It was rice powder, which she plastered on her delicate satin-like skin with perverse taste.
He caught up the paper bag and rubbed it over her face violently enough to graze her skin and called her a miller’s daughter.
On another occasion she brought some ribbon home, to do up her old black hat which she was so ashamed of.
He asked her in a furious voice where she had got those ribbons from.
Had she earned them by lying on her back or had she bagged them somewhere?
A hussy or a thief, and perhaps both by now?
More than once he found her with some pretty little doodad.
She had found a little interlaced heart in the street on Rue d’Aboukir.
Her father crushed the heart under his foot, driving her to the verge of throwing herself at him to ruin something of his.
For two years she had been longing for one of those hearts, and now he had smashed it!
This was too much, she was reaching the end of the line with him.
Coupeau was often in the wrong in the manner in which he tried to rule Nana.
His injustice exasperated her.
She at last left off attending the workshop and when the zinc-worker gave her a hiding, she declared she would not return to Titreville’s again, for she was always placed next to Augustine, who must have swallowed her feet to have such a foul breath.
Then Coupeau took her himself to the Rue du Caire and requested the mistress of the establishment to place her always next to Augustine, by way of punishment.
Every morning for a fortnight he took the trouble to come down from the Barriere Poissonniere to escort Nana to the door of the flower shop. And he remained for five minutes on the footway, to make sure that she had gone in.
But one morning while he was drinking a glass with a friend in a wineshop in the Rue Saint-Denis, he perceived the hussy darting down the street.
For a fortnight she had been deceiving him; instead of going into the workroom, she climbed a story higher, and sat down on the stairs, waiting till he had gone off.
When Coupeau began casting the blame on Madame Lerat, the latter flatly replied that she would not accept it. She had told her niece all she ought to tell her, to keep her on her guard against men, and it was not her fault if the girl still had a liking for the nasty beasts. Now, she washed her hands of the whole business; she swore she would not mix up in it, for she knew what she knew about scandalmongers in her own family, yes, certain persons who had the nerve to accuse her of going astray with Nana and finding an indecent pleasure in watching her take her first misstep.
Then Coupeau found out from the proprietress that Nana was being corrupted by that little floozie Leonie, who had given up flower-making to go on the street.
Nana was being tempted by the jingle of cash and the lure of adventure on the streets.
In the tenement in the Rue de la Goutte-d’Or, Nana’s old fellow was talked about as a gentleman everyone was acquainted with.
Oh! he remained very polite, even a little timid, but awfully obstinate and patient, following her ten paces behind like an obedient poodle.
Sometimes, indeed, he ventured into the courtyard.
One evening, Madame Gaudron met him on the second floor landing, and he glided down alongside the balusters with his nose lowered and looking as if on fire, but frightened.
The Lorilleuxs threatened to move out if that wayward niece of theirs brought men trailing in after her.
It was disgusting. The staircase was full of them.
The Boches said that they felt sympathy for the old gentleman because he had fallen for a tramp.
He was really a respectable businessman, they had seen his button factory on the Boulevard de la Villette.
He would be an excellent catch for a decent girl.
For the first month Nana was greatly amused with her old flirt.
You should have seen him always dogging her — a perfect great nuisance, who followed far behind, in the crowd, without seeming to do so.
And his legs!
Regular lucifers.
No more moss on his pate, only four straight hairs falling on his neck, so that she was always tempted to ask him where his hairdresser lived.
Ah! what an old gaffer, he was comical and no mistake, nothing to get excited over.
Then, on finding him always behind her, she no longer thought him so funny.
She became afraid of him and would have called out if he had approached her.
Often, when she stopped in front of a jeweler’s shop, she heard him stammering something behind her.
And what he said was true; she would have liked to have had a cross with a velvet neck-band, or a pair of coral earrings, so small you would have thought they were drops of blood.
More and more, as she plodded through the mire of the streets, getting splashed by passing vehicles and being dazzled by the magnificence of the window displays, she felt longings that tortured her like hunger pangs, yearnings for better clothes, for eating in restaurants, for going to the theatre, for a room of her own with nice furniture.
Right at those moments, it never failed that her old gentleman would come up to whisper something in her ear.
Oh, if only she wasn’t afraid of him, how readily she would have taken up with him.
When the winter arrived, life became impossible at home.
Nana had her hiding every night.
When her father was tired of beating her, her mother smacked her to teach her how to behave.
And there were free-for-alls; as soon as one of them began to beat her, the other took her part, so that all three of them ended by rolling on the floor in the midst of the broken crockery.
And with all this, there were short rations and they shivered with cold.
Whenever the girl bought anything pretty, a bow or a pair of buttons, her parents confiscated the purchase and drank what they could get for it.
She had nothing of her own, excepting her allowance of blows, before coiling herself up between the rags of a sheet, where she shivered under her little black skirt, which she stretched out by way of a blanket.