Part 21

Nana had therefore found a way to make ends meet for everything. The house, on certain days, overflowed with food. Twice a week, Bosc ate himself sick. One evening, as Madame Lerat was withdrawing, enraged to see a plentiful dinner on the fire of which she would not eat, she could not help brutally asking who was paying. Nana, surprised, became quite silly and began to cry.

-- Well! that's a nice state of affairs, said the aunt, who had understood.

Nana had resigned herself, in order to have peace in her household. Besides, it was the fault of the Tricon, whom she had met in the rue de Laval, one day when Fontan had gone off furious, because of a dish of salt cod. Then, she had said yes to the Tricon, who just happened to be in want. As Fontan never came home before six o'clock, she had her afternoons free, and she brought back forty francs, sixty francs, sometimes more. She might have commanded ten and fifteen louis, if she had known how to keep her situation; but she was still very glad to find there enough to keep the pot boiling. In the evening, she forgot everything, when Bosc was bursting with food, and Fontan, his elbows on the table, let his eyes be kissed, with the superior air of a man who is loved for his own sake.

Then, while adoring her darling, her beloved dog, with a passion all the blinder because she was paying at that hour, Nana fell back into the gutter of her beginnings. She rolled, she beat the pavement with her old rags of a little scrubwoman, in quest of a hundred-sou piece. One Sunday, at the Marché La Rochefoucauld, she had made it up with Satin, after flying at her, furiously reproaching her with Madame Robert. But Satin merely answered that when one did not like a thing, that was no reason for wanting to disgust others with it. And Nana, of a broad mind, yielding to that philosophical idea that one never knows where one will end, had forgiven her. Even, her curiosity aroused, she questioned her about corners of vice, stupefied to learn more at her age, after all she knew; and she laughed, she exclaimed, finding it funny, a little repulsive however, for at bottom she was bourgeois in what did not enter into her habits. So she went back to Laure's, eating there when Fontan dined in town. She amused herself there with the stories, the loves and the jealousies that passioned the customers, without their losing a forkful. Yet, she was still not one of them, as she said. The fat Laure, with her softened maternity, often invited her to spend a few days in her villa at Asnières, a country house, where there were rooms for seven ladies. She refused, she was afraid. But Satin having sworn to her that she was mistaken, that gentlemen from Paris would swing you and play at barrel, she promised for later, when she could get away.

At that time, Nana, much tormented, was hardly in a laughing mood. She needed money. When the Tricon had no need of her, which happened too often, she did not know where to bestow her body. Then, it was with Satin furious sorties on the pavement of Paris, in that low vice which prowls along the muddy alleys, under the troubled light of the gas. Nana went back to the barrier dance-halls, where she had popped her first dirty petticoats; she saw again the dark corners of the outer boulevards, the posts on which men, when she was fifteen, kissed her, while her father sought her to smack her behind. The two ran, did the balls and cafés of a district, climbing damp stairways of spittle and spilled beer; or else they walked slowly, they went up the streets, planted themselves upright, against the carriage doors. Satin, who had begun in the Latin Quarter, took Nana there, to Bullier and to the breweries of the boulevard Saint-Michel. But the holidays were coming, the quarter smelt too much of want. And they always came back to the grand boulevards. It was still there that they had the most luck. From the heights of Montmartre to the plateau of the Observatory, they thus beat the whole city. Rainy evenings when the boots wore out, warm evenings that stuck the bodices to the skin, long spells of standing, endless walks, jostlings and quarrels, last brutalities of a passer-by taken to some blind lodging-house and coming down the greasy steps with oaths.

Summer was ending, a stormy summer, with burning nights. They set out together after dinner, about nine o'clock. On the sidewalks of the rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, two files of women skirting the shops, petticoats tucked up, noses to the ground, hurried toward the boulevards with a busy air, without a glance at the windows. It was the hungry descent of the Bréda district, in the first flames of the gas. Nana and Satin went along the church, always took the rue Le Peletier. Then, a hundred metres from the Café Riche, as they arrived on the parade ground, they let down the tail of their dress, drawn up hitherto by a careful hand; and from then on, risking the dust, sweeping the sidewalks and rolling their waists, they went off with little steps, they slowed their pace still more, when they crossed the crude glare of a great café. Tossing their heads, laughing loud, with looks backward at the men who turned round, they were at home. Their whitened faces, stained with the red of the lips and the black of the eyelids, took, in the shadow, the troubling charm of a thirteen-sous bazaar Orient, let loose in the open air of the street. Until eleven o'clock, amid the jostlings of the crowd, they remained gay, merely throwing a "dirty cad!" now and then, behind the backs of the awkward ones whose heel tore a flounce from them; they exchanged little familiar salutes with café boys, stopped to chat in front of a table, accepted drinks, which they drank slowly, as happy persons seated, to wait for the theatres to empty. But, as the night advanced, if they had not made one or two trips to the rue La Rochefoucauld, they turned to nasty sluts, their hunting became keener. There was, at the foot of the trees, along the darkening boulevards that were emptying, fierce haggling, foul words and blows; while honest families, father, mother and daughters, accustomed to these encounters, passed tranquilly, without quickening their step. Then, after going ten times from the Opéra to the Gymnase, Nana and Satin, when decidedly the men detached themselves and slipped away faster, in the growing obscurity, kept to the sidewalks of the rue du Faubourg-Montmartre. There, until two o'clock, restaurants, breweries, pork-butchers flamed, a whole swarming of women persisted at the doors of the cafés; last corner lit and alive of nocturnal Paris, last market open to the bargains of a night, where business was done among groups, crudely, from one end of the street to the other, as in the widely opened corridor of a public house. And, on the evenings when they came back empty, they quarrelled with each other. The rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette stretched black and deserted, shadows of women dragged themselves; it was the belated return of the district, the poor girls exasperated by a night of idleness, persisting, still discussing in a hoarse voice with some lost drunkard, whom they detained at the corner of the rue Bréda or the rue Fontaine.

