Nana (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Emile Zola [86]
Fauchery here called to the count, and the latter reached the second storey just as a furiously uttered oath issued from the passage on the right. Mathilde, a smutty little thing, who personated virtuous persecuted damsels, had just broken her basin, the soapy water from which ran out on to the landing. A door was closed violently. Two women in their stays jumped across the passage; another, holding the tail of her chemise between her teeth, suddenly appeared, and as hastily made off. Then were heard a great deal of laughing, the sound of a quarrel, a song commenced and almost immediately interrupted. Through the cracks in the walls and the doors of the passage, one caught glimpses of nudity, rosy skins and white underlinen. Two girls, who were very merry, were showing one another the different marks on their bodies; a third, very young, almost a child, had lifted up her skirts, and was mending her drawers; whilst the dressers, seeing the two men, gently closed the curtains out of decency.
It was the jostling at the end of the performance, the great washing off of white paint and rouge, the resumption of everyday dress in the midst of a cloud of face powder, an increase of the human odour which issued through the slamming doors. Arrived on the third storey, Muffat abandoned himself to the intoxication which was taking possession of him. The dressing-room of the female supers was there: twenty women heaped together, a confusion of soaps and bottles of lavender water, resembling the common room of a house of ill-fame in the suburbs. As he passed, he heard behind a closed door a great noise of washing, a storm in a basin. And he was moving on to the top storey, when he had the curiosity to look through a peep-hole left open in a door; the room was unoccupied, and all he could see by the light of the flaring gas was a familiar utensil forgotten amidst a pile of skirts thrown on the floor. This was the last vision he carried away with him. Up above, on the fourth storey, he felt as though he would choke. All the odours, all the heat congregated there. The yellow ceiling had a roasted appearance; a gas-lamp was burning in a sort of ruddy mist. For a moment he clung to the iron railing, which had the cool feeling of living flesh, and, closing his eyes, he drew a long breath, seeming by doing so to inhale all that pertained to the female sex he was still unacquainted with, although he was, as it were, enveloped by it.
“Come on,” cried Fauchery, who had disappeared a moment before; “someone wants you.”
He was in Clarisse’s and Simone’s dressing-room—a long sort of attic under the slates, badly constructed, with innumerable angles. Two deep openings in the roof admitted the light. But, at that time of night, flames of gas illuminated the room, hung with wall-paper, rose-coloured flowers on a green trellis-work, costing a farthing a yard. Side by side two wooden shelves, deal-boards covered with oil-cloth, blackened by the dirty water constantly spilt upon it, served as dressing-tables; beneath them were scattered some zinc cans very much the worse for wear, two or three pails full of slops, and several coarse yellow earthenware jugs. There were, in fact, an infinity of things more or less damaged or dirtied by use—chipped basins, horn combs with half the teeth broken off, all, indeed, which the haste and carelessness of two women, who dress and wash in common, leave untidily about them in a place that they only momentarily occupy, and the dirt and disorder of which no longer affects them when once they are out of it.
“Come on,” repeated Fauchery, with that comradeship which men affect when in company with damsels of easy virtue; “Clarisse wants to kiss you.”
Muffat at length entered the room, but he was greatly surprised to find the Marquis de Chouard seated on a chair between the two dressing-tables. The marquis had retired there. He kept his feet wide apart because one of the pails leaked, making a big pool of soapy water on the floor. He appeared to be very much at his ease, evidently knowing the best places, and looking