Nana (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Emile Zola [80]
“Your Highness is spoiling me,” she murmured.
The making-up was a most complicated business, which the Marquis de Chouard followed with extreme delight. He, also, ventured an observation.
“Could not the orchestra,” he asked, “accompany you more softly? It drowns your voice, and that is an unpardonable crime.”
This time Nana did not turn round. She had taken the hare’s foot, and was passing it very lightly and carefully over her face, leaning so forward over the dressing-table as to cause the rounded portion of her white drawers to swell out, the corner of her chemise still protruding. To show that she was sensible of the old gentleman’s compliment, she slightly moved her hips. A pause ensued. Madame Jules had observed a rent in the drawers. She took one of the pins stuck over her heart, and remained kneeling for a moment on the ground, occupied about Nana’s leg; whilst the young woman, without appearing to know that she was there, was covering herself with powder, being careful, however, not to lay any on the upper part of her cheeks. When the prince remarked that, if she came to sing in London, all England would want to applaud her, she laughed pleasantly, and turned herself round for a second, her left cheek very white in the midst of a cloud of powder. Then she suddenly became very serious: she was about to put on the rouge. Once more, standing with her face close to the glass, she dipped her finger in a pot, and applied the rouge under her eyes, spreading it gently up to the temples. The gentlemen maintained a respectful silence.
Count Muffat had scarcely said a word: he was immersed in thoughts of his youth. The room he had when a child had been very cold. Later on, when sixteen years old, he used to kiss his mother every night, and would then feel, even in his sleep, the icy coldness of her embrace. One day, as he passed a half-closed door, he caught a glimpse of a maid-servant washing herself; and that was the only reminiscence that had troubled him from the age of puberty to the day of his marriage. Then he had encountered in his wife a strict observance of conjugal duties; he himself experienced a sort of devout repugnance. He grew up, he grew old, ignorant of the ways of the flesh, bent to rigid religious practices, having regulated his life according to precepts and laws; and suddenly he found himself deposited in this actress’s dressing-room, in company of this almost naked girl. He who had never even seen Countess Muffat put on her garters was now assisting at the most secret details of a woman’s toilet, in the midst of that fascinating and powerful odour, surrounded by all those pots and basins. His whole being revolted; the slow possession that Nana had taken of him for some little time past terrified him, as it recalled to his mind the pious stories he had read in his childhood of persons possessed by devils. He believed in the devil. In his confused state of mind, Nana, with her smiles and her body full of vice, was the devil in person. But he would be strong; he would know how to defend himself.
“Then that is settled,” the prince was saying, as he took his ease on the sofa. “Next year you come to London, and you will receive such a welcome that you will never return to France. Ah! my dear count, you do not value your pretty women sufficiently. We shall take them all from you.”
“He will not miss them,” maliciously murmured the Marquis de Chouard, who threw off his mask on such occasions as the present. “The count is virtue itself.”
Hearing the count’s virtue spoken of, Nana looked at him in so peculiar a manner that Muffat felt greatly annoyed. Then he was surprised at having given way to the feeling, and became angry with himself. Why should the fact of his being virtuous embarrass him in the presence of that girl? He could have beaten her. But Nana, reaching over for a hair pencil, let it fall; and as she stooped to pick it up, he hastened to anticipate