Four Short Stories By Emile Zola eBook

Émile Gaboriau
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 771 pages of information about Four Short Stories By Emile Zola.

Four Short Stories By Emile Zola eBook

Émile Gaboriau
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 771 pages of information about Four Short Stories By Emile Zola.

When he reached the foot of the stairs the count once more felt the hot breath upon his neck and shoulders.  As of old it was laden with the odor of women, wafted amid floods of light and sound from the dressing rooms above, and now with every upward step he took the musky scent of powders and the tart perfume of toilet vinegars heated and bewildered him more and more.  On the first floor two corridors ran backward, branching sharply off and presenting a set of doors to view which were painted yellow and numbered with great white numerals in such a way as to suggest a hotel with a bad reputation.  The tiles on the floor had been many of them unbedded, and the old house being in a state of subsidence, they stuck up like hummocks.  The count dashed recklessly forward, glanced through a half-open door and saw a very dirty room which resembled a barber’s shop in a poor part of the town.  In was furnished with two chairs, a mirror and a small table containing a drawer which had been blackened by the grease from brushes and combs.  A great perspiring fellow with smoking shoulders was changing his linen there, while in a similar room next door a woman was drawing on her gloves preparatory to departure.  Her hair was damp and out of curl, as though she had just had a bath.  But Fauchery began calling the count, and the latter was rushing up without delay when a furious “damn!” burst from the corridor on the right.  Mathilde, a little drab of a miss, had just broken her washhand basin, the soapy water from which was flowing out to the stairhead.  A dressing room door banged noisily.  Two women in their stays skipped across the passage, and another, with the hem of her shift in her mouth, appeared and immediately vanished from view.  Then followed a sound of laughter, a dispute, the snatch of a song which was suddenly broken off short.  All along the passage naked gleams, sudden visions of white skin and wan underlinen were observable through chinks in doorways.  Two girls were making very merry, showing each other their birthmarks.  One of them, a very young girl, almost a child, had drawn her skirts up over her knees in order to sew up a rent in her drawers, and the dressers, catching sight of the two men, drew some curtains half to for decency’s sake.  The wild stampede which follows the end of a play had already begun, the grand removal of white paint and rouge, the reassumption amid clouds of rice powder of ordinary attire.  The strange animal scent came in whiffs of redoubled intensity through the lines of banging doors.  On the third story Muffat abandoned himself to the feeling of intoxication which was overpowering him.  For the chorus girls’ dressing room was there, and you saw a crowd of twenty women and a wild display of soaps and flasks of lavender water.  The place resembled the common room in a slum lodging house.  As he passed by he heard fierce sounds of washing behind a closed door and a perfect storm raging in a washhand basin.  And as he was mounting up to the topmost story of all,

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Project Gutenberg
Four Short Stories By Emile Zola from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.