sess everything that she might destroy everything,
was suddenly increased. Never before had she felt so profoundly the
puissance of her sex. She gazed slowly round and remarked with an
expression of grave philosophy:

"Ah well, all the same, one's jolly well right to profit by things when
one's young!"

But now Satin was rolling on the bearskins in the bedroom and calling
her.

"Oh, do come! Do come!"

Nana undressed in the dressing room, and in order to be quicker about it
she took her thick fell of blonde hair in both hands and began shaking
it above the silver wash hand basin, while a downward hail of long
hairpins rang a little chime on the shining metal.

CHAPTER XI

One Sunday the race for the Grand Prix de Paris was being run in the
Bois de Boulogne beneath skies rendered sultry by the first heats of
June. The sun that morning had risen amid a mist of dun-colored dust,
but toward eleven o'clock, just when the carriages were reaching the
Longchamps course, a southerly wind had swept away the clouds; long
streamers of gray vapor were disappearing across the sky, and gaps
showing an intense blue beyond were spreading from one end of the
horizon to the other. In the bright bursts of sunlight which alternated
with the clouds the whole scene shone again, from the field which was
gradually filling with a crowd of carriages, horsemen and pedestrians,
to the still-vacant course, where the judge's box stood, together with
the posts and the masts for signaling numbers, and thence on to the five
symmetrical stands of brickwork and timber, rising gallery upon gallery
in the middle of the weighing enclosure opposite. Beyond these, bathed
in the light of noon, lay the vast level plain, bordered with little
trees and shut in to the westward by the wooded heights of Saint-Cloud
and the Suresnes, which, in their turn, were dominated by the severe
outlines of Mont-Valerien.

Nana, as excited as if the Grand Prix were going to make her fortune,
wanted to take up a position by the railing next the winning post. She
had arrived very early--she was, in fact, one of the first to come--in
a landau adorned with silver and drawn, a la Daumont, by four splendid
white horses. This landau was a present from Count Muffat. When she had
made her appearance at the entrance to the field with two postilions
jogging blithely on the near horses and two footmen perching motionless
behind the carriage, the people had rushed to look as th