"Oh, take care! That mast just missed crushing you!"

And he carried him off and shook him before setting him down again. In view of the sceneshifters' exaggerated mirth, Fauchery grew white. His lips trembled, and he was ready to flare up in anger while Mignon, shamming good nature, was clapping him on the shoulder with such affectionate violence as nearly to pulverize him.

"I value your health, I do!" he kept repeating. "Egad! I should be in a pretty pickle if anything serious happened to you!"

But just then a whisper ran through their midst: "The prince! The prince!" And everybody turned and looked at the little door which opened out of the main body of the house. At first nothing was visible save Bordenave's round back and beefy neck, which bobbed down and arched up in a series of obsequious obeisances. Then the prince made his appearance. Largely and strongly built, light of beard and rosy of hue, he was not lacking in the kind of distinction peculiar to a sturdy man of pleasure, the square contours of whose limbs are clearly defined by the irreproachable cut of a frock coat. Behind him walked Count Muffat and the Marquis de Chouard, but this particular corner of the theater being dark, the group were lost to view amid huge moving shadows.

In order fittingly to address the son of a queen, who would someday occupy a throne, Bordenave had assumed the tone of a man exhibiting a bear in the street. In a voice tremulous with false emotion he kept repeating:

"If His Highness will have the goodness to follow me—would His Highness deign to come this way? His Highness will take care!"

The prince did not hurry in the least. On the contrary, he was greatly interested and kept pausing in order to look at the sceneshifters' maneuvers. A batten had just been lowered, and the group of gaslights high up among its iron crossbars illuminated the stage with a wide beam of light. Muffat, who had never yet been behind scenes at a theater, was even more astonished than the rest. An uneasy feeling of mingled fear and vague repugnance took possession of him. He looked up into the heights above him, where more battens, the gas jets on which were burning low, gleamed like galaxies of little bluish stars amid a chaos of iron rods, connecting lines of all sizes, hanging stages and canvases spread out in space, like huge cloths hung out to dry.

"Lower away!" shouted the foreman unexpectedly.

And the prince himself had to warn the count, for a canvas was descending. They were setting the scenery for the third act, which was the grotto on Mount Etna. Men were busy planting masts in the sockets, while others went and took frames which were leaning against the walls of the stage and proceeded to lash them with strong cords to the poles already in position. At the back of the stage, with a view to producing the bright rays thrown by Vulcan's glowing forge, a stand had been fixed by a limelight man, who was now lighting various burners under red glasses. The scene was one of confusion, verging to all appearances on absolute chaos, but every little move had been prearranged. Nay, amid all the scurry the whistle blower even took a few turns, stepping short as he did so, in order to rest his legs.

"His Highness overwhelms me," said Bordenave, still bowing low. "The theater is not large, but we do what we can. Now if His Highness deigns to follow me—"

Count Muffat was already making for the dressing-room passage. The really sharp downward slope of the stage had surprised him disagreeably, and he owed no small part of his present anxiety to a feeling that its boards were moving under his feet. Through the open sockets gas was descried burning in the "dock." Human voices and blasts of air, as from a vault, came up thence, and, looking down into the depths of gloom, one became aware of a whole subterranean existence. But just as the count was going up the stage a small incident occurred to stop him. Two little women, dressed for the third act, were chatting by the peephole in the curtain. One of them, straining forward and widening the hole with her fingers in order the better to observe things, was scanning the house beyond.

"I see him," said she sharply. "Oh, what a mug!"

Horrified, Bordenave had much ado not to give her a kick. But the prince smiled and looked pleased and excited by the remark. He gazed warmly at the little woman who did not care a button for His Highness, and she, on her part, laughed unblushingly. Bordenave, however, persuaded the prince to follow him. Muffat was beginning to perspire; he had taken his hat off. What inconvenienced him most was the stuffy, dense, overheated air of the place with its strong, haunting smell, a smell peculiar to this part of a theater, and, as such, compact of the reek of gas, of the glue used in the manufacture of the scenery, of dirty dark nooks and corners and of questionably clean chorus girls. In the passage the air was still more suffocating, and one seemed to breathe a poisoned atmosphere, which was occasionally relieved by the acid scents of toilet waters and the perfumes of various soaps emanating from the dressing rooms. The count lifted his eyes as he passed and glanced up the staircase, for he was well-nigh startled by the keen flood of light and warmth which flowed down upon his back and shoulders. High up above him there was a clicking of ewers and basins, a sound of laughter and of people calling to one another, a banging of doors, which in their continual opening and shutting allowed an odor of womankind to escape—a musky scent of oils and essences mingling with the natural pungency exhaled from human tresses. He did not stop. Nay, he hastened his walk: he almost ran, his skin tingling with the breath of that fiery approach to a world he knew nothing of.

"A theater's a curious sight, eh?" said the Marquis de Chouard with the enchanted expression of a man who once more finds himself amid familiar surroundings.

But Bordenave had at length reached Nana's dressing room at the end of the passage. He quietly turned the door handle; then, cringing again:

"If His Highness will have the goodness to enter—"

They heard the cry of a startled woman and caught sight of Nana as, stripped to the waist, she slipped behind a curtain while her dresser, who had been in the act of drying her, stood, towel in air, before them.

"Oh, it IS silly to come in that way!" cried Nana from her hiding place. "Don't come in; you see you mustn't come in!"

Bordenave did not seem to relish this sudden flight.

"Do stay where you were, my dear. Why, it doesn't matter," he said. "It's His Highness. Come, come, don't be childish."

And when she still refused to make her appearance—for she was startled as yet, though she had begun to laugh—he added in peevish, paternal tones:

"Good heavens, these gentlemen know perfectly well what a woman looks like. They won't eat you."

"I'm not so sure of that," said the prince wittily.

With that the whole company began laughing in an exaggerated manner in order to pay him proper court.

"An exquisitely witty speech—an altogether Parisian speech," as Bordenave remarked.

Nana vouchsafed no further reply, but the curtain began moving. Doubtless she was making up her mind. Then Count Muffat, with glowing cheeks, began to take stock of the dressing room. It was a square room with a very low ceiling, and it was entirely hung with a light-colored Havana stuff. A curtain of the same material depended from a copper rod and formed a sort of recess at the end of the room, while two large windows opened on the courtyard of the theater and were faced, at a distance of three yards at most, by a leprous-looking wall against which the panes cast squares of yellow light amid the surrounding darkness. A large dressing glass faced a white marble toilet table, which was garnished with a disorderly array of flasks and glass boxes containing oils, essences and powders. The count went up to the dressing glass and discovered that he was looking very flushed and had small drops of perspiration on his forehead. He dropped his eyes and came and took up a position in front of the toilet table, where the basin, full of soapy water, the small, scattered, ivory toilet utensils and the damp sponges, appeared for some moments to absorb his attention. The feeling of dizziness which he had experienced when he first visited Nana in the Boulevard Haussmann once more overcame him. He felt the thick carpet soften under foot, and the gasjets burning by the dressing table and by the glass seemed to shoot whistling flames about his temples. For one moment, being afraid of fainting away under the influence of those feminine odors which he now re-encountered, intensified by the heat under the low-pitched ceiling, he sat down on the edge of a softly padded divan between the two windows. But he got up again almost directly and, returning to the dressing table, seemed to gaze with vacant eyes into space, for he was thinking of a bouquet of tuberoses which had once faded in his bedroom and had nearly killed him in their death. When tuberoses are turning brown they have a human smell.

"Make haste!" Bordenave whispered, putting his head in behind the curtain.

The prince, however, was listening complaisantly to the Marquis de Chouard, who had taken up a hare's-foot on the dressing table and had begun explaining the way grease paint is put on. In a corner of the room Satin, with her pure, virginal face, was scanning the gentlemen keenly, while the dresser, Mme Jules by name, was getting ready Venus' tights and tunic. Mme Jules was a woman of no age. She had the parchment skin and changeless features peculiar to old maids whom no one ever knew in their younger years. She had indeed shriveled up in the burning atmosphere of the dressing rooms and amid the most famous thighs and bosoms in all Paris. She wore everlastingly a faded black dress, and on her flat and sexless chest a perfect forest of pins clustered above the spot where her heart should have been.

"I beg your pardon, gentlemen," said Nana, drawing aside the curtain, "but you took me by surprise."

They all turned round. She had not clothed herself at all, had, in fact, only buttoned on a little pair of linen stays which half revealed her bosom. When the gentlemen had put her to flight she had scarcely begun undressing and was rapidly taking off her fishwife's costume. Through the opening in her drawers behind a corner of her shift was even now visible. There she stood, bare-armed, bare-shouldered, bare-breasted, in all the adorable glory of her youth and plump, fair beauty, but she still held the curtain with one hand, as though ready to draw it to again upon the slightest provocation.

"Yes, you took me by surprise! I never shall dare—" she stammered in pretty, mock confusion, while rosy blushes crossed her neck and shoulders and smiles of embarrassment played about her lips.

"Oh, don't apologize," cried Bordenave, "since these gentlemen approve of your good looks!"

But she still tried the hesitating, innocent, girlish game, and, shivering as though someone were tickling her, she continued:

"His Highness does me too great an honor. I beg His Highness will excuse my receiving him thus—"

"It is I who am importunate," said the prince, "but, madame, I could not resist the desire of complimenting you."

Thereupon, in order to reach her dressing table, she walked very quietly and just as she was through the midst of the gentlemen, who made way for her to pass.

