d
state. She had run to meet him and now began crying:

"Oh, monsieur, do come in! Madame nearly died yesterday evening!"

And when he asked for particulars:

"Something it's impossible to believe has happened--a miscarriage,
monsieur."

Nana had been in the family way for the past three months. For long she
had simply thought herself out of sorts, and Dr Boutarel had himself
been in doubt. But when afterward he made her a decisive announcement,
she felt so bored thereby that she did all she possibly could to
disguise her condition. Her nervous terrors, her dark humors, sprang to
some extent from this unfortunate state of things, the secret of which
she kept very shamefacedly, as became a courtesan mother who is obliged
to conceal her plight. The thing struck her as a ridiculous accident,
which made her appear small in her own eyes and would, had it been
known, have led people to chaff her.

"A poor joke, eh?" she said. "Bad luck, too, certainly."

She was necessarily very sharp set when she thought her last hour had
come. There was no end to her surprise, too; her sexual economy seemed
to her to have got out of order; it produced children then even when
one did not want them and when one employed it for quite other purposes!
Nature drove her to exasperation; this appearance of serious motherhood
in a career of pleasure, this gift of life amid all the deaths she was
spreading around, exasperated her. Why could one not dispose of oneself
as fancy dictated, without all this fuss? And whence had this brat come?
She could not even suggest a father. Ah, dear heaven, the man who made
him would have a splendid notion had he kept him in his own hands, for
nobody asked for him; he was in everybody's way, and he would certainly
not have much happiness in life!

Meanwhile Zoe described the catastrophe.

"Madame was seized with colic toward four o'clock. When she didn't come
back out of the dressing room I went in and found her lying stretched on
the floor in a faint. Yes, monsieur, on the floor in a pool of blood, as
though she had been murdered. Then I understood, you see. I was furious;
Madame might quite well have confided her trouble to me. As it happened,
Monsieur Georges was there, and he helped me to lift her up, and
directly a miscarriage was mentioned he felt ill in his turn! Oh, it's
true I've had the hump since yesterday!"

In fact, the house seemed utterly upset. All the servants were galloping
upstairs, dow