Nana (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Emile Zola [221]
Next, Nana tackled Steiner without disgust, but also without love. She called him a dirty Jew. She seemed to be gratifying an old hatred which she could not very well explain to herself. He was fat, he was stupid, and she turned him about, taking double mouthfuls, wishing to have done with the Prussian all the quicker. He had given up Simone. His Bosphorus speculation was already in jeopardy. Nana hastened his downfall by the most lavish expenditure. For a month still he struggled, performing miracles. He covered Europe with a colossal publicity—posters, advertisements, prospectuses—and extracted money from the most distant countries. All those savings, the louis of the speculators the same as the sous of the poor people, were swallowed up in the Avenue de Villiers. He had also gone into partnership with an iron-founder in Alsace. There were there, in a corner of the country, workmen black with coal dust, bathed with perspiration, who, night and day, tightened their muscles and heard their bones crack, to supply the means for Nana’s pleasures. She devoured all like a great fire—the thefts at the Bourse, the earnings of labour.
This time she finished Steiner. She returned him to the pavement, sucked to the bone, so emptied that he remained even incapable of inventing a fresh roguery. In the collapse of his banking establishment he went crazy; he trembled at the name of the police. He was made a bankrupt; and the mere word “money” bewildered him, threw him into a childish state of embarrassment—he who had handled millions. One evening when with her, he burst out crying. He asked her to lend him a hundred francs to pay his servant; and Nana, affected and amused by this ending of the terrible old man who for twenty years past had been skimming the Paris market, brought him the money, saying,
“You know, I give ’em you because it’s funny; but listen, my little man, you’re not of an age for me to keep you. You must seek some other occupation.”
Then Nana at once started on La Faloise. He had for a long time been soliciting the honour of being ruined by her, so as to be a perfect swell. That was what he was in want of; he must have a woman to bring him out. In two months Paris would know him, and he would read his own name in all the newspapers. Six weeks sufficed. His inheritance consisted of landed estates, fields, pastures, woods, and farms. He had to sell them rapidly, one after the other. At every bite Nana devoured an acre. The foliage frizzling beneath the sun, the rich ripe corn, the golden vines in September, the tall grass in which the cows buried themselves up to their shoulders—all went as though engulfed in some abyss; and there were also a stream, a lime quarry, and three windmills which disappeared. Nana passed like an invading army—like one of those clouds of locusts whose flight destroys a whole province similar to a flame of fire. She burnt the earth wherever she placed her tiny foot. Farm after farm, meadow after meadow, she nibbled up the inheritance in her pretty way, without even noticing what she was about, just the same as she would craunch up a bag of burnt almonds, placed on her knees, between her meals. It was a matter of no consequence; they were merely sweeties. But one night there only remained a small wood. She swallowed it with a disdainful air, for it was really not worth the trouble of opening one’s mouth for.
La Faloise laughed in an idiotic way as he sucked the knob of his walking-stick. Debts were crushing him down; he no longer possessed a hundred francs of income. He saw himself obliged to go back to the country and live with a maniacal uncle. But that did not matter; he was a swell. The “Figaro” had twice printed his name; and with his skinny neck rising out of his collar slightly turned down in front, his waist encased in a waistcoat a great deal too tight, he swaggered about, uttering exclamations like a parrot, and affecting the languors of a wooden puppet that has never had an emotion. Nana, whom he irritated immensely,