ng from group to group, while over head the stands
rose tier above crowded tier and the light-colored dresses therein faded
into the delicate shadows of the timberwork. Nana stared at all these
ladies. She stared steadily and markedly at the Countess Sabine. After
which, as she was passing in front of the imperial stand, the sight
of Muffat, looming in all his official stiffness by the side of the
empress, made her very merry.

"Oh, how silly he looks!" she said at the top of her voice to
Vandeuvres. She was anxious to pay everything a visit. This small
parklike region, with its green lawns and groups of trees, rather
charmed her than otherwise. A vendor of ices had set up a large buffet
near the entrance gates, and beneath a rustic thatched roof a dense
throng of people were shouting and gesticulating. This was the
ring. Close by were some empty stalls, and Nana was disappointed at
discovering only a gendarme's horse there. Then there was the paddock,
a small course some hundred meters in circumference, where a stable help
was walking about Valerio II in his horsecloths. And, oh, what a lot of
men on the graveled sidewalks, all of them with their tickets forming an
orange-colored patch in their bottonholes! And what a continual parade
of people in the open galleries of the grandstands! The scene interested
her for a moment or two, but truly, it was not worth while getting the
spleen because they didn't admit you inside here.

Daguenet and Fauchery passed by and bowed to her. She made them a sign,
and they had to come up. Thereupon she made hay of the weighing-in
enclosure. But she broke off abruptly:

"Dear me, there's the Marquis de Chouard! How old he's growing! That old
man's killing himself! Is he still as mad about it as ever?"

Thereupon Daguenet described the old man's last brilliant stroke. The
story dated from the day before yesterday, and no one knew it as yet.
After dangling about for months he had bought her daughter Amelie from
Gaga for thirty thousand francs, they said.

"Good gracious! That's a nice business!" cried Nana in disgust. "Go in
for the regular thing, please! But now that I come to think of it,
that must be Lili down there on the grass with a lady in a brougham. I
recognized the face. The old boy will have brought her out."

Vandeuvres was not listening; he was impatient and longed to get rid of
her. But Fauchery having remarked at parting that if she had not seen
the bookmakers she had