union with
the play actor couldn't last; the madness must be allowed to pass off!
The two men retired without uttering a sound. On the pavement outside
they shook hands silently, as though swayed by a mutual sense of
fraternity. Then they turned their backs on one another and went
crawling off in opposite directions.

When at last Muffat entered his town house in the Rue Miromesnil his
wife was just arriving. The two met on the great staircase, whose walls
exhaled an icy chill. They lifted up their eyes and beheld one another.
The count still wore his muddy clothes, and his pale, bewildered face
betrayed the prodigal returning from his debauch. The countess looked
as though she were utterly fagged out by a night in the train. She was
dropping with sleep, but her hair had been brushed anyhow, and her eyes
were deeply sunken.

CHAPTER VIII

We are in a little set of lodgings on the fourth floor in the Rue Veron
at Montmartre. Nana and Fontan have invited a few friends to cut their
Twelfth-Night cake with them. They are giving their housewarming, though
they have been only three days settled.

They had no fixed intention of keeping house together, but the whole
thing had come about suddenly in the first glow of the honeymoon.
After her grand blowup, when she had turned the count and the banker so
vigorously out of doors, Nana felt the world crumbling about her feet.
She estimated the situation at a glance; the creditors would swoop
down on her anteroom, would mix themselves up with her love affairs and
threaten to sell her little all unless she continued to act sensibly.
Then, too, there would be no end of disputes and carking anxieties if
she attempted to save her furniture from their clutches. And so she
preferred giving up everything. Besides, the flat in the Boulevard
Haussmann was plaguing her to death. It was so stupid with its great
gilded rooms! In her access of tenderness for Fontan she began dreaming
of a pretty little bright chamber. Indeed, she returned to the old
ideals of the florist days, when her highest ambition was to have a
rosewood cupboard with a plate-glass door and a bed hung with blue
"reps." In the course of two days she sold what she could smuggle out
of the house in the way of knickknacks and jewelry and then disappeared,
taking with her ten thousand francs and never even warning the porter's
wife. It was a plunge into the dark, a merry spree; never a trace was
left behind. In this way