Nana (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Emile Zola [89]
“He’s a bit of a muff, all the same,” said he, without explaining himself further to Fauchery, whom Rose Mignon was taking home with her husband with the intention of making them good friends again.
Muffat found himself alone on the footpath outside. His Highness had quietly placed Nana in his carriage and driven off. The marquis, in a very excited state, had followed Satin and her super, contenting himself with keeping close to those two embodiments of vice, with the vague hope of their taking compassion on him. Then Muffat, his head as hot as a furnace, decided to go home on foot. All combat within him had ceased. A new era of life had drowned all his ideas and his beliefs of forty years’ standing. As he walked along the Boulevards the noise caused by the belated vehicles seemed to deafen him with the sound of Nana’s name, whilst in the gas-lamps a naked vision, Nana’s supple arms and her white shoulders, appeared to dance before his eyes, and he felt that he was wholly hers; he would have abjured all, have sold everything he possessed, to have had her with him but for one short hour that very night. It was his youth that was at length awakening within him, the gluttonous puberty of an adolescent that had suddenly become inflamed in the midst of his jesuitical coldness and his dignity of mature age.
CHAPTER VI
Count Muffat, accompanied by his wife and daughter, had arrived the previous evening at Les Fondettes, where Madame Hugon, who was alone with her son George, had invited them to come and spend a week. The house, built towards the end of the seventeenth century, was erected in the middle of an immense square enclosure, without a single ornament; but the garden contained some magnificent trees, and a series of playing fountains, supplied by neighbouring springs. On the road from Orleans to Paris it appeared like a flood of verdure, a bouquet of trees, breaking the monotony of that flat country, where cultivated fields could be seen as far as the horizon.
At eleven o’clock, when the second sounding of the bell had gathered every one round the luncheon table, Madame Hugon, with her kind, maternal smile, kissed Sabine on both cheeks, saying:
“You know that when in the country I always do so. Having you here makes me feel twenty years younger. Did you sleep well in your old room?” Then, without waiting for an answer, she turned toward Estelle, adding, “And this little one no doubt slept soundly all night? Come and kiss me, my child.”
They had sat down in the vast dining-room, the windows of which looked on to the ornamental garden; but they only occupied one end of the big table, so as to be more together. Sabine was very merry, recalling the events of her childhood which this visit had awakened: months passed at Les Fondettes, long walks, a fall into one of the fountains one summer’s evening, an old romance of chivalry discovered on the top of some cupboard and read in winter, seated before a blazing fire of vine-cuttings; and George, who had not seen the countess for some months past, noticed a peculiar look about her, with something changed in the expression of her face; whilst that stick, Estelle, on the contrary, seemed more a nonentity than ever, still more awkward and dumb. As they were eating some boiled eggs and some cutlets done very plainly, Madame Hugon began to complain, as only the mistress of a household can, of the outrageous prices the butchers were charging for their meat. She had to have everything from Orleans, and they never sent her the pieces she ordered. Besides, if her guests fared badly it was their own fault; they came too late in the season.
“It is most foolish,” said she. “I have been expecting you ever since last June, and now we are in the middle of September. As you see, it is no longer so nice out of doors.”
With a gesture, she indicated the trees on the lawn, the leaves of which were commencing to turn yellow. It was a cloudy day, a kind of bluey mist obscured the horizon in a melancholy