Four Short Stories By Emile Zola. Emile Zola
when she still refused to make her appearance – for she was startled as yet, though she had begun to laugh – he added in peevish, paternal tones:
“Good heavens, these gentlemen know perfectly well what a woman looks like. They won’t eat you.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” said the prince wittily.
With that the whole company began laughing in an exaggerated manner in order to pay him proper court.
“An exquisitely witty speech – an altogether Parisian speech,” as Bordenave remarked.
Nana vouchsafed no further reply, but the curtain began moving. Doubtless she was making up her mind. Then Count Muffat, with glowing cheeks, began to take stock of the dressing room. It was a square room with a very low ceiling, and it was entirely hung with a light-colored Havana stuff. A curtain of the same material depended from a copper rod and formed a sort of recess at the end of the room, while two large windows opened on the courtyard of the theater and were faced, at a distance of three yards at most, by a leprous-looking wall against which the panes cast squares of yellow light amid the surrounding darkness. A large dressing glass faced a white marble toilet table, which was garnished with a disorderly array of flasks and glass boxes containing oils, essences and powders. The count went up to the dressing glass and discovered that he was looking very flushed and had small drops of perspiration on his forehead. He dropped his eyes and came and took up a position in front of the toilet table, where the basin, full of soapy water, the small, scattered, ivory toilet utensils and the damp sponges, appeared for some moments to absorb his attention. The feeling of dizziness which he had experienced when he first visited Nana in the Boulevard Haussmann once more overcame him. He felt the thick carpet soften under foot, and the gasjets burning by the dressing table and by the glass seemed to shoot whistling flames about his temples. For one moment, being afraid of fainting away under the influence of those feminine odors which he now re-encountered, intensified by the heat under the low-pitched ceiling, he sat down on the edge of a softly padded divan between the two windows. But he got up again almost directly and, returning to the dressing table, seemed to gaze with vacant eyes into space, for he was thinking of a bouquet of tuberoses which had once faded in his bedroom and had nearly killed him in their death. When tuberoses are turning brown they have a human smell.
“Make haste!” Bordenave whispered, putting his head in behind the curtain.
The prince, however, was listening complaisantly to the Marquis de Chouard, who had taken up a hare’s-foot on the dressing table and had begun explaining the way grease paint is put on. In a corner of the room Satin, with her pure, virginal face, was scanning the gentlemen keenly, while the dresser, Mme Jules by name, was getting ready Venus’ tights and tunic. Mme Jules was a woman of no age. She had the parchment skin and changeless features peculiar to old maids whom no one ever knew in their younger years. She had indeed shriveled up in the burning atmosphere of the dressing rooms and amid the most famous thighs and bosoms in all Paris. She wore everlastingly a faded black dress, and on her flat and sexless chest a perfect forest of pins clustered above the spot where her heart should have been.
“I beg your pardon, gentlemen,” said Nana, drawing aside the curtain, “but you took me by surprise.”
They all turned round. She had not clothed herself at all, had, in fact, only buttoned on a little pair of linen stays which half revealed her bosom. When the gentlemen had put her to flight she had scarcely begun undressing and was rapidly taking off her fishwife’s costume. Through the opening in her drawers behind a corner of her shift was even now visible. There she stood, bare-armed, bare-shouldered, bare-breasted, in all the adorable glory of her youth and plump, fair beauty, but she still held the curtain with one hand, as though ready to draw it to again upon the slightest provocation.
“Yes, you took me by surprise! I never shall dare – ” she stammered in pretty, mock confusion, while rosy blushes crossed her neck and shoulders and smiles of embarrassment played about her lips.
“Oh, don’t apologize,” cried Bordenave, “since these gentlemen approve of your good looks!”
But she still tried the hesitating, innocent, girlish game, and, shivering as though someone were tickling her, she continued:
“His Highness does me too great an honor. I beg His Highness will excuse my receiving him thus – ”
“It is I who am importunate,” said the prince, “but, madame, I could not resist the desire of complimenting you.”
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