Complete Works of Emile Zola (616 page)

Daguenet and Fauchery passed by and bowed to her. She made them a sign, and they had to come up. Thereupon she made hay of the weighing-in enclosure. But she broke off abruptly:

“Dear me, there’s the Marquis de Chouard! How old he’s growing! That old man’s killing himself! Is he still as mad about it as ever?”

Thereupon Daguenet described the old man’s last brilliant stroke. The story dated from the day before yesterday, and no one knew it as yet. After dangling about for months he had bought her daughter Amelie from Gaga for thirty thousand francs, they said.

“Good gracious! That’s a nice business!” cried Nana in disgust. “Go in for the regular thing, please! But now that I come to think of it, that must be Lili down there on the grass with a lady in a brougham. I recognized the face. The old boy will have brought her out.”

Vandeuvres was not listening; he was impatient and longed to get rid of her. But Fauchery having remarked at parting that if she had not seen the bookmakers she had seen nothing, the count was obliged to take her to them in spite of his obvious repugnance. And she was perfectly happy at once; that truly was a curious sight, she said!

Amid lawns bordered by young horse-chestnut trees there was a round open enclosure, where, forming a vast circle under the shadow of the tender green leaves, a dense line of bookmakers was waiting for betting men, as though they had been hucksters at a fair. In order to overtop and command the surrounding crowd they had taken up positions on wooden benches, and they were advertising their prices on the trees beside them. They had an ever-vigilant glance, and they booked wagers in answer to a single sign, a mere wink, so rapidly that certain curious onlookers watched them openmouthed, without being able to understand it all. Confusion reigned; prices were shouted, and any unexpected change in a quotation was received with something like tumult. Occasionally scouts entered the place at a run and redoubled the uproar as they stopped at the entrance to the rotunda and, at the tops of their voices, announced departures and arrivals. In this place, where the gambling fever was pulsing in the sunshine, such announcements were sure to raise a prolonged muttering sound.

“They ARE funny!” murmured Nana, greatly entertained.

“Their features look as if they had been put on the wrong way. Just you see that big fellow there; I shouldn’t care to meet him all alone in the middle of a wood.”

But Vandeuvres pointed her out a bookmaker, once a shopman in a fancy repository, who had made three million francs in two years. He was slight of build, delicate and fair, and people all round him treated him with great respect. They smiled when they addressed him, while others took up positions close by in order to catch a glimpse of him.

They were at length leaving the ring when Vandeuvres nodded slightly to another bookmaker, who thereupon ventured to call him. It was one of his former coachmen, an enormous fellow with the shoulders of an ox and a high color. Now that he was trying his fortunes at race meetings on the strength of some mysteriously obtained capital, the count was doing his utmost to push him, confiding to him his secret bets and treating him on all occasions as a servant to whom one shows one’s true character. Yet despite this protection, the man had in rapid succession lost very heavy sums, and today he, too, was playing his last card. There was blood in his eyes; he looked fit to drop with apoplexy.

“Well, Marechal,” queried the count in the lowest of voices, “to what amount have you laid odds?”

“To five thousand louis, Monsieur le Comte,” replied the bookmaker, likewise lowering his voice. “A pretty job, eh? I’ll confess to you that I’ve increased the odds; I’ve made it three to one.”

Vandeuvres looked very much put out.

“No, no, I don’t want you to do that. Put it at two to one again directly. I shan’t tell you any more, Marechal.”

“Oh, how can it hurt, Monsieur le Comte, at this time o’ day?” rejoined the other with the humble smile befitting an accomplice. “I had to attract the people so as to lay your two thousand louis.”

At this Vandeuvres silenced him. But as he was going off Marechal remembered something and was sorry he had not questioned him about the shortening of the odds on the filly. It would be a nice business for him if the filly stood a chance, seeing that he had just laid fifty to one about her in two hundreds.

Nana, though she did not understand a word of what the count was whispering, dared not, however, ask for new explanations. He seemed more nervous than before and abruptly handed her over to Labordette, whom they came upon in front of the weighing-in room.

“You’ll take her back,” he said. “I’ve got something on hand. Au revoir!”