She had strongly marked hips, which filled her drawers out roundly, while with swelling bosom she still continued bowing and smiling her delicate little smile. Suddenly she seemed to recognize Count Muffat, and she extended her hand to him as an old friend. Then she scolded him for not having come to her supper party. His Highness deigned to chaff Muffat about this, and the latter stammered and thrilled again at the thought that for one second he had held in his own feverish clasp a little fresh and perfumed hand. The count had dined excellently at the prince's, who, indeed, was a heroic eater and drinker. Both of them were even a little intoxicated, but they behaved very creditably. To hide the commotion within him Muffat could only remark about the heat.

"Good heavens, how hot it is here!" he said. "How do you manage to live in such a temperature, madame?"

And conversation was about to ensue on this topic when noisy voices were heard at the dressing-room door. Bordenave drew back the slide over a grated peephole of the kind used in convents. Fontan was outside with Prulliere and Bosc, and all three had bottles under their arms and their hands full of glasses. He began knocking and shouting out that it was his patron saint's day and that he was standing champagne round. Nana consulted the prince with a glance. Eh! Oh dear, yes! His Highness did not want to be in anyone's way; he would be only too happy! But without waiting for permission Fontan came in, repeating in baby accents:

"Me not a cad, me pay for champagne!"

Then all of a sudden he became aware of the prince's presence of which he had been totally ignorant. He stopped short and, assuming an air of farcical solemnity, announced:

"King Dagobert is in the corridor and is desirous of drinking the health of His Royal Highness."

The prince having made answer with a smile, Fontan's sally was voted charming. But the dressing room was too small to accommodate everybody, and it became necessary to crowd up anyhow, Satin and Mme Jules standing back against the curtain at the end and the men clustering closely round the half-naked Nana. The three actors still had on the costumes they had been wearing in the second act, and while Prulliere took off his Alpine admiral's cocked hat, the huge plume of which would have knocked the ceiling, Bosc, in his purple cloak and tinware crown, steadied himself on his tipsy old legs and greeted the prince as became a monarch receiving the son of a powerful neighbor. The glasses were filled, and the company began clinking them together.

"I drink to Your Highness!" said ancient Bosc royally.

"To the army!" added Prulliere.

"To Venus!" cried Fontan.

The prince complaisantly poised his glass, waited quietly, bowed thrice and murmured:

"Madame! Admiral! Your Majesty!"

Then he drank it off. Count Muffat and the Marquis de Chouard had followed his example. There was no more jesting now—the company were at court. Actual life was prolonged in the life of the theater, and a sort of solemn farce was enacted under the hot flare of the gas. Nana, quite forgetting that she was in her drawers and that a corner of her shift stuck out behind, became the great lady, the queen of love, in act to open her most private palace chambers to state dignitaries. In every sentence she used the words "Royal Highness" and, bowing with the utmost conviction, treated the masqueraders, Bosc and Prulliere, as if the one were a sovereign and the other his attendant minister. And no one dreamed of smiling at this strange contrast, this real prince, this heir to a throne, drinking a petty actor's champagne and taking his ease amid a carnival of gods, a masquerade of royalty, in the society of dressers and courtesans, shabby players and showmen of venal beauty. Bordenave was simply ravished by the dramatic aspects of the scene and began dreaming of the receipts which would have accrued had His Highness only consented thus to appear in the second act of the Blonde Venus.

"I say, shall we have our little women down?" he cried, becoming familiar.

Nana would not hear of it. But notwithstanding this, she was giving way herself. Fontan attracted her with his comic make-up. She brushed against him and, eying him as a woman in the family way might do when she fancies some unpleasant kind of food, she suddenly became extremely familiar:

"Now then, fill up again, ye great brute!"

Fontan charged the glasses afresh, and the company drank, repeating the same toasts.

"To His Highness!"

"To the army!"

"To Venus!"

But with that Nana made a sign and obtained silence. She raised her glass and cried:

"No, no! To Fontan! It's Fontan's day; to Fontan! To Fontan!"

Then they clinked glasses a third time and drank Fontan with all the honors. The prince, who had noticed the young woman devouring the actor with her eyes, saluted him with a "Monsieur Fontan, I drink to your success!" This he said with his customary courtesy.

But meanwhile the tail of his highness's frock coat was sweeping the marble of the dressing table. The place, indeed, was like an alcove or narrow bathroom, full as it was of the steam of hot water and sponges and of the strong scent of essences which mingled with the tartish, intoxicating fumes of the champagne. The prince and Count Muffat, between whom Nana was wedged, had to lift up their hands so as not to brush against her hips or her breast with every little movement. And there stood Mme Jules, waiting, cool and rigid as ever, while Satin, marveling in the depths of her vicious soul to see a prince and two gentlemen in black coats going after a naked woman in the society of dressed-up actors, secretly concluded that fashionable people were not so very particular after all.

But Father Barillot's tinkling bell approached along the passage. At the door of the dressing room he stood amazed when he caught sight of the three actors still clad in the costumes which they had worn in the second act.

"Gentlemen, gentlemen," he stammered, "do please make haste. They've just rung the bell in the public foyer."

"Bah, the public will have to wait!" said Bordenave placidly.

However, as the bottles were now empty, the comedians went upstairs to dress after yet another interchange of civilities. Bosc, having dipped his beard in the champagne, had taken it off, and under his venerable disguise the drunkard had suddenly reappeared. His was the haggard, empurpled face of the old actor who has taken to drink. At the foot of the stairs he was heard remarking to Fontan in his boozy voice:

"I pulverized him, eh?"

He was alluding to the prince.

In Nana's dressing room none now remained save His Highness, the count and the marquis. Bordenave had withdrawn with Barillot, whom he advised not to knock without first letting Madame know.

"You will excuse me, gentlemen?" asked Nana, again setting to work to make up her arms and face, of which she was now particularly careful, owing to her nude appearance in the third act.

The prince seated himself by the Marquis de Chouard on the divan, and Count Muffat alone remained standing. In that suffocating heat the two glasses of champagne they had drunk had increased their intoxication. Satin, when she saw the gentlemen thus closeting themselves with her friend, had deemed it discreet to vanish behind the curtain, where she sat waiting on a trunk, much annoyed at being compelled to remain motionless, while Mme Jules came and went quietly without word or look.

"You sang your numbers marvelously," said the prince.

And with that they began a conversation, but their sentences were short and their pauses frequent. Nana, indeed, was not always able to reply. After rubbing cold cream over her arms and face with the palm of her hand she laid on the grease paint with the corner of a towel. For one second only she ceased looking in the glass and smilingly stole a glance at the prince.

"His Highness is spoiling me," she murmured without putting down the grease paint.

Her task was a complicated one, and the Marquis de Chouard followed it with an expression of devout enjoyment. He spoke in his turn.

"Could not the band accompany you more softly?" he said. "It drowns your voice, and that's an unpardonable crime."

This time Nana did not turn round. She had taken up the hare's-foot and was lightly manipulating it. All her attention was concentrated on this action, and she bent forward over her toilet table so very far that the white round contour of her drawers and the little patch of chemise stood out with the unwonted tension. But she was anxious to prove that she appreciated the old man's compliment and therefore made a little swinging movement with her hips.

Silence reigned. Mme Jules had noticed a tear in the right leg of her drawers. She took a pin from over her heart and for a second or so knelt on the ground, busily at work about Nana's leg, while the young woman, without seeming to notice her presence, applied the rice powder, taking extreme pains as she did so, to avoid putting any on the upper part of her cheeks. But when the prince remarked that if she were to come and sing in London all England would want to applaud her, she laughed amiably and turned round for a moment with her left cheek looking very white amid a perfect cloud of powder. Then she became suddenly serious, for she had come to the operation of rouging. And with her face once more close to the mirror, she dipped her finger in a jar and began applying the rouge below her eyes and gently spreading it back toward her temples. The gentlemen maintained a respectful silence.

Count Muffat, indeed, had not yet opened his lips. He was thinking perforce of his own youth. The bedroom of his childish days had been quite cold, and later, when he had reached the age of sixteen and would give his mother a good-night kiss every evening, he used to carry the icy feeling of the embrace into the world of dreams. One day in passing a half-open door he had caught sight of a maidservant washing herself, and that was the solitary recollection which had in any way troubled his peace of mind from the days of puberty till the time of marriage. Afterward he had found his wife strictly obedient to her conjugal duties but had himself felt a species of religious dislike to them. He had grown to man's estate and was now aging, in ignorance of the flesh, in the humble observance of rigid devotional practices and in obedience to a rule of life full of precepts and moral laws. And now suddenly he was dropped down in this actress's dressing room in the presence of this undraped courtesan.

He, who had never seen the Countess Muffat putting on her garters, was witnessing, amid that wild disarray of jars and basins and that strong, sweet perfume, the intimate details of a woman's toilet. His whole being was in turmoil; he was terrified by the stealthy, all-pervading influence which for some time past Nana's presence had been exercising over him, and he recalled to mind the pious accounts of diabolic possession which had amused his early years. He was a believer in the devil, and, in a confused kind of way, Nana was he, with her laughter and her bosom and her hips, which seemed swollen with many vices. But he promised himself that he would be strong—nay, he would know how to defend himself.

"Well then, it's agreed," said the prince, lounging quite comfortably on the divan. "You will come to London next year, and we shall receive you so cordially that you will never return to France again. Ah, my dear Count, you don't value your pretty women enough. We shall take them all from you!"

