Nana (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Emile Zola [12]
Luc Sante was born in Verviers, Belgium. He is the author of Low Life, Evidence, and The Factory of Facts and coeditor, with Melissa Holbrook Pierson, of O.K. You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actors. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Grammy (for album notes), and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is Visiting Professor of Writing and the History of Photography at Bard College. He lives with his wife and son in Ulster County, New York.
Nana
CHAPTER I
At nine o’clock the Variety Theatre was still almost empty. In the balcony and orchestra stalls a few persons waited, lost amidst the garnet-coloured velvet seats, in the faint light of the half extinguished gasalier.a The huge crimson curtain was enveloped in shadow, and not a sound came from the stage behind. The foot-lights were not yet lit up, and the seats of the musicians were unoccupied. High up, however, in the third gallery, close to the roof—displaying figures of naked women and children floating among clouds, to which the gas imparted a greenish tinge—were heard the sounds of shouts and laughter above a continual hum of conversation, and a crowd of men and women, all wearing the caps of the working classes, were seated in rows reaching almost to the gilded festoons of the ceiling. Now and again an attendant would appear, fussily conducting a lady and gentleman to their seats—the gentleman in evening dress, and the lady slim and slightly stooping, and glancing slowly over the house. Two young men suddenly appeared in the stalls close to the orchestra. They remained standing, looking round about them.
“What did I tell you, Hector?” exclaimed the elder—a tall fellow, with a slight, black moustache. “We have come too early. You might just as well have allowed me to finish my cigar.”
An attendant passed by at this moment. “Oh! M. Fauchery,” she said familiarly, “it will not begin for half an hour.”
“Then why on earth do they say nine o’clock on the bills?” asked Hector, whose long, thin face assumed an expression of intense annoyance. “This very morning Clarisse, who is in the piece, assured me that the curtain would go up at nine, precisely.”
For a minute they relapsed into silence, as they raised their heads and gazed into the shadows of the boxes; but the green paper, with which the latter were lined, made them obscurer still. Below, the small boxes under the balcony disappeared in total darkness. In the balcony boxes only a very stout lady, leaning heavily on the velvet-covered balustrade was to be seen. To the right and the left, between high columns, the stage boxes, hung with drapery deeply fringed, remained empty. The body of the house, decorated in white and gold, relieved by pale green, seemed to disappear filled as it was with a misty haze arising from the subdued light emanating from the huge crystal gasalier.
“Did you succeed in securing a stage-box for Lucy?” asked Hector.
“Yes,” replied the other, “but not without a deal of trouble. Oh! there is no danger of Lucy’s coming too early—not she!” He stifled a yawn, and then, after a brief silence, resumed; “You are lucky, you who have never yet been present at a first night. ‘The Blonde Venus’ will be the success of the year. Every one has been speaking of the piece for six months past. Ah! my boy, such music—such ‘go’! Bordenave, who knows what’s what, kept it purposely for the time of the Exhibition.”b
Hector listened religiously. At length he hazarded a question: “And Nana—the new star who is to play Venus—do you know her?”
“Oh, hang it!