Nana (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Emile Zola [81]
Just then old Barillot’s voice was heard outside. “Madame, may I give the signal? The audience is becoming very impatient.”
“Presently,” replied Nana, without hurrying herself.
She had dipped the hair pencil into a pot of black; then, her nose almost touching the looking-glass, her left eye closed, she delicately painted the lashes. Muffat stood behind her, looking on. He saw her in the glass, with her plump shoulders and her neck drowned in a roseate shadow; and he could not, in spite of his efforts, withdraw his gaze from that face rendered so provoking by the closed eye, and full of dimples, as though transported with desires. When she shut her right eye, and applied the pencil, he felt that he belonged to her wholly.
“Madame,” again cried the panting voice of the old call-boy, “they are stamping their feet; they will end by smashing the seats. May I give the signal?”
“Oh! damn ’em!” said Nana angrily. “Give the signal; I don’t care! If I’m not ready, well! they’ll have to wait for me.” Suddenly calming herself, she turned towards the gentlemen, and added with a smile, “It’s true; one can’t even have a few minutes’ quiet conversation.”
She had now finished her face and arms. She added, with her finger, two broad streaks of carmine to her lips. Count Muffat felt more agitated still, bewitched by the perversion of the powders and the pigments, seized with an inordinate desire for that painted beauty, with her mouth too red and her face too white, her eyes enlarged, ardent and circled with black, as though wounded by love. However, Nana passed behind the curtain for a moment to get into Venus’s tights, after taking off her drawers. Then, without the least shame, she doffed her chemisette, and held out her arms to Madame Jules, who slipped on the short sleeves of the tunic.
“Now, let me dress you quick, as they are making a disturbance!” murmured the old woman.
The prince, with half closed eyes, examined the symmetry of her neck and chest with the eye of a connoisseur, whilst the Marquis de Chouard wagged his head involuntarily. Muffat, in order that he might see no more, gazed down at the carpet. Venus was now ready, as that gauze drapery was all that she wore over her shoulders. Madame Jules hovered round her, looking like an old woman carved out of wood, with clear, expressionless eyes, and every now and then she kept taking pins from the inexhaustible cushion over her heart to pin Venus’s tunic, passing her bony hands over those next to naked rolls of fat, without their awakening in her mind a single recollection, and with the greatest indifference for her sex.
“There!” said the young woman, as she gave a last look at herself in the glass.
Bordenave came back, very anxious, saying that the third act had commenced.
“Well! I am ready,” resumed she. “What a fuss to make! I always have to wait for the others.”
The gentlemen left the dressing-room, but they did not say good-bye, the prince having a desire to witness the third act from the wings. Left alone, Nana looked about her with surprise.
“Wherever has she got to?” asked she.
She was seeking Satin. When she at length found her behind the curtain, sitting waiting on the trunk, Satin quietly said, “I certainly didn’t intend to be in your way there, with all those men!” And she added that she would now go off. But Nana stopped her. She must be cracked to think of such a thing, when Bordenave had consented to engage her! They could settle the matter after the performance. Satin hesitated. It was altogether such a queer place, nothing like anything she had been used to. In spite of all this, however, she remained.
As the prince descended the little wooden staircase, a strange noise, a mixture of stifled oaths and stampings of feet as of men struggling, reached him from the other side of the theatre. It was caused by an occurrence that quite scared the actors