"That won't make much odds to him," murmured the Marquis de Chouard wickedly, for he occasionally said a risky thing among friends. "The count is virtue itself."

Hearing his virtue mentioned, Nana looked at him so comically that Muffat felt a keen twinge of annoyance. But directly afterward he was surprised and angry with himself. Why, in the presence of this courtesan, should the idea of being virtuous embarrass him? He could have struck her. But in attempting to take up a brush Nana had just let it drop on the ground, and as she stooped to pick it up he rushed forward. Their breath mingled for one moment, and the loosened tresses of Venus flowed over his hands. But remorse mingled with his enjoyment, a kind of enjoyment, moreover, peculiar to good Catholics, whom the fear of hell torments in the midst of their sin.

At this moment Father Barillot's voice was heard outside the door.

"May I give the knocks, madame? The house is growing impatient."

"All in good time," answered Nana quietly.

She had dipped her paint brush in a pot of kohl, and with the point of her nose close to the glass and her left eye closed she passed it delicately along between her eyelashes. Muffat stood behind her, looking on. He saw her reflection in the mirror, with her rounded shoulders and her bosom half hidden by a rosy shadow. And despite all his endeavors he could not turn away his gaze from that face so merry with dimples and so worn with desire, which the closed eye rendered more seductive. When she shut her right eye and passed the brush along it he understood that he belonged to her.

"They are stamping their feet, madame," the callboy once more cried. "They'll end by smashing the seats. May I give the knocks?"

"Oh, bother!" said Nana impatiently. "Knock away; I don't care! If I'm not ready, well, they'll have to wait for me!"

She grew calm again and, turning to the gentlemen, added with a smile:

"It's true: we've only got a minute left for our talk."

Her face and arms were now finished, and with her fingers she put two large dabs of carmine on her lips. Count Muffat felt more excited than ever. He was ravished by the perverse transformation wrought by powders and paints and filled by a lawless yearning for those young painted charms, for the too-red mouth and the too-white face and the exaggerated eyes, ringed round with black and burning and dying for very love. Meanwhile Nana went behind the curtain for a second or two in order to take off her drawers and slip on Venus' tights. After which, with tranquil immodesty, she came out and undid her little linen stays and held out her arms to Mme Jules, who drew the short-sleeved tunic over them.

"Make haste; they're growing angry!" she muttered.

The prince with half-closed eyes marked the swelling lines of her bosom with an air of connoisseurship, while the Marquis de Chouard wagged his head involuntarily. Muffat gazed at the carpet in order not to see any more. At length Venus, with only her gauze veil over her shoulders, was ready to go on the stage. Mme Jules, with vacant, unconcerned eyes and an expression suggestive of a little elderly wooden doll, still kept circling round her. With brisk movements she took pins out of the inexhaustible pincushion over her heart and pinned up Venus' tunic, but as she ran over all those plump nude charms with her shriveled hands, nothing was suggested to her. She was as one whom her sex does not concern.

"There!" said the young woman, taking a final look at herself in the mirror.

Bordenave was back again. He was anxious and said the third act had begun.

"Very well! I'm coming," replied Nana. "Here's a pretty fuss! Why, it's usually I that waits for the others."

The gentlemen left the dressing room, but they did not say good-by, for the prince had expressed a desire to assist behind the scenes at the performance of the third act. Left alone, Nana seemed greatly surprised and looked round her in all directions.

"Where can she be?" she queried.

She was searching for Satin. When she had found her again, waiting on her trunk behind the curtain, Satin quietly replied:

"Certainly I didn't want to be in your way with all those men there!"

And she added further that she was going now. But Nana held her back. What a silly girl she was! Now that Bordenave had agreed to take her on! Why, the bargain was to be struck after the play was over! Satin hesitated. There were too many bothers; she was out of her element! Nevertheless, she stayed.

As the prince was coming down the little wooden staircase a strange sound of smothered oaths and stamping, scuffling feet became audible on the other side of the theater. The actors waiting for their cues were being scared by quite a serious episode. For some seconds past Mignon had been renewing his jokes and smothering Fauchery with caresses. He had at last invented a little game of a novel kind and had begun flicking the other's nose in order, as he phrased it, to keep the flies off him. This kind of game naturally diverted the actors to any extent.

But success had suddenly thrown Mignon off his balance. He had launched forth into extravagant courses and had given the journalist a box on the ear, an actual, a vigorous, box on the ear. This time he had gone too far: in the presence of so many spectators it was impossible for Fauchery to pocket such a blow with laughing equanimity. Whereupon the two men had desisted from their farce, had sprung at one another's throats, their faces livid with hate, and were now rolling over and over behind a set of side lights, pounding away at each other as though they weren't breakable.

"Monsieur Bordenave, Monsieur Bordenave!" said the stage manager, coming up in a terrible flutter.

Bordenave made his excuses to the prince and followed him. When he recognized Fauchery and Mignon in the men on the floor he gave vent to an expression of annoyance. They had chosen a nice time, certainly, with His Highness on the other side of the scenery and all that houseful of people who might have overheard the row! To make matters worse, Rose Mignon arrived out of breath at the very moment she was due on the stage. Vulcan, indeed, was giving her the cue, but Rose stood rooted to the ground, marveling at sight of her husband and her lover as they lay wallowing at her feet, strangling one another, kicking, tearing their hair out and whitening their coats with dust. They barred the way. A sceneshifter had even stopped Fauchery's hat just when the devilish thing was going to bound onto the stage in the middle of the struggle. Meanwhile Vulcan, who had been gagging away to amuse the audience, gave Rose her cue a second time. But she stood motionless, still gazing at the two men.

"Oh, don't look at THEM!" Bordenave furiously whispered to her. "Go on the stage; go on, do! It's no business of yours! Why, you're missing your cue!"

And with a push from the manager, Rose stepped over the prostrate bodies and found herself in the flare of the footlights and in the presence of the audience. She had quite failed to understand why they were fighting on the floor behind her. Trembling from head to foot and with a humming in her ears, she came down to the footlights, Diana's sweet, amorous smile on her lips, and attacked the opening lines of her duet with so feeling a voice that the public gave her a veritable ovation.

Behind the scenery she could hear the dull thuds caused by the two men. They had rolled down to the wings, but fortunately the music covered the noise made by their feet as they kicked against them.

"By God!" yelled Bordenave in exasperation when at last he had succeeded in separating them. "Why couldn't you fight at home? You know as well as I do that I don't like this sort of thing. You, Mignon, you'll do me the pleasure of staying over here on the prompt side, and you, Fauchery, if you leave the O.P. side I'll chuck you out of the theater. You understand, eh? Prompt side and O.P. side or I forbid Rose to bring you here at all."

When he returned to the prince's presence the latter asked what was the matter.

"Oh, nothing at all," he murmured quietly.

Nana was standing wrapped in furs, talking to these gentlemen while awaiting her cue. As Count Muffat was coming up in order to peep between two of the wings at the stage, he understood from a sign made him by the stage manager that he was to step softly. Drowsy warmth was streaming down from the flies, and in the wings, which were lit by vivid patches of light, only a few people remained, talking in low voices or making off on tiptoe. The gasman was at his post amid an intricate arrangement of cocks; a fireman, leaning against the side lights, was craning forward, trying to catch a glimpse of things, while on his seat, high up, the curtain man was watching with resigned expression, careless of the play, constantly on the alert for the bell to ring him to his duty among the ropes. And amid the close air and the shuffling of feet and the sound of whispering, the voices of the actors on the stage sounded strange, deadened, surprisingly discordant. Farther off again, above the confused noises of the band, a vast breathing sound was audible. It was the breath of the house, which sometimes swelled up till it burst in vague rumors, in laughter, in applause. Though invisible, the presence of the public could be felt, even in the silences.

"There's something open," said Nana sharply, and with that she tightened the folds of her fur cloak. "Do look, Barillot. I bet they've just opened a window. Why, one might catch one's death of cold here!"

Barillot swore that he had closed every window himself but suggested that possibly there were broken panes about. The actors were always complaining of drafts. Through the heavy warmth of that gaslit region blasts of cold air were constantly passing—it was a regular influenza trap, as Fontan phrased it.

"I should like to see YOU in a low-cut dress," continued Nana, growing annoyed.

"Hush!" murmured Bordenave.

On the stage Rose rendered a phrase in her duet so cleverly that the stalls burst into universal applause. Nana was silent at this, and her face grew grave. Meanwhile the count was venturing down a passage when Barillot stopped him and said he would make a discovery there. Indeed, he obtained an oblique back view of the scenery and of the wings which had been strengthened, as it were, by a thick layer of old posters. Then he caught sight of a corner of the stage, of the Etna cave hollowed out in a silver mine and of Vulcan's forge in the background. Battens, lowered from above, lit up a sparkling substance which had been laid on with large dabs of the brush. Side lights with red glasses and blue were so placed as to produce the appearance of a fiery brazier, while on the floor of the stage, in the far background, long lines of gaslight had been laid down in order to throw a wall of dark rocks into sharp relief. Hard by on a gentle, "practicable" incline, amid little points of light resembling the illumination lamps scattered about in the grass on the night of a public holiday, old Mme Drouard, who played Juno, was sitting dazed and sleepy, waiting for her cue.

