per
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 sexle