ng 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 b