Presently there was a commotion, for Simonne, while listening to a story Clarisse was telling her, cried out:

"My! It's the Tricon!"

It was indeed the Tricon, wearing the same old curls and looking as like a litigious great lady as ever.

When she saw Nana she went straight up to her.

"No," said the latter after some rapid phrases had been exchanged, "not now." The old lady looked grave. Just then Prulliere passed by and shook hands with her, while two little chorus girls stood gazing at her with looks of deep emotion. For a moment she seemed to hesitate. Then she beckoned to Simonne, and the rapid exchange of sentences began again.

"Yes," said Simonne at last. "In half an hour."

But as she was going upstairs again to her dressing room, Mme Bron, who was once more going the rounds with letters, presented one to her. Bordenave lowered his voice and furiously reproached the portress for having allowed the Tricon to come in. That woman! And on such an evening of all others! It made him so angry because His Highness was there! Mme Bron, who had been thirty years in the theater, replied quite sourly. How was she to know? she asked. The Tricon did business with all the ladies—M. le Directeur had met her a score of times without making remarks. And while Bordenave was muttering oaths the Tricon stood quietly by, scrutinizing the prince as became a woman who weighs a man at a glance. A smile lit up her yellow face. Presently she paced slowly off through the crowd of deeply deferential little women.

"Immediately, eh?" she queried, turning round again to Simonne.

Simonne seemed much worried. The letter was from a young man to whom she had engaged herself for that evening. She gave Mme Bron a scribbled note in which were the words, "Impossible tonight, darling—I'm booked." But she was still apprehensive; the young man might possibly wait for her in spite of everything. As she was not playing in the third act, she had a mind to be off at once and accordingly begged Clarisse to go and see if the man were there. Clarisse was only due on the stage toward the end of the act, and so she went downstairs while Simonne ran up for a minute to their common dressing room.

In Mme Bron's drinking bar downstairs a super, who was charged with the part of Pluto, was drinking in solitude amid the folds of a great red robe diapered with golden flames. The little business plied by the good portress must have been progressing finely, for the cellarlike hole under the stairs was wet with emptied heeltaps and water. Clarisse picked up the tunic of Iris, which was dragging over the greasy steps behind her, but she halted prudently at the turn in the stairs and was content simply to crane forward and peer into the lodge. She certainly had been quick to scent things out! Just fancy! That idiot La Faloise was still there, sitting on the same old chair between the table and the stove! He had made pretense of sneaking off in front of Simonne and had returned after her departure. For the matter of that, the lodge was still full of gentlemen who sat there gloved, elegant, submissive and patient as ever. They were all waiting and viewing each other gravely as they waited. On the table there were now only some dirty plates, Mme Bron having recently distributed the last of the bouquets. A single fallen rose was withering on the floor in the neighborhood of the black cat, who had lain down and curled herself up while the kittens ran wild races and danced fierce gallops among the gentlemen's legs. Clarisse was momentarily inclined to turn La Faloise out. The idiot wasn't fond of animals, and that put the finishing touch to him! He was busy drawing in his legs because the cat was there, and he didn't want to touch her.

"He'll nip you; take care!" said Pluto, who was a joker, as he went upstairs, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

After that Clarisse gave up the idea of hauling La Faloise over the coals. She had seen Mme Bron giving the letter to Simonne's young man, and he had gone out to read it under the gas light in the lobby. "Impossible tonight, darling—I'm booked." And with that he had peaceably departed, as one who was doubtless used to the formula. He, at any rate, knew how to conduct himself! Not so the others, the fellows who sat there doggedly on Mme Bron's battered straw-bottomed chairs under the great glazed lantern, where the heat was enough to roast you and there was an unpleasant odor. What a lot of men it must have held! Clarisse went upstairs again in disgust, crossed over behind scenes and nimbly mounted three flights of steps which led to the dressing rooms, in order to bring Simonne her reply.

Downstairs the prince had withdrawn from the rest and stood talking to Nana. He never left her; he stood brooding over her through half-shut eyelids. Nana did not look at him but, smiling, nodded yes. Suddenly, however, Count Muffat obeyed an overmastering impulse, and leaving Bordenave, who was explaining to him the working of the rollers and windlasses, he came up in order to interrupt their confabulations. Nana lifted her eyes and smiled at him as she smiled at His Highness. But she kept her ears open notwithstanding, for she was waiting for her cue.

"The third act is the shortest, I believe," the prince began saying, for the count's presence embarrassed him.

She did not answer; her whole expression altered; she was suddenly intent on her business. With a rapid movement of the shoulders she had let her furs slip from her, and Mme Jules, standing behind, had caught them in her arms. And then after passing her two hands to her hair as though to make it fast, she went on the stage in all her nudity.

"Hush, hush!" whispered Bordenave.

The count and the prince had been taken by surprise. There was profound silence, and then a deep sigh and the far-off murmur of a multitude became audible. Every evening when Venus entered in her godlike nakedness the same effect was produced. Then Muffat was seized with a desire to see; he put his eye to the peephole. Above and beyond the glowing arc formed by the footlights the dark body of the house seemed full of ruddy vapor, and against this neutral-tinted background, where row upon row of faces struck a pale, uncertain note, Nana stood forth white and vast, so that the boxes from the balcony to the flies were blotted from view. He saw her from behind, noted her swelling hips, her outstretched arms, while down on the floor, on the same level as her feet, the prompter's head—an old man's head with a humble, honest face—stood on the edge of the stage, looking as though it had been severed from the body. At certain points in her opening number an undulating movement seemed to run from her neck to her waist and to die out in the trailing border of her tunic. When amid a tempest of applause she had sung her last note she bowed, and the gauze floated forth round about her limbs, and her hair swept over her waist as she bent sharply backward. And seeing her thus, as with bending form and with exaggerated hips she came backing toward the count's peephole, he stood upright again, and his face was very white. The stage had disappeared, and he now saw only the reverse side of the scenery with its display of old posters pasted up in every direction. On the practicable slope, among the lines of gas jets, the whole of Olympus had rejoined the dozing Mme Drouard. They were waiting for the close of the act. Bosc and Fontan sat on the floor with their knees drawn up to their chins, and Prulliere stretched himself and yawned before going on. Everybody was worn out; their eyes were red, and they were longing to go home to sleep.

Just then Fauchery, who had been prowling about on the O.P. side ever since Bordenave had forbidden him the other, came and buttonholed the count in order to keep himself in countenance and offered at the same time to show him the dressing rooms. An increasing sense of languor had left Muffat without any power of resistance, and after looking round for the Marquis de Chouard, who had disappeared, he ended by following the journalist. He experienced a mingled feeling of relief and anxiety as he left the wings whence he had been listening to Nana's songs.

Fauchery had already preceded him up the staircase, which was closed on the first and second floors by low-paneled doors. It was one of those stairways which you find in miserable tenements. Count Muffat had seen many such during his rounds as member of the Benevolent Organization. It was bare and dilapidated: there was a wash of yellow paint on its walls; its steps had been worn by the incessant passage of feet, and its iron balustrade had grown smooth under the friction of many hands. On a level with the floor on every stairhead there was a low window which resembled a deep, square venthole, while in lanterns fastened to the walls flaring gas jets crudely illuminated the surrounding squalor and gave out a glowing heat which, as it mounted up the narrow stairwell, grew ever more intense.

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, curiosity led him to risk one more little peep through an open loophole. The room was empty, and under the flare of the gas a solitary chamber pot stood forgotten among a heap of petticoats trailing on the floor. This room afforded him his ultimate impression. Upstairs on the fourth floor he was well-nigh suffocated. All the scents, all the blasts of heat, had found their goal there. The yellow ceiling looked as if it had been baked, and a lamp burned amid fumes of russet-colored fog. For some seconds he leaned upon the iron balustrade which felt warm and damp and well-nigh human to the touch. And he shut his eyes and drew a long breath and drank in the sexual atmosphere of the place. Hitherto he had been utterly ignorant of it, but now it beat full in his face.

"Do come here," shouted Fauchery, who had vanished some moments ago. "You're being asked for."

At the end of the corridor was the dressing room belonging to Clarisse and Simonne. It was a long, ill-built room under the roof with a garret ceiling and sloping walls. The light penetrated to it from two deep-set openings high up in the wall, but at that hour of the night the dressing room was lit by flaring gas. It was papered with a paper at seven sous a roll with a pattern of roses twining over green trelliswork. Two boards, placed near one another and covered with oilcloth, did duty for dressing tables. They were black with spilled water, and underneath them was a fine medley of dinted zinc jugs, slop pails and coarse yellow earthenware crocks. There was an array of fancy articles in the room—a battered, soiled and well-worn array of chipped basins, of toothless combs, of all those manifold untidy trifles which, in their hurry and carelessness, two women will leave scattered about when they undress and wash together amid purely temporary surroundings, the dirty aspect of which has ceased to concern them.

"Do come here," Fauchery repeated with the good-humored familiarity which men adopt among their fallen sisters. "Clarisse is wanting to kiss you."

Muffat entered the room at last. But what was his surprise when he found the Marquis de Chouard snugly enscounced on a chair between the two dressing tables! The marquis had withdrawn thither some time ago. He was spreading his feet apart because a pail was leaking and letting a whitish flood spread over the floor. He was visibly much at his ease, as became a man who knew all the snug corners, and had grown quite merry in the close dressing room, where people might have been bathing, and amid those quietly immodest feminine surroundings which the uncleanness of the little place rendered at once natural and poignant.

