walking off, humming:

When Venus roams at eventide.

Satin had gone back in front of the Cafe des Varietes, where Auguste let
her eat the sugar that remained over from the customers' orders. A stout
man, who came out in a very heated condition, finally carried her off in
the shadow of the boulevard, which was now gradually going to sleep.

Still people kept coming downstairs. La Faloise was waiting for
Clarisse; Fauchery had promised to catch up Lucy Stewart with Caroline
Hequet and her mother. They came; they took up a whole corner of the
entrance hall and were laughing very loudly when the Muffats passed by
them with an icy expression. Bordenave had just then opened a little
door and, peeping out, had obtained from Fauchery the formal promise
of an article. He was dripping with perspiration, his face blazed, as
though he were drunk with success.

"You're good for two hundred nights," La Faloise said to him with
civility. "The whole of Paris will visit your theater."

But Bordenave grew annoyed and, indicating with a jerk of his chin the
public who filled the entrance hall--a herd of men with parched lips
and ardent eyes, still burning with the enjoyment of Nana--he cried out
violently:

"Say 'my brothel,' you obstinate devil!"

CHAPTER II

At ten o'clock the next morning Nana was still asleep. She occupied
the second floor of a large new house in the Boulevard Haussmann, the
landlord of which let flats to single ladies in order by their means
to dry the paint. A rich merchant from Moscow, who had come to pass a
winter in Paris, had installed her there after paying six months' rent
in advance. The rooms were too big for her and had never been completely
furnished. The vulgar sumptuosity of gilded consoles and gilded chairs
formed a crude contrast therein to the bric-a-brac of a secondhand
furniture shop--to mahogany round tables, that is to say, and zinc
candelabras, which sought to imitate Florentine bronze. All of which
smacked of the courtesan too early deserted by her first serious
protector and fallen back on shabby lovers, of a precarious first
appearance of a bad start, handicapped by refusals of credit and threats
of eviction.

Nana was sleeping on her face, hugging in her bare arms a pillow in
which she was burying cheeks grown pale in sleep. The bedroom and the
dressing room were the only two apartments which had been properly
furnished by a neighboring upholsterer. A ray of light, gliding