And he entered the room, which was narrow and low-pitched and half filled with a great pair of scales. It was like a waiting room in a suburban station, and Nana was again hugely disillusioned, for she had been picturing to herself something on a very vast scale, a monumental machine, in fact, for weighing horses. Dear me, they only weighed the jockeys! Then it wasn’t worth while making such a fuss with their weighing! In the scale a jockey with an idiotic expression was waiting, harness on knee, till a stout man in a frock coat should have done verifying his weight. At the door a stable help was holding a horse, Cosinus, round which a silent and deeply interested throng was clustering.

The course was about to be cleared. Labordette hurried Nana but retraced his steps in order to show her a little man talking with Vandeuvres at some distance from the rest.

“Dear me, there’s Price!” he said.

“Ah yes, the man who’s mounting me,” she murmured laughingly.

And she declared him to be exquisitely ugly. All jockeys struck her as looking idiotic, doubtless, she said, because they were prevented from growing bigger. This particular jockey was a man of forty, and with his long, thin, deeply furrowed, hard, dead countenance, he looked like an old shriveled-up child. His body was knotty and so reduced in size that his blue jacket with its white sleeves looked as if it had been thrown over a lay figure.

“No,” she resumed as she walked away, “he would never make me very happy, you know.”

A mob of people were still crowding the course, the turf of which had been wet and trampled on till it had grown black. In front of the two telegraphs, which hung very high up on their cast-iron pillars, the crowd were jostling together with upturned faces, uproariously greeting the numbers of the different horses as an electric wire in connection with the weighing room made them appear. Gentlemen were pointing at programs: Pichenette had been scratched by his owner, and this caused some noise. However, Nana did not do more than cross over the course on Labordette’s arm. The bell hanging on the flagstaff was ringing persistently to warn people to leave the course.

“Ah, my little dears,” she said as she got up into her landau again, “their enclosure’s all humbug!”

She was welcomed with acclamation; people around her clapped their hands.

“Bravo, Nana! Nana’s ours again!”

What idiots they were, to be sure! Did they think she was the sort to cut old friends? She had come back just at the auspicious moment. Now then, ‘tenshun! The race was beginning! And the champagne was accordingly forgotten, and everyone left off drinking.

But Nana was astonished to find Gaga in her carriage, sitting with Bijou and Louiset on her knees. Gaga had indeed decided on this course of action in order to be near La Faloise, but she told Nana that she had been anxious to kiss Baby. She adored children.

“By the by, what about Lili?” asked Nana. “That’s certainly she over there in that old fellow’s brougham. They’ve just told me something very nice!”

Gaga had adopted a lachrymose expression.

“My dear, it’s made me ill,” she said dolorously. “Yesterday I had to keep my bed, I cried so, and today I didn’t think I should be able to come. You know what my opinions were, don’t you? I didn’t desire that kind of thing at all. I had her educated in a convent with a view to a good marriage. And then to think of the strict advice she had and the constant watching! Well, my dear, it was she who wished it. We had such a scene — tears — disagreeable speeches! It even got to such a point that I caught her a box on the ear. She was too much bored by existence, she said; she wanted to get out of it. By and by, when she began to say, ‘‘Tisn’t you, after all, who’ve got the right to prevent me,’ I said to her: ‘you’re a miserable wretch; you’re bringing dishonor upon us. Begone!’ And it was done. I consented to arrange about it. But my last hope’s blooming well blasted, and, oh, I used to dream about such nice things!”

The noise of a quarrel caused them to rise. It was Georges in the act of defending Vandeuvres against certain vague rumors which were circulating among the various groups.

“Why should you say that he’s laying off his own horse?” the young man was exclaiming. “Yesterday in the Salon des Courses he took the odds on Lusignan for a thousand louis.”

“Yes, I was there,” said Philippe in affirmation of this. “And he didn’t put a single louis on Nana. If the betting’s ten to one against Nana he’s got nothing to win there. It’s absurd to imagine people are so calculating. Where would his interest come in?”

Labordette was listening with a quiet expression. Shrugging his shoulders, he said:

“Oh, leave them alone; they must have their say. The count has again laid at least as much as five hundred louis on Lusignan, and if he’s wanted Nana to run to a hundred louis it’s because an owner ought always to look as if he believes in his horses.”