"D'you go with the old boy?" Simonne asked Clarisse in a whisper.

"Rather!" replied the latter aloud.

The dresser, a very ugly and extremely familiar young girl, who was helping Simonne into her coat, positively writhed with laughter. The three pushed each other and babbled little phrases which redoubled their merriment.

"Come, Clarisse, kiss the gentleman," said Fauchery. "You know, he's got the rhino."

And turning to the count:

"You'll see, she's very nice! She's going to kiss you!"

But Clarisse was disgusted by the men. She spoke in violent terms of the dirty lot waiting at the porter's lodge down below. Besides, she was in a hurry to go downstairs again; they were making her miss her last scene. Then as Fauchery blocked up the doorway, she gave Muffat a couple of kisses on the whiskers, remarking as she did so:

"It's not for you, at any rate! It's for that nuisance Fauchery!"

And with that she darted off, and the count remained much embarrassed in his father-in-law's presence. The blood had rushed to his face. In Nana's dressing room, amid all the luxury of hangings and mirrors, he had not experienced the sharp physical sensation which the shameful wretchedness of that sorry garret excited within him, redolent as it was of these two girls' self-abandonment. Meanwhile the marquis had hurried in the rear of Simonne, who was making off at the top of her pace, and he kept whispering in her ear while she shook her head in token of refusal. Fauchery followed them, laughing. And with that the count found himself alone with the dresser, who was washing out the basins. Accordingly he took his departure, too, his legs almost failing under him. Once more he put up flights of half-dressed women and caused doors to bang as he advanced. But amid the disorderly, disbanded troops of girls to be found on each of the four stories, he was only distinctly aware of a cat, a great tortoise-shell cat, which went gliding upstairs through the ovenlike place where the air was poisoned with musk, rubbing its back against the banisters and keeping its tail exceedingly erect.

"Yes, to be sure!" said a woman hoarsely. "I thought they'd keep us back tonight! What a nuisance they are with their calls!"

The end had come; the curtain had just fallen. There was a veritable stampede on the staircase—its walls rang with exclamations, and everyone was in a savage hurry to dress and be off. As Count Muffat came down the last step or two he saw Nana and the prince passing slowly along the passage. The young woman halted and lowered her voice as she said with a smile:

"All right then—by and by!"

The prince returned to the stage, where Bordenave was awaiting him. And left alone with Nana, Muffat gave way to an impulse of anger and desire. He ran up behind her and, as she was on the point of entering her dressing room, imprinted a rough kiss on her neck among little golden hairs curling low down between her shoulders. It was as though he had returned the kiss that had been given him upstairs. Nana was in a fury; she lifted her hand, but when she recognized the count she smiled.

"Oh, you frightened me," she said simply.

And her smile was adorable in its embarrassment and submissiveness, as though she had despaired of this kiss and were happy to have received it. But she could do nothing for him either that evening or the day after. It was a case of waiting. Nay, even if it had been in her power she would still have let herself be desired. Her glance said as much. At length she continued:

"I'm a landowner, you know. Yes, I'm buying a country house near Orleans, in a part of the world to which you sometimes betake yourself. Baby told me you did—little Georges Hugon, I mean. You know him? So come and see me down there."

The count was a shy man, and the thought of his roughness had frightened him; he was ashamed of what he had done and he bowed ceremoniously, promising at the same time to take advantage of her invitation. Then he walked off as one who dreams.

He was rejoining the prince when, passing in front of the foyer, he heard Satin screaming out:

"Oh, the dirty old thing! Just you bloody well leave me alone!"

It was the Marquis de Chouard who was tumbling down over Satin. The girl had decidedly had enough of the fashionable world! Nana had certainly introduced her to Bordenave, but the necessity of standing with sealed lips for fear of allowing some awkward phrase to escape her had been too much for her feelings, and now she was anxious to regain her freedom, the more so as she had run against an old flame of hers in the wings. This was the super, to whom the task of impersonating Pluto had been entrusted, a pastry cook, who had already treated her to a whole week of love and flagellation. She was waiting for him, much irritated at the things the marquis was saying to her, as though she were one of those theatrical ladies! And so at last she assumed a highly respectable expression and jerked out this phrase:

"My husband's coming! You'll see."

Meanwhile the worn-looking artistes were dropping off one after the other in their outdoor coats. Groups of men and women were coming down the little winding staircase, and the outlines of battered hats and worn-out shawls were visible in the shadows. They looked colorless and unlovely, as became poor play actors who have got rid of their paint. On the stage, where the side lights and battens were being extinguished, the prince was listening to an anecdote Bordenave was telling him. He was waiting for Nana, and when at length she made her appearance the stage was dark, and the fireman on duty was finishing his round, lantern in hand. Bordenave, in order to save His Highness going about by the Passage des Panoramas, had made them open the corridor which led from the porter's lodge to the entrance hall of the theater. Along this narrow alley little women were racing pell-mell, for they were delighted to escape from the men who were waiting for them in the other passage. They went jostling and elbowing along, casting apprehensive glances behind them and only breathing freely when they got outside. Fontan, Bosc and Prulliere, on the other hand, retired at a leisurely pace, joking at the figure cut by the serious, paying admirers who were striding up and down the Galerie des Varietes at a time when the little dears were escaping along the boulevard with the men of their hearts. But Clarisse was especially sly. She had her suspicions about La Faloise, and, as a matter of fact, he was still in his place in the lodge among the gentlemen obstinately waiting on Mme Bron's chairs. They all stretched forward, and with that she passed brazenly by in the wake of a friend. The gentlemen were blinking in bewilderment over the wild whirl of petticoats eddying at the foot of the narrow stairs. It made them desperate to think they had waited so long, only to see them all flying away like this without being able to recognize a single one. The litter of little black cats were sleeping on the oilcloth, nestled against their mother's belly, and the latter was stretching her paws out in a state of beatitude while the big tortoise-shell cat sat at the other end of the table, her tail stretched out behind her and her yellow eyes solemnly following the flight of the women.

"If His Highness will be good enough to come this way," said Bordenave at the bottom of the stairs, and he pointed to the passage.

Some chorus girls were still crowding along it. The prince began following Nana while Muffat and the marquis walked behind.

It was a long, narrow passage lying between the theater and the house next door, a kind of contracted by-lane which had been covered with a sloping glass roof. Damp oozed from the walls, and the footfall sounded as hollow on the tiled floor as in an underground vault. It was crowded with the kind of rubbish usually found in a garret. There was a workbench on which the porter was wont to plane such parts of the scenery as required it, besides a pile of wooden barriers which at night were placed at the doors of the theater for the purpose of regulating the incoming stream of people. Nana had to pick up her dress as she passed a hydrant which, through having been carelessly turned off, was flooding the tiles underfoot. In the entrance hall the company bowed and said good-by. And when Bordenave was alone he summed up his opinion of the prince in a shrug of eminently philosophic disdain.

"He's a bit of a duffer all the same," he said to Fauchery without entering on further explanations, and with that Rose Mignon carried the journalist off with her husband in order to effect a reconciliation between them at home.

Muffat was left alone on the sidewalk. His Highness had handed Nana quietly into his carriage, and the marquis had slipped off after Satin and her super. In his excitement he was content to follow this vicious pair in vague hopes of some stray favor being granted him. Then with brain on fire Muffat decided to walk home. The struggle within him had wholly ceased. The ideas and beliefs of the last forty years were being drowned in a flood of new life. While he was passing along the boulevards the roll of the last carriages deafened him with the name of Nana; the gaslights set nude limbs dancing before his eyes—the nude limbs, the lithe arms, the white shoulders, of Nana. And he felt that he was hers utterly: he would have abjured everything, sold everything, to possess her for a single hour that very night. Youth, a lustful puberty of early manhood, was stirring within him at last, flaming up suddenly in the chaste heart of the Catholic and amid the dignified traditions of middle age.



CHAPTER VI

Count Muffat, accompanied by his wife and daughter, had arrived overnight at Les Fondettes, where Mme Hugon, who was staying there with only her son Georges, had invited them to come and spend a week. The house, which had been built at the end of the eighteenth century, stood in the middle of a huge square enclosure. It was perfectly unadorned, but the garden possessed magnificent shady trees and a chain of tanks fed by running spring water. It stood at the side of the road which leads from Orleans to Paris and with its rich verdure and high-embowered trees broke the monotony of that flat countryside, where fields stretched to the horizon's verge.

At eleven o'clock, when the second lunch bell had called the whole household together, Mme Hugon, smiling in her kindly maternal way, gave Sabine two great kisses, one on each cheek, and said as she did so:

"You know it's my custom in the country. Oh, seeing you here makes me feel twenty years younger. Did you sleep well in your old room?"

Then without waiting for her reply she turned to Estelle:

"And this little one, has she had a nap too? Give me a kiss, my child."

They had taken their seats in the vast dining room, the windows of which looked out on the park. But they only occupied one end of the long table, where they sat somewhat crowded together for company's sake. Sabine, in high good spirits, dwelt on various childish memories which had been stirred up within her—memories of months passed at Les Fondettes, of long walks, of a tumble into one of the tanks on a summer evening, of an old romance of chivalry discovered by her on the top of a cupboard and read during the winter before fires made of vine branches. And Georges, who had not seen the countess for some months, thought there was something curious about her. Her face seemed changed, somehow, while, on the other hand, that stick of an Estelle seemed more insignificant and dumb and awkward than ever.

