that mysterious existence of hers, about which no one ever
troubled. But the hardest to bear were the two or three hours between
lunch and the toilet. On ordinary occasions she proposed a game of
bezique to her old friend; on others she would read the Figaro, in which
the theatrical echoes and the fashionable news interested her. Sometimes
she even opened a book, for she fancied herself in literary matters. Her
toilet kept her till close on five o'clock, and then only she would wake
from her daylong drowse and drive out or receive a whole mob of men at
her own house. She would often dine abroad and always go to bed very
late, only to rise again on the morrow with the same languor as before
and to begin another day, differing in nothing from its predecessor.

The great distraction was to go to the Batignolles and see her little
Louis at her aunt's. For a fortnight at a time she forgot all about him,
and then would follow an access of maternal love, and she would hurry
off on foot with all the modesty and tenderness becoming a good mother.
On such occasions she would be the bearer of snuff for her aunt and of
oranges and biscuits for the child, the kind of presents one takes to a
hospital. Or again she would drive up in her landau on her return from
the Bois, decked in costumes, the resplendence of which greatly excited
the dwellers in the solitary street. Since her niece's magnificent
elevation Mme Lerat had been puffed up with vanity. She rarely presented
herself in the Avenue de Villiers, for she was pleased to remark that it
wasn't her place to do so, but she enjoyed triumphs in her own street.
She was delighted when the young woman arrived in dresses that had cost
four or five thousand francs and would be occupied during the whole
of the next day in showing off her presents and in citing prices which
quite stupefied the neighbors. As often as not, Nana kept Sunday free
for the sake of "her family," and on such occasions, if Muffat invited
her, she would refuse with the smile of a good little shopwoman. It
was impossible, she would answer; she was dining at her aunt's; she was
going to see Baby. Moreover, that poor little man Louiset was always
ill. He was almost three years old, growing quite a great boy! But he
had had an eczema on the back of his neck, and now concretions were
forming in his ears, which pointed, it was feared, to decay of the bones
of the skull. When she saw how pale he looked, with his spoiled bloo