“Oh, bosh! What the deuce does that matter to us?” shouted La Faloise with a wave of his arms. “Spirit’s going to win! Down with France — bravo, England!”

A long shiver ran through the crowd, while a fresh peal from the bell announced the arrival of the horses upon the racecourse. At this Nana got up and stood on one of the seats of her carriage so as to obtain a better view, and in so doing she trampled the bouquets of roses and myosotis underfoot. With a sweeping glance she took in the wide, vast horizon. At this last feverish moment the course was empty and closed by gray barriers, between the posts of which stood a line of policemen. The strip of grass which lay muddy in front of her grew brighter as it stretched away and turned into a tender green carpet in the distance. In the middle landscape, as she lowered her eyes, she saw the field swarming with vast numbers of people, some on tiptoe, others perched on carriages, and all heaving and jostling in sudden passionate excitement.

Horses were neighing; tent canvases flapped, while equestrians urged their hacks forward amid a crowd of pedestrians rushing to get places along the barriers. When Nana turned in the direction of the stands on the other side the faces seemed diminished, and the dense masses of heads were only a confused and motley array, filling gangways, steps and terraces and looming in deep, dark, serried lines against the sky. And beyond these again she over looked the plain surrounding the course. Behind the ivy-clad mill to the right, meadows, dotted over with great patches of umbrageous wood, stretched away into the distance, while opposite to her, as far as the Seine flowing at the foot of a hill, the avenues of the park intersected one another, filled at that moment with long, motionless files of waiting carriages; and in the direction of Boulogne, on the left, the landscape widened anew and opened out toward the blue distances of Meudon through an avenue of paulownias, whose rosy, leafless tops were one stain of brilliant lake color. People were still arriving, and a long procession of human ants kept coming along the narrow ribbon of road which crossed the distance, while very far away, on the Paris side, the nonpaying public, herding like sheep among the wood, loomed in a moving line of little dark spots under the trees on the skirts of the Bois.

Suddenly a cheering influence warmed the hundred thousand souls who covered this part of the plain like insects swarming madly under the vast expanse of heaven. The sun, which had been hidden for about a quarter of an hour, made his appearance again and shone out amid a perfect sea of light. And everything flamed afresh: the women’s sunshades turned into countless golden targets above the heads of the crowd. The sun was applauded, saluted with bursts of laughter. And people stretched their arms out as though to brush apart the clouds.

Meanwhile a solitary police officer advanced down the middle of the deserted racecourse, while higher up, on the left, a man appeared with a red flag in his hand.

“It’s the starter, the Baron de Mauriac,” said Labordette in reply to a question from Nana. All round the young woman exclamations were bursting from the men who were pressing to her very carriage step. They kept up a disconnected conversation, jerking out phrases under the immediate influence of passing impressions. Indeed, Philippe and Georges, Bordenave and La Faloise, could not be quiet.

“Don’t shove! Let me see! Ah, the judge is getting into his box. D’you say it’s Monsieur de Souvigny? You must have good eyesight — eh? — to be able to tell what half a head is out of a fakement like that! Do hold your tongue — the banner’s going up. Here they are — ‘tenshun! Cosinus is the first!”

A red and yellow banner was flapping in mid-air at the top of a mast. The horses came on the course one by one; they were led by stableboys, and the jockeys were sitting idle-handed in the saddles, the sunlight making them look like bright dabs of color. After Cosinus appeared Hazard and Boum. Presently a murmur of approval greeted Spirit, a magnificent big brown bay, the harsh citron color and black of whose jockey were cheerlessly Britannic. Valerio II scored a success as he came in; he was small and very lively, and his colors were soft green bordered with pink. The two Vandeuvres horses were slow to make their appearance, but at last, in Frangipane’s rear, the blue and white showed themselves. But Lusignan, a very dark bay of irreproachable shape, was almost forgotten amid the astonishment caused by Nana. People had not seen her looking like this before, for now the sudden sunlight was dyeing the chestnut filly the brilliant color of a girl’s red-gold hair. She was shining in the light like a new gold coin; her chest was deep; her head and neck tapered lightly from the delicate, high-strung line of her long back.