While such simple fare as cutlets and boiled eggs was being discussed by the company, Mme Hugon, as became a good housekeeper, launched out into complaints. The butchers, she said, were becoming impossible. She bought everything at Orleans, and yet they never brought her the pieces she asked for. Yet, alas, if her guests had nothing worth eating it was their own fault: they had come too late in the season.

"There's no sense in it," she said. "I've been expecting you since June, and now we're half through September. You see, it doesn't look pretty."

And with a movement she pointed to the trees on the grass outside, the leaves of which were beginning to turn yellow. The day was covered, and the distance was hidden by a bluish haze which was fraught with a sweet and melancholy peacefulness.

"Oh, I'm expecting company," she continued. "We shall be gayer then! The first to come will be two gentlemen whom Georges has invited—Monsieur Fauchery and Monsieur Daguenet; you know them, do you not? Then we shall have Monsieur de Vandeuvres, who has promised me a visit these five years past. This time, perhaps, he'll make up his mind!"

"Oh, well and good!" said the countess, laughing. "If we only can get Monsieur de Vandeuvres! But he's too much engaged."

"And Philippe?" queried Muffat.

"Philippe has asked for a furlough," replied the old lady, "but without doubt you won't be at Les Fondettes any longer when he arrives."

The coffee was served. Paris was now the subject of conversation, and Steiner's name was mentioned, at which Mme Hugon gave a little cry.

"Let me see," she said; "Monsieur Steiner is that stout man I met at your house one evening. He's a banker, is he not? Now there's a detestable man for you! Why, he's gone and bought an actress an estate about a league from here, over Gumieres way, beyond the Choue. The whole countryside's scandalized. Did you know about that, my friend?"

"I knew nothing about it," replied Muffat. "Ah, then, Steiner's bought a country place in the neighborhood!"

Hearing his mother broach the subject, Georges looked into his coffee cup, but in his astonishment at the count's answer he glanced up at him and stared. Why was he lying so glibly? The count, on his side, noticed the young fellow's movement and gave him a suspicious glance. Mme Hugon continued to go into details: the country place was called La Mignotte. In order to get there one had to go up the bank of the Choue as far as Gumieres in order to cross the bridge; otherwise one got one's feet wet and ran the risk of a ducking.

"And what is the actress's name?" asked the countess.

"Oh, I wasn't told," murmured the old lady. "Georges, you were there the morning the gardener spoke to us about it."

Georges appeared to rack his brains. Muffat waited, twirling a teaspoon between his fingers. Then the countess addressed her husband:

"Isn't Monsieur Steiner with that singer at the Varietes, that Nana?"

"Nana, that's the name! A horrible woman!" cried Mme Hugon with growing annoyance. "And they are expecting her at La Mignotte. I've heard all about it from the gardener. Didn't the gardener say they were expecting her this evening, Georges?"

The count gave a little start of astonishment, but Georges replied with much vivacity:

"Oh, Mother, the gardener spoke without knowing anything about it. Directly afterward the coachman said just the opposite. Nobody's expected at La Mignotte before the day after tomorrow."

He tried hard to assume a natural expression while he slyly watched the effect of his remarks on the count. The latter was twirling his spoon again as though reassured. The countess, her eyes fixed dreamily on the blue distances of the park, seemed to have lost all interest in the conversation. The shadow of a smile on her lips, she seemed to be following up a secret thought which had been suddenly awakened within her. Estelle, on the other hand, sitting stiffly on her chair, had heard all that had been said about Nana, but her white, virginal face had not betrayed a trace of emotion.

"Dear me, dear me! I've got no right to grow angry," murmured Mme Hugon after a pause, and with a return to her old good humor she added:

"Everybody's got a right to live. If we meet this said lady on the road we shall not bow to her—that's all!"

And as they got up from table she once more gently upbraided the Countess Sabine for having been so long in coming to her that year. But the countess defended herself and threw the blame of the delays upon her husband's shoulders. Twice on the eve of departure, when all the trunks were locked, he counterordered their journey on the plea of urgent business. Then he had suddenly decided to start just when the trip seemed shelved. Thereupon the old lady told them how Georges in the same way had twice announced his arrival without arriving and had finally cropped up at Les Fondettes the day before yesterday, when she was no longer expecting him. They had come down into the garden, and the two men, walking beside the ladies, were listening to them in consequential silence.

"Never mind," said Mme Hugon, kissing her son's sunny locks, "Zizi is a very good boy to come and bury himself in the country with his mother. He's a dear Zizi not to forget me!"

In the afternoon she expressed some anxiety, for Georges, directly after leaving the table, had complained of a heavy feeling in his head and now seemed in for an atrocious sick headache. Toward four o'clock he said he would go upstairs to bed: it was the only remedy. After sleeping till tomorrow morning he would be perfectly himself again. His mother was bent on putting him to bed herself, but as she left the room he ran and locked the door, explaining that he was shutting himself in so that no one should come and disturb him. Then caressingly he shouted, "Good night till tomorrow, little Mother!" and promised to take a nap. But he did not go to bed again and with flushed cheeks and bright eyes noiselessly put on his clothes. Then he sat on a chair and waited. When the dinner bell rang he listened for Count Muffat, who was on his way to the dining room, and ten minutes later, when he was certain that no one would see him, he slipped from the window to the ground with the assistance of a rain pipe. His bedroom was situated on the first floor and looked out upon the rear of the house. He threw himself among some bushes and got out of the park and then galloped across the fields with empty stomach and heart beating with excitement. Night was closing in, and a small fine rain was beginning to fall.

It was the very evening that Nana was due at La Mignotte. Ever since in the preceding May Steiner had bought her this country place she had from time to time been so filled with the desire of taking possession that she had wept hot tears about, but on each of these occasions Bordenave had refused to give her even the shortest leave and had deferred her holiday till September on the plea that he did not intend putting an understudy in her place, even for one evening, now that the exhibition was on. Toward the close of August he spoke of October. Nana was furious and declared that she would be at La Mignotte in the middle of September. Nay, in order to dare Bordenave, she even invited a crowd of guests in his very presence. One afternoon in her rooms, as Muffat, whose advances she still adroitly resisted, was beseeching her with tremulous emotion to yield to his entreaties, she at length promised to be kind, but not in Paris, and to him, too, she named the middle of September. Then on the twelfth she was seized by a desire to be off forthwith with Zoe as her sole companion. It might be that Bordenave had got wind of her intentions and was about to discover some means of detaining her. She was delighted at the notion of putting him in a fix, and she sent him a doctor's certificate. When once the idea had entered her head of being the first to get to La Mignotte and of living there two days without anybody knowing anything about it, she rushed Zoe through the operation of packing and finally pushed her into a cab, where in a sudden burst of extreme contrition she kissed her and begged her pardon. It was only when they got to the station refreshment room that she thought of writing Steiner of her movements. She begged him to wait till the day after tomorrow before rejoining her if he wanted to find her quite bright and fresh. And then, suddenly conceiving another project, she wrote a second letter, in which she besought her aunt to bring little Louis to her at once. It would do Baby so much good! And how happy they would be together in the shade of the trees! In the railway carriage between Paris and Orleans she spoke of nothing else; her eyes were full of tears; she had an unexpected attack of maternal tenderness and mingled together flowers, birds and child in her every sentence.

La Mignotte was more than three leagues away from the station, and Nana lost a good hour over the hire of a carriage, a huge, dilapidated calash, which rumbled slowly along to an accompaniment of rattling old iron. She had at once taken possession of the coachman, a little taciturn old man whom she overwhelmed with questions. Had he often passed by La Mignotte? It was behind this hill then? There ought to be lots of trees there, eh? And the house could one see it at a distance? The little old man answered with a succession of grunts. Down in the calash Nana was almost dancing with impatience, while Zoe, in her annoyance at having left Paris in such a hurry, sat stiffly sulking beside her. The horse suddenly stopped short, and the young woman thought they had reached their destination. She put her head out of the carriage door and asked:

"Are we there, eh?"

By way of answer the driver whipped up his horse, which was in the act of painfully climbing a hill. Nana gazed ecstatically at the vast plain beneath the gray sky where great clouds were banked up.

"Oh, do look, Zoe! There's greenery! Now, is that all wheat? Good lord, how pretty it is!"

"One can quite see that Madame doesn't come from the country," was the servant's prim and tardy rejoinder. "As for me, I knew the country only too well when I was with my dentist. He had a house at Bougival. No, it's cold, too, this evening. It's damp in these parts."

They were driving under the shadow of a wood, and Nana sniffed up the scent of the leaves as a young dog might. All of a sudden at a turn of the road she caught sight of the corner of a house among the trees. Perhaps it was there! And with that she began a conversation with the driver, who continued shaking his head by way of saying no. Then as they drove down the other side of the hill he contented himself by holding out his whip and muttering, "'Tis down there."

She got up and stretched herself almost bodily out of the carriage door.

"Where is it? Where is it?" she cried with pale cheeks, but as yet she saw nothing.

At last she caught sight of a bit of wall. And then followed a succession of little cries and jumps, the ecstatic behavior of a woman overcome by a new and vivid sensation.

"I see it! I see it, Zoe! Look out at the other side. Oh, there's a terrace with brick ornaments on the roof! And there's a hothouse down there! But the place is immense. Oh, how happy I am! Do look, Zoe! Now, do look!"

