Part 12

As the prince was descending the little wooden staircase, a strange noise, stifled oaths, the trampling of a struggle, broke out from the other side of the theatre. It was quite a scene that alarmed the artists waiting for their cues. For a moment now, Mignon had been joking again, smothering Fauchery with caresses. He had just invented a little game: he flicked him on the nose with his fingers, to protect him from the flies, he said. Naturally, this game greatly amused the artists. But suddenly, Mignon, carried away by his success, launching into fancy, had given the journalist a slap, a real and vigorous slap. This time, he was going too far; Fauchery could not, before everyone, accept such a blow with a laugh. And the two men, dropping the comedy, livid and their faces bursting with hatred, had thrown themselves at each other's throats. They were rolling on the ground, behind a flat, calling each other pimps.

-- Mr. Bordenave! Mr. Bordenave! the stagestruck manager came to say.

Bordenave followed him, after begging the prince's pardon. When he recognized Fauchery and Mignon on the ground, he gave a gesture of an annoyed man. Really, they were taking their time nicely, with His Highness on the other side of the set, and the whole house that might hear! To crown his trouble, Rose Mignon arrived, out of breath, just at the minute of her entrance. Vulcain was throwing her her line. But Rose remained stupefied, seeing at her feet her husband and her lover wallowing, strangling each other, kicking, hair torn out, white redingote dusty. They blocked her path; even a stagehand had caught Fauchery's hat, at the moment when that devil of a hat, in the struggle, was about to bounce onto the stage. Meanwhile, Vulcain, who was inventing phrases to amuse the public, gave his line again. Rose, motionless, still looked at the two men.

-- But don't look! Bordenave hissed furiously in her neck. Go on! go on!... It's not your business! You're missing your entrance!

And, pushed by him, Rose, stepping over the bodies, found herself on stage, in the blaze of the footlights, before the public. She had not understood why they were on the ground, fighting. Trembling, her head full of a buzzing, she descended toward the footlights with her beautiful smile of a loving Diana, and she attacked the first phrase of her duet, in so warm a voice, that the public gave her an ovation. Behind the set, she heard the dull blows of the two men. They had rolled as far as the harlequin's mantle. Fortunately, the music covered the noise of the kicks they were giving the frames.

-- Goddamn! cried Bordenave exasperated, when he had at last succeeded in separating them, can't you fight at home? You know well enough I don't like that... You, Mignon, you're going to do me the pleasure of staying here, stage right; and you, Fauchery, I'll throw you out of the theatre if you leave stage left... Eh? is that understood, stage right and stage left, or I forbid Rose to bring you here.

When he returned to the prince, the latter inquired.

-- Oh! nothing at all, he murmured with a calm air.

Nana, standing, wrapped in a fur, was waiting for her entrance, chatting with these gentlemen. As Count Muffat went up to throw a glance at the stage, between two frames, he understood, by a gesture of the stage manager, that he must walk softly. A warm peace fell from the flies. In the wings, lit by violent sheets of light, rare persons, speaking in low voices, stood about, went away on tiptoe. The gasman was at his post, near the complicated play of valves; a fireman, leaning against a flat, tried to see, stretching out his head; while, right at the top, on his bench, the curtain man kept watch, with a resigned air, ignorant of the play, always waiting for the bell for the handling of his ropes. And, in the midst of this stifled air, these tramplings and these whisperings, the voice of the actors on stage arrived strange, muffled, a voice whose falseness surprised. Then, it was, further off, beyond the confused noises of the orchestra, like an immense breathing, the house that breathed and whose breath sometimes swelled, bursting into murmurs, into laughs, into applause. One felt the public without seeing it, even in its silences.

-- But there's something open, said Nana abruptly, drawing the corners of her fur together. Look, Barillot. I bet they've just opened a window... Truly, one can suffocate here!

Barillot swore that he had closed everything himself. Perhaps there were broken panes. The artists were always complaining of draughts. In the heavy heat of the gas, cold gusts passed, a real nest of chest inflammations, as Fontan said.

-- I'd like to see you in low dress, continued Nana, who was getting angry.

-- Hush! murmured Bordenave.

On stage, Rose was detailing so finely a phrase of her duet, that bravos covered the orchestra. Nana was silent, her face serious. Meanwhile, the count was venturing into an alley, when Barillot stopped him, warning him that there was a discovery there. He saw the set inside out and askew, the back of the frames consolidated by a thick layer of old posters, then a corner of the stage, the cavern of Etna hollowed in a silver mine, with Vulcain's forge, at the back. The lowered portcullises set fire to the tinsel applied in broad brushstrokes. Flats with blue glass and red glass, by a calculated opposition, contrived a blaze of fire; while, on the ground, at the third level, trails of gas ran, to detach a bar of black rocks. And there, on an inclined practicable of gentle slope, amid these drops of light like lanterns set in the grass, an evening of public festival, old Madame Drouard, who played Juno, was seated, blinded and drowsy, waiting for her entrance.

