Nana (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Emile Zola [238]
“Let’s be off! let’s be off, my dears!” repeated Gaga. “It isn’t healthy.”
They left the room quickly, throwing another glance towards the bed; but as Lucy, Blanche, and Caroline were still there, Rose gave a last look round to see that all was tidy. She drew the curtain before the window. Then she thought that the lamp was not proper, there ought to be a candle; and, after taking one of the brass candlesticks from the mantelpiece, she lit the candle, and placed it on the night-table beside the corpse. A bright light suddenly illuminated the face of the deceased. It was horrible. They shuddered, and hastened away.
“Ah! she is altered—she is altered!” murmured Rose Mignon, who was the last to leave the room.
She went off and closed the door. Nana was left alone, her face turned upwards in the candle-light. It was a charnel-house, a mass of matter and blood, a shovelful of putrid flesh, thrown there on the cushion. The pustules had invaded the entire face, one touching the other; and, faded, sunk in, with the greyish aspect of mud, they already seemed like a mouldiness of the earth on that shapeless pulp, in which the features were no longer recognisable. One of the eyes, the left one, had completely disappeared amidst the eruption of the purulence; the other, half open, looked like a black and tainted hole. The nose still continued to suppurate. A reddish crust starting from one of the cheeks, invaded the mouth, which it distorted in an abominable laugh; and on this horrible and grotesque mask of nothingness, the hair, that beautiful hair, retaining its sun-like fire, fell in a stream of gold. Venus was decomposing. It seemed as if the virus gathered by her in the gutters, from the tolerated carrion—that ferment with which she had poisoned a people—had ascended to her face and rotted it.
The room was deserted. A strong breath of despair mounted from the Boulevard, and swelled the curtain.
“To Berlin! to Berlin! to Berlin!”
Endnotes
1 (p. 195) Galerie Montmartre ... Galerie des Variétés... Galerie Saint-Marc: These arcades, along with the Passage des Panoramas mentioned on page 33 and the Galerie Feydeau, on page 197, were pedestrian streets with glass roofs, lined with shops—the distant ancestors of today’s shopping malls. The German critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin considered them to be the emblematic feature of nineteenth-century Paris and compiled and wrote an immense, unfinished book, The Arcades Project (1927-1940), that springs from a contemplation of their role in society. Although many arcades of the period have been demolished, these five, which are interconnected, still stand.
2 (p. 205) Fauchery’s article, entitled the “Golden Fly” ... which it entered by the windows: This article, entirely Zola’s invention, constitutes his thesis statement, baldly put forth, the least subtle detail in a book that manages to be at once deft and broad. The reference to the girl having been “born from four or five generations of drunkards” is the only direct allusion in Nana to its predecessor, LAssommoir (published in English as The Drinking Den, The Dram Shop, or The Drunkard) . The genetic notions advanced here have long been discredited, although we know that behavior is often handed down through the generations by example.
3 (p. 320) Then the conversation having turned... “may God preserve the Emperor as long as possible!”: This is another instance of Zola’s unsubtle message-bearing. We are meant to remark upon the irony of Nana—descendant of generations of alcoholics—denouncing the Republicans as drunkards, assisted, of course, by the propaganda that the right-wing Figaro fed to its readers. That newspaper called Zola a “socialist”—a contentious word—in its review of Nana, but also ran a page of illustrations of the book’s characters.
4 (p. 387) But the waltz still continued its voluptuous whirl . . . saucy rhythm of the music: In its foreshadowing of the events of the following two years—the Siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War and the subsequent Commune (an insurrection