The carriage had by this time pulled up before the park gates. A side door was opened, and the gardener, a tall, dry fellow, made his appearance, cap in hand. Nana made an effort to regain her dignity, for the driver seemed now to be suppressing a laugh behind his dry, speechless lips. She refrained from setting off at a run and listened to the gardener, who was a very talkative fellow. He begged Madame to excuse the disorder in which she found everything, seeing that he had only received Madame's letter that very morning. But despite all his efforts, she flew off at a tangent and walked so quickly that Zoe could scarcely follow her. At the end of the avenue she paused for a moment in order to take the house in at a glance. It was a great pavilion-like building in the Italian manner, and it was flanked by a smaller construction, which a rich Englishman, after two years' residence in Naples, had caused to be erected and had forthwith become disgusted with.

"I'll take Madame over the house," said the gardener.

But she had outrun him entirely, and she shouted back that he was not to put himself out and that she would go over the house by herself. She preferred doing that, she said. And without removing her hat she dashed into the different rooms, calling to Zoe as she did so, shouting her impressions from one end of each corridor to the other and filling the empty house, which for long months had been uninhabited, with exclamations and bursts of laughter. In the first place, there was the hall. It was a little damp, but that didn't matter; one wasn't going to sleep in it. Then came the drawing room, quite the thing, the drawing room, with its windows opening on the lawn. Only the red upholsteries there were hideous; she would alter all that. As to the dining room-well, it was a lovely dining room, eh? What big blowouts you might give in Paris if you had a dining room as large as that! As she was going upstairs to the first floor it occurred to her that she had not seen the kitchen, and she went down again and indulged in ecstatic exclamations. Zoe ought to admire the beautiful dimensions of the sink and the width of the hearth, where you might have roasted a sheep! When she had gone upstairs again her bedroom especially enchanted her. It had been hung with delicate rose-colored Louis XVI cretonne by an Orleans upholsterer. Dear me, yes! One ought to sleep jolly sound in such a room as that; why, it was a real best bedroom! Then came four or five guest chambers and then some splendid garrets, which would be extremely convenient for trunks and boxes. Zoe looked very gruff and cast a frigid glance into each of the rooms as she lingered in Madame's wake. She saw Nana disappearing up the steep garret ladder and said, "Thanks, I haven't the least wish to break my legs." But the sound of a voice reached her from far away; indeed, it seemed to come whistling down a chimney.

"Zoe, Zoe, where are you? Come up, do! You've no idea! It's like fairyland!"

Zoe went up, grumbling. On the roof she found her mistress leaning against the brickwork balustrade and gazing at the valley which spread out into the silence. The horizon was immeasurably wide, but it was now covered by masses of gray vapor, and a fierce wind was driving fine rain before it. Nana had to hold her hat on with both hands to keep it from being blown away while her petticoats streamed out behind her, flapping like a flag.

"Not if I know it!" said Zoe, drawing her head in at once. "Madame will be blown away. What beastly weather!"

Madame did not hear what she said. With her head over the balustrade she was gazing at the grounds beneath. They consisted of seven or eight acres of land enclosed within a wall. Then the view of the kitchen garden entirely engrossed her attention. She darted back, jostling the lady's maid at the top of the stairs and bursting out:

"It's full of cabbages! Oh, such woppers! And lettuces and sorrel and onions and everything! Come along, make haste!"

The rain was falling more heavily now, and she opened her white silk sunshade and ran down the garden walks.

"Madame will catch cold," cried Zoe, who had stayed quietly behind under the awning over the garden door.

But Madame wanted to see things, and at each new discovery there was a burst of wonderment.

"Zoe, here's spinach! Do come. Oh, look at the artichokes! They are funny. So they grow in the ground, do they? Now, what can that be? I don't know it. Do come, Zoe, perhaps you know."

The lady's maid never budged an inch. Madame must really be raving mad. For now the rain was coming down in torrents, and the little white silk sunshade was already dark with it. Nor did it shelter Madame, whose skirts were wringing wet. But that didn't put her out in the smallest degree, and in the pouring rain she visited the kitchen garden and the orchard, stopping in front of every fruit tree and bending over every bed of vegetables. Then she ran and looked down the well and lifted up a frame to see what was underneath it and was lost in the contemplation of a huge pumpkin. She wanted to go along every single garden walk and to take immediate possession of all the things she had been wont to dream of in the old days, when she was a slipshod work-girl on the Paris pavements. The rain redoubled, but she never heeded it and was only miserable at the thought that the daylight was fading. She could not see clearly now and touched things with her fingers to find out what they were. Suddenly in the twilight she caught sight of a bed of strawberries, and all that was childish in her awoke.

"Strawberries! Strawberries! There are some here; I can feel them. A plate, Zoe! Come and pick strawberries."

And dropping her sunshade, Nana crouched down in the mire under the full force of the downpour. With drenched hands she began gathering the fruit among the leaves. But Zoe in the meantime brought no plate, and when the young woman rose to her feet again she was frightened. She thought she had seen a shadow close to her.

"It's some beast!" she screamed.

But she stood rooted to the path in utter amazement. It was a man, and she recognized him.

"Gracious me, it's Baby! What ARE you doing there, baby?"

"'Gad, I've come—that's all!" replied Georges.

Her head swam.

"You knew I'd come through the gardener telling you? Oh, that poor child! Why, he's soaking!"

"Oh, I'll explain that to you! The rain caught me on my way here, and then, as I didn't wish to go upstream as far as Gumieres, I crossed the Choue and fell into a blessed hole."

Nana forgot the strawberries forthwith. She was trembling and full of pity. That poor dear Zizi in a hole full of water! And she drew him with her in the direction of the house and spoke of making up a roaring fire.

"You know," he murmured, stopping her among the shadows, "I was in hiding because I was afraid of being scolded, like in Paris, when I come and see you and you're not expecting me."

She made no reply but burst out laughing and gave him a kiss on the forehead. Up till today she had always treated him like a naughty urchin, never taking his declarations seriously and amusing herself at his expense as though he were a little man of no consequence whatever. There was much ado to install him in the house. She absolutely insisted on the fire being lit in her bedroom, as being the most comfortable place for his reception. Georges had not surprised Zoe, who was used to all kinds of encounters, but the gardener, who brought the wood upstairs, was greatly nonplused at sight of this dripping gentleman to whom he was certain he had not opened the front door. He was, however, dismissed, as he was no longer wanted.

A lamp lit up the room, and the fire burned with a great bright flame.

"He'll never get dry, and he'll catch cold," said Nana, seeing Georges beginning to shiver.

And there were no men's trousers in her house! She was on the point of calling the gardener back when an idea struck her. Zoe, who was unpacking the trunks in the dressing room, brought her mistress a change of underwear, consisting of a shift and some petticoats with a dressing jacket.

"Oh, that's first rate!" cried the young woman. "Zizi can put 'em all on. You're not angry with me, eh? When your clothes are dry you can put them on again, and then off with you, as fast as fast can be, so as not to have a scolding from your mamma. Make haste! I'm going to change my things, too, in the dressing room."

Ten minutes afterward, when she reappeared in a tea gown, she clasped her hands in a perfect ecstasy.

"Oh, the darling! How sweet he looks dressed like a little woman!"

He had simply slipped on a long nightgown with an insertion front, a pair of worked drawers and the dressing jacket, which was a long cambric garment trimmed with lace. Thus attired and with his delicate young arms showing and his bright damp hair falling almost to his shoulders, he looked just like a girl.

"Why, he's as slim as I am!" said Nana, putting her arm round his waist. "Zoe, just come here and see how it suits him. It's made for him, eh? All except the bodice part, which is too large. He hasn't got as much as I have, poor, dear Zizi!"

"Oh, to be sure, I'm a bit wanting there," murmured Georges with a smile.

All three grew very merry about it. Nana had set to work buttoning the dressing jacket from top to bottom so as to make him quite decent. Then she turned him round as though he were a doll, gave him little thumps, made the skirt stand well out behind. After which she asked him questions. Was he comfortable? Did he feel warm? Zounds, yes, he was comfortable! Nothing fitted more closely and warmly than a woman's shift; had he been able, he would always have worn one. He moved round and about therein, delighted with the fine linen and the soft touch of that unmanly garment, in the folds of which he thought he discovered some of Nana's own warm life.

Meanwhile Zoe had taken the soaked clothes down to the kitchen in order to dry them as quickly as possible in front of a vine-branch fire. Then Georges, as he lounged in an easy chair, ventured to make a confession.

"I say, are you going to feed this evening? I'm dying of hunger. I haven't dined."

Nana was vexed. The great silly thing to go sloping off from Mamma's with an empty stomach, just to chuck himself into a hole full of water! But she was as hungry as a hunter too. They certainly must feed! Only they would have to eat what they could get. Whereupon a round table was rolled up in front of the fire, and the queerest of dinners was improvised thereon. Zoe ran down to the gardener's, he having cooked a mess of cabbage soup in case Madame should not dine at Orleans before her arrival. Madame, indeed, had forgotten to tell him what he was to get ready in the letter she had sent him. Fortunately the cellar was well furnished. Accordingly they had cabbage soup, followed by a piece of bacon. Then Nana rummaged in her handbag and found quite a heap of provisions which she had taken the precaution of stuffing into it. There was a Strasbourg pate, for instance, and a bag of sweet-meats and some oranges. So they both ate away like ogres and, while they satisfied their healthy young appetites, treated one another with easy good fellowship. Nana kept calling Georges "dear old girl," a form of address which struck her as at once tender and familiar. At dessert, in order not to give Zoe any more trouble, they used the same spoon turn and turn about while demolishing a pot of preserves they had discovered at the top of a cupboard.