But there was a movement. Simonne, in the midst of listening to a story from Clarisse, let escape:

-- Why! the Tricon!

It was the Tricon, indeed, with her fringe and her bearing of a countess who haunts the lawyers. When she caught sight of Nana, she walked straight to her.

-- No, said the latter, after a rapid exchange of words. Not now.

The old lady remained grave. Prullière, passing, gave her a handshake. Two little figurantes contemplated her with emotion. She, for a moment, seemed hesitant. Then, she called Simonne with a gesture. And the rapid exchange of words began again.

-- Yes, said Simonne at last. In half an hour.

But, as she went up to her dressing room, Madame Bron, who was walking about again with letters, handed her one. Bordenave, lowering his voice, was furiously reproaching the concierge for having let the Tricon pass; that woman! just this very evening! it indignant him, on account of His Highness. Madame Bron, thirty years in the theatre, answered in a sour tone. Did she know? The Tricon did business with all those ladies; twenty times Monsieur the Director had met her without a word. And, while Bordenave chewed big oaths, the Tricon, tranquil, examined the prince fixedly, as a woman who weighs a man with a look. A smile lit her yellow face. Then, she went away, with a slow step, amid the respectful little women.

-- Right away, isn't it? she said turning toward Simonne.

Simonne seemed much annoyed. The letter was from a young man to whom she had promised for the evening. She gave Madame Bron a scrawled note: "Not possible this evening, my dear, I'm taken." But she remained uneasy; this young man was perhaps going to wait for her all the same. As she was not in the third act, she wanted to leave right away. Then, she begged Clarisse to go see. The latter only entered the stage toward the end of the act. She went down, while Simonne went up for an instant to the dressing room they occupied in common.

Below, in Madame Bron's refreshment room, a super, charged with the role of Pluto, was drinking alone, draped in a great red robe with gold flames. The little trade of the concierge must have gone well, for the cellar hole, under the staircase, was all damp with the rinsings of spilt glasses. Clarisse lifted her tunic of Iris, which trailed on the greasy steps. But she stopped prudently, contenting herself with stretching out her head, at the turn of the staircase, to throw a glance into the dressing room. And she had had a nose for it. Was not that idiot of La Faloise still there, on the same chair, between the table and the stove! He had made as if to flee before Simonne, then he had come back. Besides, the dressing room was always full of gentlemen, gloved, correct, with a submissive and patient air. All waited, looking at each other gravely. There was no longer on the table but the dirty plates, Madame Bron had just distributed the last bouquets; only a fallen rose was fading, near the black cat, who had lain down in a round, while the little cats executed mad runs, ferocious gallops, between the legs of the gentlemen. Clarisse had for an instant the desire to fling La Faloise out. That cretin did not like animals; that completed him. He drew in his elbows, because of the cat, so as not to touch her.

-- She's going to pinch you, beware! said Pluto, a joker, who was going up wiping his lips with the back of his hand.

Then, Clarisse dropped the idea of making a scene with La Faloise. She had seen Madame Bron hand the letter to Simonne's young man. He had gone to read it under the gas jet of the vestibule. "Not possible this evening, my dear, I'm taken." And, peaceably, accustomed to the phrase no doubt, he had disappeared. At least there was one who knew how to behave! It was not like the others, those who persisted there, on the straw-bottomed chairs of Madame Bron, in that great glass lantern, where one cooked and which smelled none too good. How it must take hold of men! Clarisse went up, disgusted; she crossed the stage, she climbed nimbly the three flights of the dressing-room staircase, to give answer to Simonne.

On the stage, the prince, drawing aside, spoke to Nana. He had not left her, he was brooding her with his half-closed eyes. Nana, without looking at him, smiling, said yes, with a nod. But, abruptly, Count Muffat obeyed a thrust of his whole being; he let go of Bordenave who was giving him details on the handling of the windlasses and drums, and approached to break off this conversation. Nana raised her eyes, smiled at him as she smiled at His Highness. However, she still had an ear stretched, watching for her cue.

-- The third act is the shortest, I believe, said the prince, embarrassed by the count's presence.

She did not answer, her face changed, all at once at her business. With a rapid movement of the shoulders, she had made her fur slip, which Madame Jules, standing behind her, received in her arms. And, naked, after having carried both hands to her hair, as if to fix it, she entered the stage.

-- Hush! hush! breathed Bordenave.

