her satin skin
and the supple contours of her shape, would keep her serious, attentive
and absorbed in the love of herself. The hairdresser frequently found
her standing thus and would enter without her once turning to look
at him. Muffat used to grow angry then, but he only succeeded in
astonishing her. What was coming over the man? She was doing it to
please herself, not other people.

That particular evening she wanted to have a better view of herself, and
she lit the six candles attached to the frame of the mirror. But while
letting her shift slip down she paused. She had been preoccupied for
some moments past, and a question was on her lips.

"You haven't read the Figaro article, have you? The paper's on the
table." Daguenet's laugh had recurred to her recollections, and she was
harassed by a doubt. If that Fauchery had slandered her she would be
revenged.

"They say that it's about me," she continued, affecting indifference.
"What's your notion, eh, darling?"

And letting go her shift and waiting till Muffat should have done
reading, she stood naked. Muffat was reading slowly Fauchery's article
entitled "The Golden Fly," describing the life of a harlot descended
from four or five generations of drunkards and tainted in her blood by a
cumulative inheritance of misery and drink, which in her case has taken
the form of a nervous exaggeration of the sexual instinct. She has shot
up to womanhood in the slums and on the pavements of Paris, and tall,
handsome and as superbly grown as a dunghill plant, she avenges the
beggars and outcasts of whom she is the ultimate product. With her the
rottenness that is allowed to ferment among the populace is carried
upward and rots the aristocracy. She becomes a blind power of nature, a
leaven of destruction, and unwittingly she corrupts and disorganizes
all Paris, churning it between her snow-white thighs as milk is monthly
churned by housewives. And it was at the end of this article that the
comparison with a fly occurred, a fly of sunny hue which has flown up
out of the dung, a fly which sucks in death on the carrion tolerated by
the roadside and then buzzing, dancing and glittering like a precious
stone enters the windows of palaces and poisons the men within by merely
settling on them in her flight.

Muffat lifted his head; his eyes stared fixedly; he gazed at the fire.

"Well?" asked Nana.

But he did not answer. It seemed as though he wanted to read the article
again.