Nana (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Emile Zola [218]
“And my bills that are coming due! They’ll seize my goods, whilst his lordship comes here on tick. Now, just look at yourself! Do you think I love you for yourself? When one has a mug like yours, one pays the women who are willing to put up with you. Damnation! if you don’t bring me the ten thousand francs to-night, you sha’n’t even so much as suck the tip of my little finger. Really! I must send you back to your wife!”
That night he brought the ten thousand francs. Nana held out her lips. He took a long kiss, which consoled him for all his day of agony. What annoyed the young woman was always having him attached to her skirts. She complained to M. Venot, imploring him to take her little muff to the countess. Their reconciliation did not appear to have been of much use and she regretted having had anything to do with it, as he was for ever at her back. The days when, blinded by anger, she forgot her interests, she swore to play him such a dirty trick that he would never again be able to come near her. But while she blackguarded him, slapping her thighs meanwhile—she might even have spat in his face—he would have remained and thanked her. Then they had continual quarrels about money. She roughly demanded it. She abused him in regard to the most miserable sums, odiously greedy every minute, delighting in cruelly telling him that she only tolerated him for his money and for nothing else, that she didn’t care for him, that she loved another, and that she was very unfortunate in having to do with such an idiot as he! They did not even want to have him any longer at court, where there was a talk of requesting him to send in his resignation. The Empress had said, “He is too disgusting.” That was very true. And Nana always repeated the words as a parting shot in their quarrels.
“Really! you are too disgusting!”
She no longer put the least constraint upon herself now, she had regained complete liberty. Every day she took her drive in the Bois round the lake, forming acquaintances there which became more intimate elsewhere. It was the great angling match for men, the baiting in the full light of day, the hooking by illustrious harlots, beneath the smile of toleration and the dazzling luxury of Paris. Duchesses drew each other’s attention to her, the wives of wealthy tradesmen copied her bonnets; at times her landau, when striving to pass, would arrest a long string of grand equipages, containing financiers holding all Europe in their cash-boxes, and ministers whose big fingers were half throttling France; and she formed a part of this world of the Bois. She occupied an important position there, known by the people of every capital, greatly in demand with all foreigners, adding the mad fit of her debauchery to the splendours of that crowd like the very glory and keen enjoyment of a nation. Then the intimacies of a night—mere birds of passage, of which she herself lost all recollection on the morrow—would take her to the grand restaurants, often to the Café de Madrid, when the weather was fine. All the staff of the embassies defiled there; she dined with Lucy Stewart, who murdered the French language, and who paid to be amused, taking the girls at so much an evening, with instructions to them to be funny, while they themselves were so sick of everything and so worn out that they never even touched them. And the girls called it going on the spree. They returned home delighted at having been treated with such disdain, and finished the night with some lover of their choice.
Count Muffat pretended to be ignorant of these goings on, when Nana did not tell him of them herself. He suffered, too, a great deal from the disgraces of his daily existence. The mansion in the Avenue de Villiers was becoming a regular hell, a mad-house in which sudden crazes at all hours of the day led to the most odious scenes. Nana had arrived at the point of battling with her servants. At one time she was especially good to Charles, the coachman. Whenever she stopped at a restaurant, she sent him out refreshments by the waiters; she would talk to him from