kid-boots.
I jumped upon the carpet and proceeded with my examinations. The left boot followed, and without removing her plump calf from off the other, Bella sat looking at the folded piece of paper which I had seen the young fellow deposit secretly in her hand.
Closely watching everything. I noted the swelling thighs, which spread upwards above her tightly fitting garters, until they were lost in the darkness, as they closed together at a point where her beautiful belly met them in her stooping position; and almost obliterated a thin and peach-like slit, which just showed its rounded lips between them in the shade.
Presently Bella dropped her note, and being open, I took the liberty to read it.
I will be in the old spot at eight o’clock tonight,
. . . were the only words which the paper contained, but they appeared to have a special interest for Bella, who remained cogitating for some time in the same thoughtful mood.
My curiosity had been aroused, and my desire to know more of the interesting young being with whom chance had so promiscuously brought me in pleasing contact, prompted me to remain quietly ensconced in a snug though somewhat moist hiding place, and it was not until near upon the hour named that I once more emerged in order to watch the progress of events.
Bella dressed herself with scrupulous care, and now prepared to betake herself to the garden which surrounded the country-house in which she dwelt. I went with her.
Arriving at the end of a long and shady avenue the young girl seated herself upon a rustic bench, and there awaited the coming of the person she was to meet.
It was not many minutes before the young man presented himself whom I had seen in communication with my fair little friend in the morning.
A conversation ensued which, if I might judge by the abstraction of the pair from aught besides themselves, had unusual interest for both.
It was evening, and the twilight had already commenced: the air was warm and genial, and the young pair sat closely entwined upon the bench, lost to all but their own united happiness.
“You don’t know how I love you Bella,” whispered the youth, tenderly sealing his protestation with a kiss upon the pouting lips of his companion.
“Yes I do,” replied the girl, naïvely, “are you not always telling me? I shall get tired of hearing it soon.”
Bella fidgeted her pretty little foot and looked thoughtful.
“When are you going to explain and show me all those funny things you told me about?” asked she, giving a quick glance up, and then as rapidly bending her eyes upon the gravel walk.
“Now,” answered the youth. “Now, dear Bella, while we have the chance to be alone and free from interruption. You know, Bella, we are no longer children?”
Bella nodded her head.
“Well, there are things which are not known to children, and which are necessary for lovers not only to know, but also
to practice.”
“Dear me,” said the girl, seriously.
“Yes,” continued her companion, “there are secrets which render lovers happy, and which make them enjoy of loving and of being loved.”
“Lord!” exclaimed Bella, “how, sentimental you have grown, Charlie; I remember the time when you declared sentiment was ‘all humbug.’”
“So I thought it was, till I loved you,” replied the youth.
“Nonsense,” continued Bella, “but go on, Charlie, and tell me what you promised.”
“I can’t tell you without showing you as well,” replied Charlie; “the knowledge can only be learnt by experience.”
“Oh, go on then and show me,” carried the girl, in whose bright eyes and glowing cheeks I thought I could detect a very conscious knowledge of the kind of instruction about to be imparted.
There was something catching in her impatience. The youth yielded to it, and covering her beautiful young form with his own, glued his mouth to hers and kissed it rapturously.
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