However, there were good strokes of luck, louis caught with decent gentlemen, who went up putting their decoration in their pocket. Satin especially had the nose. On damp evenings, when wet Paris exhaled a faint odour of a large ill-kept alcove, she knew that this soft weather, this fetidness of shady corners enraged the men. And she watched for the best dressed, she saw that in their pale eyes. It was like a fit of carnal madness passing over the city. She was a little afraid, for the most respectable were the dirtiest. All the varnish cracked, the beast showed itself, exacting in its monstrous tastes, refining its perversion. So this slut of a Satin lacked respect, bursting out before the dignity of people in carriages, saying that their coachmen were nicer, because they respected women and did not kill them with other-worldly ideas. The tumble of smart people into the riffraff of vice still surprised Nana, who kept prejudices, from which Satin freed her. Then, as she said, when she talked gravely, was there therefore no more virtue? From top to bottom, all were rolling. Well! it must be a pretty state of things, in Paris, from nine in the evening to three in the morning; and she laughed, she cried that, if one could have seen into all the bedrooms, one would have witnessed something funny, the little world giving it to each other over the ears, and not a few great personages, here and there, nose stuck into the filth more deeply than the others. That completed her education.

One evening, coming to fetch Satin, she recognised the Marquis de Chouard coming down the stairs, legs broken, dragging himself on the banister, with a white face. She pretended to blow her nose. Then, upstairs, as she found Satin in an awful dirty state, the place abandoned for a week, a foul bed, pots lying about, she was astonished that the latter knew the marquis. Ah! yes, she knew him; even that he had jolly well bored them, her and her pastry-cook, when they were together! Now, he came back from time to time; but he bored her to death, he sniffed in all the not-proper places, even in her slippers.

-- Yes, my dear, in my slippers... Oh! an old dirty beast! He always asks for things...

What especially troubled Nana was the sincerity of these low debauches. She remembered her comedies of pleasure, when she was a launched woman; while she saw the girls around her, dying a little in it every day. Then, Satin filled her with an abominable fear of the police. She was full of stories on that subject. Formerly, she slept with a vice-squad agent, so that they would leave her alone; twice he had prevented her being put on the card; and, now, she trembled, for her case was clear, if they nabbed her again. She had to be heard. The agents, to get gratuities, arrested as many women as possible; they grabbed everything, they silenced you with a slap if you cried out, certain of being supported and rewarded, even when they had taken an honest girl in the lot. In summer, by dozen or fifteen, they made raids on the boulevard, they encircled a sidewalk, caught as many as thirty women in an evening. Only Satin knew the places; as soon as she caught sight of the agents' noses, she flew off, amid the frightened scattering of the long tails fleeing through the crowd. It was a dread of the law, a terror of the prefecture, so great, that certain ones remained paralysed at the café doors, in the strong-arm sweep that cleared the avenue. But Satin dreaded denunciations more; her pastry-cook had shown himself cad enough to threaten to sell her, when she left him; yes, men lived on their mistresses with that trick, not to count dirty women who would very well betray you by treachery, if you were prettier than they. Nana listened to these things, seized with growing frights. She had always trembled before the law, that unknown power, that vengeance of men who could do away with her, without anyone in the world defending her. Saint-Lazare appeared to her like a pit, a black hole where they buried living women, after cutting their hair. She told herself well that it would have sufficed to drop Fontan to find protections; Satin might talk to her as she would of certain lists of women, accompanied by photographs, which the agents were to consult, with orders never to touch those: she kept none the less a trembling, she always saw herself jostled, dragged, thrown next day to the inspection; and that inspection chair filled her with anguish and shame, she who had flung her shift twenty times over the windmills.