The count and the prince had remained surprised. In the midst of the great silence, a deep sigh, a distant murmur of crowd, rose. Every evening, the same effect was produced at the entrance of Venus, in her nudity of goddess. Then, Muffat wanted to see; he applied his eye to a hole. Beyond the dazzling arc of the footlights, the house seemed dark, as filled with a russet smoke; and, on this neutral background, where the rows of faces put a muddled pallor, Nana detached herself in white, enlarged, blocking the boxes, from the balcony to the flies. He saw her from the back, the loins taut, the arms open; while, on the ground, at the edge of her feet, the head of the prompter, an old man's head, was posed as if cut off, with a poor and honest air. At certain phrases of her entrance piece, undulations seemed to leave her neck, descend to her waist, expire at the trailing edge of her tunic. When she had pushed the last note amid a tempest of bravos, she bowed, the flying gauzes, her hair touching her loins, in the foreshortening of the spine. And, in seeing her thus, bent and the hips widened, coming backward toward the hole through which he looked at her, the count straightened up, very pale. The stage had disappeared, he no longer saw but the back of the set, the motley of old posters, pasted in every direction. On the practicable, amid the trails of gas, the whole Olympus had rejoined Madame Drouard, who dozed. They waited for the end of the act, Bosc and Fontan seated on the ground, chin on knees, Prullière stretching and yawning before entering the stage, all extinguished, red-eyed, eager to go to bed.

At this moment, Fauchery who was prowling stage left, since Bordenave had forbidden him stage right, hooked onto the count to give himself an air, offering to show him the dressing rooms. Muffat, whom a growing softness left without will, ended by following the journalist, after having sought with his eyes the Marquis de Chouard, who was no longer there. He felt at once a relief and an uneasiness, in leaving these wings whence he heard Nana sing.

Already Fauchery preceded him in the staircase, which wooden drums closed at the first and second floors. It was one of those staircases of a shady house, as Count Muffat had seen in his rounds as a member of the charity bureau, naked and dilapidated, whitewashed yellow, with steps worn by the tumble of feet, and an iron rail that the friction of hands had polished. At each landing, at ground level, a low window put a square sink of air-hole. In lanterns set in the walls, gas flames burned, crudely lighting this misery, releasing a heat that rose and amassed under the narrow spiral of the floors.

On arriving at the foot of the staircase, the count had again felt an ardent breath fall on his nape, that odour of woman descended from the dressing rooms, in a flood of light and noise; and, now, at each step he climbed, the musk of the powders, the sourness of the toilet vinegars heated him, dizzied him more. On the first, two corridors sank, turned abruptly, with doors of suspect furnished hotel, painted yellow, bearing large white numbers; on the ground, the tiles, unsealed, made bumps, in the settling of the old house. The count ventured, threw a glance through an half-open door, saw a very dirty room, a barber's shop of the faubourg, furnished with two chairs, a mirror and a drawer-shelf, blackened by the grime of combs. A fellow in sweat, the shoulders smoking, there changed linen; while, in a like room, next door, a woman about to leave put on her gloves, the hair unfrizzed and wet, as if she had just taken a bath. But Fauchery called the count, and the latter arrived at the second, when a furious "goddamn!" came out of the right corridor; Mathilde, a little ingenue dishcloth, had just broken her basin, whose soapy water flowed to the landing. A dressing-room door closed violently. Two women in corset crossed with a jump; another, the edge of her shift between her teeth, appeared and fled. Then, there were laughs, a quarrel, a song begun and suddenly interrupted. Along the corridor, through the cracks, one glimpsed corners of nudity, whitenesses of skin, pallors of linen; two girls, very gay, showed each other their marks; one, very young, almost a child, had lifted her skirts above the knees, to resew her drawers; while the dressers, on seeing the two men, slightly drew the curtains, for decency. It was the shoving of the end, the great cleaning of white and red, the street toilette resumed amid a cloud of rice powder, a redoubling of feral odour blown by the swinging doors. On the third floor, Muffat abandoned himself to the intoxication that invaded him. The figurantes' dressing room was there; twenty women heaped, a disbanding of soaps and lavender-water bottles, the common room of a barrier-house. In passing, he heard, behind a closed door, a ferocious washing, a tempest in a basin. And he climbed to the top floor, when he had the curiosity to hazard yet a look, through a judas left open: the room was empty, there was, under the blaze of the gas, but a chamber-pot forgotten, amid a disorder of skirts trailing on the ground. This room was the last vision he carried away. Above, on the fourth, he suffocated. All the odours, all the flames came to strike there; the yellow ceiling seemed cooked, a lantern burned in a russet fog. An instant, he held to the iron rail, which he found tepid with a living tepidness, and he closed his eyes, and he drank in one aspiration all the sex of woman, which he still ignored and which beat his face.

-- Come on, cried Fauchery, disappeared since a moment; they're asking for you.

