From the Pages of

Nana

Nana, very tall and very plump for her eighteen years, in the white tunic of a goddess, and with her beautiful golden hair floating over her shoulders, walked towards the foot-lights with calm self-possession, smiling at the crowd before her. Her lips parted, and she commenced her great song: (page 17)

“When Venus takes an evening stroll—”

Everything betokened the damsel abandoned too quickly by her first genuine protector, and fallen back into the clutches of unscrupulous lovers; a most difficult debut miscarried, and trammelled with a loss of credit and threats of eviction. (page 35)

 

“Only fancy, I intend to sleep a whole night—a whole night all to myself!” (page 59)

 

The women avenged morality in emptying his coffers. (page 101)

 

In her dress of soft white silk, light and crumpled like a chemise, with her touch of intoxication, which had taken the colour from her face and made her eyes look heavy, she seemed to be offering herself in a quiet, good-natured sort of way. The roses she had placed in her dress and hair were now all withered, and only the stalks remained. (page 115)

 

As she listened to the robin, whilst the boy pressed close against her, Nana recollected. Yes, it was in novels that she had seen all that. Once, in the days gone by, she would have given her heart to have seen the moon thus, to have heard the robin and to have had a little fellow full of love by her side. Oh, heaven! she could have cried, it all seemed to her so lovely and good! For certain she was born to live a virtuous life. (page 169)

 

“Ah! they’re getting on well, your respectable women! They even interfere with us now, and take our lovers!” (page 212)

 

From that night their life entirely changed. For a “yes” or a “no” Fontan struck her. She, getting used to it, submitted. Occasionally she cried out or menaced him; but he forced her against the wall, and talked of strangling her, and that made her yield. (page 234)

 

Then Nana became a woman of fashion, a marchioness of the streets frequented by the upper ten, living on the stupidity and the depravity of the male sex. It was a sudden and definitive start in a new career, a rapid rise in the celebrity of gallantry, in the full light of the follies of wealth and of the wasteful effronteries of beauty. (page 294)

 

“All those people no longer amaze me. I know them too well. You should see them with the gloss off! No more respect! respect is done with! Filth below, filth up above, it’s always filth and company. That’s why I won’t put up with any nonsense.” (page 340)

 

“Do you think I shall go to heaven?” (page 365)

 

A lewdness seemed to possess them, and inspire them with the delirious imaginations of the flesh. The old devout frights of their night of wakefulness had now turned into a thirst for bestiality, a mania for going on all fours, for grunting and biting. Then one day, as he was doing the woolly bear, she pushed him so roughly that he fell against a piece of furniture; and she broke out into an involuntary laugh as she saw a bump on his forehead. From that time, having already acquired a taste for it by her experiment on La Faloise, she treated him as an animal, goaded him and pursued him with kicks. (page 422)

She dreamed, too, of something better; and she went off in a gorgeous costume to kiss Satin a last time—clean, solid, looking quite new, as though she had never been in use. (page 433)