Just so, toward the end of September, one evening when she was walking with Satin on the boulevard Poissonnière, the latter suddenly began to gallop. And, as she questioned her:

-- The agents, she breathed. Gee up! gee up!

It was, amid the crush, a mad flight. Skirts fled, tore. There were blows and cries. A woman fell. The crowd looked with laughter at the brutal aggression of the agents, who, rapidly, tightened their circle. Meanwhile, Nana had lost Satin. Her legs dead, she was surely going to be arrested, when a man, having taken her on his arm, led her before the furious agents. It was Prullière, who had just recognised her. Without speaking, he turned with her into the rue Rougemont, then deserted, where she could breathe, so faint that he had to support her. She did not even thank him.

-- Come, he said at last, you must pull yourself together... Come up to my place.

He lodged next door, in the rue Bergère. But she straightened up at once.

-- No, I won't.

Then, he turned gross, resuming:

-- Since everyone goes there... Eh? why won't you?

-- Because.

That said all, in her idea. She loved Fontan too much to betray him with a friend. The others did not count, since there was no pleasure and it was from necessity. Before this stupid obstinacy, Prullière committed a cowardice of a pretty fellow vexed in his self-love.

-- Well! suit yourself, he declared. Only, I'm not going your way, my dear... Get yourself out of the scrape alone.

And he abandoned her. Her fright seized her again, she made an enormous detour to get back to Montmartre, shooting stiffly along the shops, paling as soon as a man approached her.

It was the next day, in the shock of her terrors of the eve, that Nana, going to her aunt's, found herself nose to nose with Labordette, at the end of a little solitary street in the Batignolles. At first, both seemed embarrassed. He, always complaisant, had affairs he hid. Yet, he recovered first, he exclaimed at the good meeting. Truly, everyone was still stupefied at the total eclipse of Nana. She was asked for, the old friends were pining away. And, turning paternal, he ended by sermonising her.

-- Between us, my dear, frankly, it's getting silly... One understands a craze. Only, to come to that, to be taken in to this point and pocket nothing but slaps!... You're posing for the virtue prizes, are you?

She listened to him with an embarrassed air. However, when he spoke to her of Rose, who was triumphing with her conquest of Count Muffat, a flame passed in her eyes. She murmured:

-- Oh! if I wanted to...

He at once offered his mediation, as an obliging friend. But she refused. Then, he attacked her from another point. He told her that Bordenave was putting up a piece by Fauchery, where there was a superb role for her.

-- What! a piece where there's a role! she cried, stupefied, but he has one and he didn't tell me anything!

She did not name Fontan. Besides, she calmed down at once. Never would she go back to the theatre. No doubt Labordette was not convinced, for he insisted with a smile.

-- You know one has nothing to fear with me. I'm preparing your Muffat, you go back to the theatre, and I bring him along by the leg.

-- No! she said energetically.

And she left him. Her heroism softened her toward herself. It was not a cad of a man who would have sacrificed himself like that, without trumpeting it. Yet, one thing struck her: Labordette had just given her exactly the same advice as Francis. In the evening, when Fontan came in, she questioned him about Fauchery's piece. He, for two months, had made his re-entry at the Variétés. Why had he not spoken to her of the role?

-- What role? he said in his nasty voice. It isn't the role of the great lady, perhaps?... Ah, so you think you've got talent! But that role, my girl, would crush you... Really, you're comic!

She was horribly hurt. All the evening, he chaffed her, calling her Mademoiselle Mars. And the more he knocked her about, the more she held firm, tasting a bitter enjoyment in this heroism of her craze, which made her very great and very loving in her own eyes. Since she went with others to feed him, she loved him more, with all the fatigue and all the disgusts she brought back. He became her vice, which she paid for, her need, which she could not do without, under the goad of slaps. He, seeing the good beast, ended by abusing. She got on his nerves, he took a ferocious hatred, to the point of no longer accounting for his interests. When Bosc made remarks to him, he cried, exasperated, without anyone knowing why, that he didn't give a damn for her and her good dinners, that he would throw her out just to make a present of his seven thousand francs to another woman. And that was the denouement of their liaison.

One evening, Nana, coming in about eleven o'clock, found the door bolted. She knocked a first time, no answer; a second time, still no answer. However, she saw light under the door, and Fontan, inside, did not mind walking about. She knocked again without tiring, calling, getting angry. At last, Fontan's voice rose, slow and thick, and let fall but one word:

-- Shit!

She knocked with both fists.

-- Shit!

She knocked harder, to split the wood.

-- Shit!

And, for a quarter of an hour, the same filth slapped her, answered like a jeering echo to each of the blows with which she shook the door. Then, seeing she did not tire, he opened abruptly, he planted himself on the threshold, arms crossed, and said in the same coldly brutal voice:

-- Good God! have you finished?... What do you want?... Eh! are you going to let us sleep? You see plainly I've company.

