f offense he could have given
her. Besides, he was under the impression that he was satisfying all
her desires. And so he harked back again and again to the letter he had
received that morning with its tissue of falsehoods, invented for the
extremely simple purpose of passing an evening at her own theater. The
crowd had pushed him forward again, and he had crossed the passage and
was puzzling his brain in front of the entrance to a restaurant, his
eyes fixed on some plucked larks and on a huge salmon laid out inside
the window.

At length he seemed to tear himself away from this spectacle. He shook
himself, looked up and noticed that it was close on nine o'clock. Nana
would soon be coming out, and he would make her tell the truth. And with
that he walked on and recalled to memory the evenings he once passed
in that region in the days when he used to meet her at the door of the
theater.

He knew all the shops, and in the gas-laden air he recognized their
different scents, such, for instance, as the strong savor of Russia
leather, the perfume of vanilla emanating from a chocolate dealer's
basement, the savor of musk blown in whiffs from the open doors of
the perfumers. But he did not dare linger under the gaze of the pale
shopwomen, who looked placidly at him as though they knew him by sight.
For one instant he seemed to be studying the line of little round
windows above the shops, as though he had never noticed them before
among the medley of signs. Then once again he went up to the boulevard
and stood still a minute or two. A fine rain was now falling, and the
cold feel of it on his hands calmed him. He thought of his wife who was
staying in a country house near Macon, where her friend Mme de Chezelles
had been ailing a good deal since the autumn. The carriages in the
roadway were rolling through a stream of mud. The country, he thought,
must be detestable in such vile weather. But suddenly he became anxious
and re-entered the hot, close passage down which he strode among the
strolling people. A thought struck him: if Nana were suspicious of his
presence there she would be off along the Galerie Montmartre.

After that the count kept a sharp lookout at the very door of the
theater, though he did not like this passage end, where he was afraid of
being recognized. It was at the corner between the Galerie des Varietes
and the Galerie Saint-Marc, an equivocal corner full of obscure little
shops. Of these last one was a sh