Nana (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Emile Zola [119]
“All is over,” he kept saying in a hollow voice. “There is nothing more, nothing more.”
His tears so mastered him that he leant against a door, burying his wet face in his hands. A sound of footsteps chased him away. He felt such shame and such fear that he fled from everyone, with the cautious tread of a night prowler. Whenever anybody passed him on the pavement he tried to assume a careless gait, as though he imagined that his history could be read in the movement of his shoulders. He had turned down the Rue de la Grange-Batelière and reached the Faubourg Montmartre, but the bright lights caused him to retrace his footsteps, and for close upon an hour he wandered thus about the neighbourhood, choosing always the darkest turnings. He had, no doubt, a goal to which his feet instinctively conducted him, patiently and by a most circuitous road. At length, at the turn of a street, he raised his eyes. He had arrived. It was the corner of the Rue Taitbout and of the Rue de Provence. He had, in the painful disorder of his brain, taken an hour to reach it, while he might have done so in five minutes. One morning, in the previous month, he recollected having called on Fauchery to thank him for having mentioned his name in the description of a ball at the Tuileries. The apartment was on the first floor, with little square windows half hidden by the colossal sign-board of the shop. The last window on the left was divided by a streak of brilliant light, the ray of a lamp passing between the partly closed curtains. And, with his eyes fixed on that bright line, he stood absorbed, awaiting something.
The moon had disappeared in an inky sky, from which a drizzling, icy rain fell. Two o’clock struck at the church of the Trinity. The Rue de Provence and the Rue Taitbout, with their lighted gas-lamps, disappeared in the distance in a yellow vapour. Muffat did not stir. That was the room. He recollected it well, hung in crimson, and with a Louis XIII. bedstead at the back of the apartment. The lamp was probably to the right, on the mantel-piece. No doubt they were in bed, for not a shadow passed the immovable line of light; and he, still watching, arranged a plan. He would ring, and hastening upstairs in spite of the door-keeper, would burst into the room and fall upon them in bed, without even giving them time to disengage their arms. The knowledge that he had no weapon arrested him for a moment. Then he decided that he would strangle them. He turned his plan over in his head, he perfected it, always awaiting something, some sign, to make him certain. Had the shadow of a woman’s form appeared at that moment, he would have rung the bell; but the thought that he was perhaps mistaken froze him. What would he be able to say? His doubts returned to him. His wife could not be with that man. The idea was monstrous and impossible; but still he stayed on, overcome by degrees by numbness, succumbing to weakness, in that long vigil, to which the fixity of his look imparted a sense of hallucination.
The shower increased. Two police officers drew near, and he was obliged to leave the door-post against which he had sought shelter. When they had disappeared down the Rue de Provence he returned, wet and shivering. The bright line still showed across