It was, at the end of the corridor, the dressing room of Clarisse and Simonne, a room in length, under the roofs, badly made, with cut slopes and wall leakages. The day came from above, by two deep openings. But, at this hour of night, gas flames lit the room, hung with a seven-sou-a-roll paper, pink flowers running on a green trellis. Side by side, two boards served as toilette, boards covered with oilcloth, black with spilt water, and under which dragged zinc pitchers dented, pails full of rinsings, jugs of coarse yellow pottery. There was there a display of bazaar articles, twisted, soiled by use, chipped basins, toothless horn combs, all that the haste and the unconcern of two women undressing, washing themselves in common, leave around them of disorder, in a place where they only pass and whose dirt no longer touches them.

-- Come on, repeated Fauchery with that camaraderie of men at the girls', it's Clarisse who wants to kiss you.

Muffat ended by entering. But he remained surprised, in finding the Marquis de Chouard installed between the two toilets, on a chair. The marquis had retired there. He spread his feet, because a pail leaked and let flow a whitish pool. One felt him at ease, knowing the good spots, revived in this suffocation of bathtub, in this tranquil impudence of woman, which this corner of uncleanliness rendered natural and as enlarged.

-- Are you going with the old man? Simonne asked Clarisse at the ear.

-- More often! answered the latter aloud.

The dresser, a very ugly and very familiar young girl, in the act of helping Simonne put on her coat, writhed with laughter. All three pushed each other, stammered words that redoubled their gaiety.

-- Come, Clarisse, kiss the gentleman, repeated Fauchery. You know he's got the sack.

And, turning toward the count:

-- You're going to see, she's very nice, she's going to kiss you.

But Clarisse was disgusted with men. She spoke violently of the bastards who waited below, at the concierge's. Besides, she was in a hurry to go back down, they were going to make her miss her last scene. Then, as Fauchery blocked the door, she placed two kisses on Muffat's side-whiskers, saying:

-- It's not for you, mind! it's for Fauchery who bores me.

And she escaped. The count remained embarrassed before his father-in-law. A flood of blood had mounted to his face. He had not felt, in Nana's dressing room, amid that luxury of hangings and mirrors, the acrid excitement of the shameful misery of this hovel, full of the abandon of the two women. However, the marquis had just left behind very hurried Simonne, speaking to her in the neck, while she refused with her head. Fauchery followed them laughing. Then, the count saw himself alone with the dresser, who was rinsing the basins. And he went away, he descended in his turn the staircase, the legs soft, raising again before him women in petticoats, making the doors bang on his passage. But, in the midst of this disbanding of girls loosed across the four floors, he distinctly glimpsed but a cat, the big red cat, who, in this poisoned furnace of musk, slid along the steps rubbing its back against the bars of the rail, tail in the air.

-- Ah well! said a woman's husky voice, I thought they'd keep us, this evening!... What bores, with their calls!

It was the end, the curtain had just fallen. There was a veritable gallop in the staircase, whose cage filled with exclamations, with a brutal haste to redress and leave. As Count Muffat descended the last step, he glimpsed Nana and the prince who were slowly following the corridor. The young woman stopped; then, smiling, lowering her voice:

-- That's it, see you soon.

The prince returned to the stage, where Bordenave awaited him. Then, alone with Nana, yielding to a thrust of anger and desire, Muffat ran behind her; and, at the moment she was entering her dressing room, he planted a rough kiss on her nape, on the little blond hairs that curled very low between her shoulders. It was like the kiss received above, which he gave back there. Nana, furious, was already raising her hand. When she recognized the count, she had a smile.

-- Oh! you frightened me, she said simply.

And her smile was adorable, confused and submissive, as if she had despaired of that kiss and were happy to have received it. But she could not, neither the evening, nor the next day. They must wait. If even she had been able, she would have made herself desired. Her look said these things. At last, she resumed:

-- You know, I'm a property owner... Yes, I'm buying a country house, near Orleans, in a region where you go sometimes. Baby told me that, little Georges Hugon, you know him?... Come see me, there.

The count, frightened by his brutality of a timid man, ashamed of what he had done, bowed her ceremoniously, promising to respond to her invitation. Then, he moved away, walking in a dream.

He was rejoining the prince, when, passing before the foyer, he heard Satin cry:

-- There's a dirty old man! Leave me alone!

It was the Marquis de Chouard, who was falling back on Satin. She had decidedly had enough of all that smart world. Nana had indeed just presented her to Bordenave. But it had bored her too much, to stay with her mouth sewn, for fear of letting escape foolishness; and she wanted to make up for it, all the more that she had fallen, in the wings, on an old flame of hers, the super charged with the role of Pluto, a pastry cook who had already given her a whole week of love and slaps. She was waiting for him, irritated that the marquis spoke to her as to one of those theatre ladies. So she ended by being very dignified, throwing this phrase:

-- My husband is going to come, you'll see!

“Stories of the world, in your language.”