He was not alone, in fact. Nana caught sight of the little woman from the Bouffes, already in her shift, with her dishevelled tow hair and her auger-hole eyes, who was laughing in the middle of that furniture she had paid for. But Fontan took a step onto the landing, terrible of aspect, opening his big fingers like pincers.

-- Clear off, or I'll strangle you!

Then, Nana burst into nervous sobs. She was afraid and ran away. This time, it was she who was thrown out. The idea of Muffat came to her all at once, in her rage; but, truly, it was not Fontan who should have returned her the compliment.

On the sidewalk, her first thought was to go and sleep with Satin, if the latter had no one. She met her in front of her house, thrown likewise onto the pavement by her landlord, who had just had a padlock put on her door, against all right, since she was in her furniture; she was swearing, she talked of dragging him before the commissary. Meanwhile, as midnight struck, they must think of finding a bed. And Satin, judging it prudent not to put the sergeants of the city into her affairs, ended by taking Nana to the rue de Laval, to a lady who kept a small furnished hotel. They were given, on the first floor, a narrow room, whose window opened on the court. Satin repeated:

-- I would have gone to Madame Robert's well enough. There's always a corner for me... But, with you, impossible... She's getting ridiculously jealous. The other evening, she beat me.

When they had locked themselves in, Nana, who had not yet relieved herself, melted into tears and told twenty times over the filthiness of Fontan. Satin listened with complaisance, consoled her, was more indignant than she, knocking at the men.

-- Oh! the pigs, oh! the pigs!... See here, no more of those pigs!

Then, she helped Nana undress, she had about her the airs of a little attentive and submissive woman. She repeated with caressing:

-- Let's get to bed quick, my cat. We'll be better... Ah! how silly you are to fret yourself! I tell you they're blackguards! Don't think of them any more... Me, I love you well. Don't cry, do that for your little darling.

And, in the bed, she at once took Nana in her arms, to calm her. She would no longer hear the name of Fontan; each time it came back to her friend's lips, she stopped it with a kiss, with a pretty angry pout, her hair unbound, of a childlike beauty and drowned in tenderness. Then, little by little, in that so sweet embrace, Nana wiped her tears. She was touched, she returned Satin's caresses. When two o'clock struck, the candle was still burning; both had light stifled laughs, with words of love.

But, abruptly, at a clamour that rose in the hotel, Satin got up, half-naked, lending ear.

-- The police! she said all white. Ah! dog take it! no luck!... We're done for!

Twenty times, she had told of the descents the agents made in the hotels. And just that night, in taking refuge in the rue de Laval, neither one nor the other had been suspicious. At the word police, Nana lost her head. She jumped from the bed, ran across the room, opened the window, with the wild air of a madwoman about to throw herself down. But, happily, the little court was glazed; a wire grating was there, on the level. Then, she did not hesitate, she straddled the sill and disappeared in the dark, her shift flying, her thighs bare to the night.

-- Do stay, Satin repeated, frightened. You'll kill yourself.

Then, as they knocked at the door, she was a good girl, pushing to the window, throwing her friend's clothes to the bottom of a wardrobe. Already she had resigned herself, telling herself that after all, if they put her on the card, she would no longer have that beast of a fear. She played the woman crushed with sleep, yawned, parleyed, ended by opening to a big fellow, dirty beard, who said to her:

-- Show your hands... You've no marks, you don't work. Come, dress yourself.

-- But I'm not a seamstress, I'm a burnisher, declared Satin with effrontery.

Besides, she dressed docilely, knowing there was no possible discussion. Cries rose in the hotel, a girl was clinging to the doors, refusing to walk; another, who was in bed with a lover, and whose lover answered for her, played the outraged honest woman, talked of bringing suit against the prefect of police. For near an hour, it was a noise of heavy shoes on the steps, doors shaken with the fist, sharp quarrels stifling in sobs, slidings of skirts brushing the walls, all the sudden waking and frightened departure of a flock of women, brutally bundled off by three agents, under the conduct of a little blond commissary, very polite. Then, the hotel fell back into a great silence.

No one had betrayed her, Nana was saved. She came back groping into the room, shivering, dead with fright. Her bare feet bled, torn by the grating. Long she remained seated on the edge of the bed, still listening. Toward morning, however, she fell asleep. But, at eight o'clock, when she woke, she fled the hotel and ran to her aunt's. When Madame Lerat, who just happened to be taking her coffee with milk with Zoé, saw her at that hour, made like a slut, her face undone, she understood at once.

-- Eh? it's done! she cried. I told you he'd strip the skin off your belly... Come in, you'll always be welcome at my house.

Zoé had risen, murmuring with a respectful familiarity:

-- At last, madame is restored to us... I was waiting for madame.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”