Nana | Page 9

of
her back."
But a slight rustling movement ran through the house; Rose Mignon
had just come on the stage as Diana. Now though she had neither the
face nor the figure for the part, being thin and dark and of the adorable
type of ugliness peculiar to a Parisian street child, she nonetheless
appeared charming and as though she were a satire on the personage
she represented. Her song at her entrance on the stage was full of lines
quaint enough to make you cry with laughter and of complaints about
Mars, who was getting ready to desert her for the companionship of
Venus. She sang it with a chaste reserve so full of sprightly
suggestiveness that the public warmed amain. The husband and Steiner,
sitting side by side, were laughing complaisantly, and the whole house
broke out in a roar when Prulliere, that great favorite, appeared as a
general, a masquerade Mars, decked with an enormous plume and
dragging along a sword, the hilt of which reached to his shoulder. As
for him, he had had enough of Diana; she had been a great deal too coy
with him, he averred. Thereupon Diana promised to keep a sharp eye
on him and to be revenged. The duet ended with a comic yodel which
Prulliere delivered very amusingly with the yell of an angry tomcat. He
had about him all the entertaining fatuity of a young leading gentleman

whose love affairs prosper, and he rolled around the most swaggering
glances, which excited shrill feminine laughter in the boxes.
Then the public cooled again, for the ensuing scenes were found
tiresome. Old Bosc, an imbecile Jupiter with head crushed beneath the
weight of an immense crown, only just succeeded in raising a smile
among his audience when he had a domestic altercation with Juno on
the subject of the cook's accounts. The march past of the gods, Neptune,
Pluto, Minerva and the rest, was well-nigh spoiling everything. People
grew impatient; there was a restless, slowly growing murmur; the
audience ceased to take an interest in the performance and looked
round at the house. Lucy began laughing with Labordette; the Count de
Vandeuvres was craning his neck in conversation behind Blanche's
sturdy shoulders, while Fauchery, out of the corners of his eyes, took
stock of the Muffats, of whom the count appeared very serious, as
though he had not understood the allusions, and the countess smiled
vaguely, her eyes lost in reverie. But on a sudden, in this uncomfortable
state of things, the applause of the clapping contingent rattled out with
the regularity of platoon firing. People turned toward the stage. Was it
Nana at last? This Nana made one wait with a vengeance.
It was a deputation of mortals whom Ganymede and Iris had introduced,
respectable middle-class persons, deceived husbands, all of them, and
they came before the master of the gods to proffer a complaint against
Venus, who was assuredly inflaming their good ladies with an excess
of ardor. The chorus, in quaint, dolorous tones, broken by silences full
of pantomimic admissions, caused great amusement. A neat phrase
went the round of the house: "The cuckolds' chorus, the cuckolds'
chorus," and it "caught on," for there was an encore. The singers' heads
were droll; their faces were discovered to be in keeping with the phrase,
especially that of a fat man which was as round as the moon.
Meanwhile Vulcan arrived in a towering rage, demanding back his wife
who had slipped away three days ago. The chorus resumed their plaint,
calling on Vulcan, the god of the cuckolds. Vulcan's part was played by
Fontan, a comic actor of talent, at once vulgar and original, and he had
a role of the wildest whimsicality and was got up as a village
blacksmith, fiery red wig, bare arms tattooed with arrow-pierced hearts

and all the rest of it. A woman's voice cried in a very high key, "Oh,
isn't he ugly?" and all the ladies laughed and applauded.
Then followed a scene which seemed interminable. Jupiter in the
course of it seemed never to be going to finish assembling the Council
of Gods in order to submit thereto the deceived husband's requests. And
still no Nana! Was the management keeping Nana for the fall of the
curtain then? So long a period of expectancy had ended by annoying
the public. Their murmurings began again.
"It's going badly," said Mignon radiantly to Steiner. "She'll get a pretty
reception; you'll see!"
At that very moment the clouds at the back of the stage were cloven
apart and Venus appeared. Exceedingly tall, exceedingly strong, for her
eighteen years, Nana, in her goddess's white tunic and with her light
hair simply flowing unfastened over her shoulders, came down to the
footlights with a quiet certainty of