"Oh, you dear old girl!" said Nana, pushing back the round table. "I haven't made such a good dinner these ten years past!"

Yet it was growing late, and she wanted to send her boy off for fear he should be suspected of all sorts of things. But he kept declaring that he had plenty of time to spare. For the matter of that, his clothes were not drying well, and Zoe averred that it would take an hour longer at least, and as she was dropping with sleep after the fatigues of the journey, they sent her off to bed. After which they were alone in the silent house.

It was a very charming evening. The fire was dying out amid glowing embers, and in the great blue room, where Zoe had made up the bed before going upstairs, the air felt a little oppressive. Nana, overcome by the heavy warmth, got up to open the window for a few minutes, and as she did so she uttered a little cry.

"Great heavens, how beautiful it is! Look, dear old girl!"

Georges had come up, and as though the window bar had not been sufficiently wide, he put his arm round Nana's waist and rested his head against her shoulder. The weather had undergone a brisk change: the skies were clearing, and a full moon lit up the country with its golden disk of light. A sovereign quiet reigned over the valley. It seemed wider and larger as it opened on the immense distances of the plain, where the trees loomed like little shadowy islands amid a shining and waveless lake. And Nana grew tenderhearted, felt herself a child again. Most surely she had dreamed of nights like this at an epoch which she could not recall. Since leaving the train every object of sensation—the wide countryside, the green things with their pungent scents, the house, the vegetables—had stirred her to such a degree that now it seemed to her as if she had left Paris twenty years ago. Yesterday's existence was far, far away, and she was full of sensations of which she had no previous experience. Georges, meanwhile, was giving her neck little coaxing kisses, and this again added to her sweet unrest. With hesitating hand she pushed him from her, as though he were a child whose affectionate advances were fatiguing, and once more she told him that he ought to take his departure. He did not gainsay her. All in good time—he would go all in good time!

But a bird raised its song and again was silent. It was a robin in an elder tree below the window.

"Wait one moment," whispered Georges; "the lamp's frightening him. I'll put it out."

And when he came back and took her waist again he added:

"We'll relight it in a minute."

Then as she listened to the robin and the boy pressed against her side, Nana remembered. Ah yes, it was in novels that she had got to know all this! In other days she would have given her heart to have a full moon and robins and a lad dying of love for her. Great God, she could have cried, so good and charming did it all seem to her! Beyond a doubt she had been born to live honestly! So she pushed Georges away again, and he grew yet bolder.

"No, let me be. I don't care about it. It would be very wicked at your age. Now listen—I'll always be your mamma."

A sudden feeling of shame overcame her. She was blushing exceedingly, and yet not a soul could see her. The room behind them was full of black night while the country stretched before them in silence and lifeless solitude. Never had she known such a sense of shame before. Little by little she felt her power of resistance ebbing away, and that despite her embarrassed efforts to the contrary. That disguise of his, that woman's shift and that dressing jacket set her laughing again. It was as though a girl friend were teasing her.

"Oh, it's not right; it's not right!" she stammered after a last effort.

And with that, in face of the lovely night, she sank like a young virgin into the arms of this mere child. The house slept.

Next morning at Les Fondettes, when the bell rang for lunch, the dining-room table was no longer too big for the company. Fauchery and Daguenet had been driven up together in one carriage, and after them another had arrived with the Count de Vandeuvres, who had followed by the next train. Georges was the last to come downstairs. He was looking a little pale, and his eyes were sunken, but in answer to questions he said that he was much better, though he was still somewhat shaken by the violence of the attack. Mme Hugon looked into his eyes with an anxious smile and adjusted his hair which had been carelessly combed that morning, but he drew back as though embarrassed by this tender little action. During the meal she chaffed Vandeuvres very pleasantly and declared that she had expected him for five years past.

"Well, here you are at last! How have you managed it?"

Vandeuvres took her remarks with equal pleasantry. He told her that he had lost a fabulous sum of money at the club yesterday and thereupon had come away with the intention of ending up in the country.

"'Pon my word, yes, if only you can find me an heiress in these rustic parts! There must be delightful women hereabouts."

The old lady rendered equal thanks to Daguenet and Fauchery for having been so good as to accept her son's invitation, and then to her great and joyful surprise she saw the Marquis de Chouard enter the room. A third carriage had brought him.

"Dear me, you've made this your trysting place today!" she cried. "You've passed word round! But what's happening? For years I've never succeeded in bringing you all together, and now you all drop in at once. Oh, I certainly don't complain."

Another place was laid. Fauchery found himself next the Countess Sabine, whose liveliness and gaiety surprised him when he remembered her drooping, languid state in the austere Rue Miromesnil drawing room. Daguenet, on the other hand, who was seated on Estelle's left, seemed slightly put out by his propinquity to that tall, silent girl. The angularity of her elbows was disagreeable to him. Muffat and Chouard had exchanged a sly glance while Vandeuvres continued joking about his coming marriage.

"Talking of ladies," Mme Hugon ended by saying, "I have a new neighbor whom you probably know."

And she mentioned Nana. Vandeuvres affected the liveliest astonishment.

"Well, that is strange! Nana's property near here!"

Fauchery and Daguenet indulged in a similar demonstration while the Marquis de Chouard discussed the breast of a chicken without appearing to comprehend their meaning. Not one of the men had smiled.

"Certainly," continued the old lady, "and the person in question arrived at La Mignotte yesterday evening, as I was saying she would. I got my information from the gardener this morning."

At these words the gentlemen could not conceal their very real surprise. They all looked up. Eh? What? Nana had come down! But they were only expecting her next day; they were privately under the impression that they would arrive before her! Georges alone sat looking at his glass with drooped eyelids and a tired expression. Ever since the beginning of lunch he had seemed to be sleeping with open eyes and a vague smile on his lips.

"Are you still in pain, my Zizi?" asked his mother, who had been gazing at him throughout the meal.

He started and blushed as he said that he was very well now, but the worn-out insatiate expression of a girl who has danced too much did not fade from his face.

"What's the matter with your neck?" resumed Mme Hugon in an alarmed tone. "It's all red."

He was embarrassed and stammered. He did not know—he had nothing the matter with his neck. Then drawing his shirt collar up:

"Ah yes, some insect stung me there!"

The Marquis de Chouard had cast a sidelong glance at the little red place. Muffat, too, looked at Georges. The company was finishing lunch and planning various excursions. Fauchery was growing increasingly excited with the Countess Sabine's laughter. As he was passing her a dish of fruit their hands touched, and for one second she looked at him with eyes so full of dark meaning that he once more thought of the secret which had been communicated to him one evening after an uproarious dinner. Then, too, she was no longer the same woman. Something was more pronounced than of old, and her gray foulard gown which fitted loosely over her shoulders added a touch of license to her delicate, high-strung elegance.

When they rose from the table Daguenet remained behind with Fauchery in order to impart to him the following crude witticism about Estelle: "A nice broomstick that to shove into a man's hands!" Nevertheless, he grew serious when the journalist told him the amount she was worth in the way of dowry.

"Four hundred thousand francs."

"And the mother?" queried Fauchery. "She's all right, eh?"

"Oh, SHE'LL work the oracle! But it's no go, my dear man!"

"Bah! How are we to know? We must wait and see."

It was impossible to go out that day, for the rain was still falling in heavy showers. Georges had made haste to disappear from the scene and had double-locked his door. These gentlemen avoided mutual explanations, though they were none of them deceived as to the reasons which had brought them together. Vandeuvres, who had had a very bad time at play, had really conceived the notion of lying fallow for a season, and he was counting on Nana's presence in the neighborhood as a safeguard against excessive boredom. Fauchery had taken advantage of the holidays granted him by Rose, who just then was extremely busy. He was thinking of discussing a second notice with Nana, in case country air should render them reciprocally affectionate. Daguenet, who had been just a little sulky with her since Steiner had come upon the scene, was dreaming of resuming the old connection or at least of snatching some delightful opportunities if occasion offered. As to the Marquis de Chouard, he was watching for times and seasons. But among all those men who were busy following in the tracks of Venus—a Venus with the rouge scarce washed from her cheeks—Muffat was at once the most ardent and the most tortured by the novel sensations of desire and fear and anger warring in his anguished members. A formal promise had been made him; Nana was awaiting him. Why then had she taken her departure two days sooner than was expected?

He resolved to betake himself to La Mignotte after dinner that same evening. At night as the count was leaving the park Georges fled forth after him. He left him to follow the road to Gumieres, crossed the Choue, rushed into Nana's presence, breathless, furious and with tears in his eyes. Ah yes, he understood everything! That old fellow now on his way to her was coming to keep an appointment! Nana was dumfounded by this ebullition of jealousy, and, greatly moved by the way things were turning out, she took him in her arms and comforted him to the best of her ability. Oh no, he was quite beside the mark; she was expecting no one. If the gentleman came it would not be her fault. What a great ninny that Zizi was to be taking on so about nothing at all! By her child's soul she swore she loved nobody except her own Georges. And with that she kissed him and wiped away his tears.