and make good her own. But the household waste was worse than the
household dishonesty. Yesterday's food was thrown into the gutter, and
the collection of provisions in the house was such that the servants
grew disgusted with it. The glass was all sticky with sugar, and the gas
burners flared and flared till the rooms seemed ready to explode.
Then, too, there were instances of negligence and mischief and sheer
accident--of everything, in fact, which can hasten the ruin of a house
devoured by so many mouths. Upstairs in Madame's quarters destruction
raged more fiercely still. Dresses, which cost ten thousand francs and
had been twice worn, were sold by Zoe; jewels vanished as though they
had crumbled deep down in their drawers; stupid purchases were made;
every novelty of the day was brought and left to lie forgotten in some
corner the morning after or swept up by ragpickers in the street. She
could not see any very expensive object without wanting to possess it,
and so she constantly surrounded herself with the wrecks of bouquets and
costly knickknacks and was the happier the more her passing fancy cost.
Nothing remained intact in her hands; she broke everything, and this
object withered, and that grew dirty in the clasp of her lithe white
fingers. A perfect heap of nameless debris, of twisted shreds and
muddy rags, followed her and marked her passage. Then amid this utter
squandering of pocket money cropped up a question about the big bills
and their settlement. Twenty thousand francs were due to the modiste,
thirty thousand to the linen draper, twelve thousand to the bootmaker.
Her stable devoured fifty thousand for her, and in six months she ran
up a bill of a hundred and twenty thousand francs at her ladies' tailor.
Though she had not enlarged her scheme of expenditure, which Labordette
reckoned at four hundred thousand francs on an average, she ran up that
same year to a million. She was herself stupefied by the amount and was
unable to tell whither such a sum could have gone. Heaps upon heaps of
men, barrowfuls of gold, failed to stop up the hole, which, amid this
ruinous luxury, continually gaped under the floor of her house.

Meanwhile Nana had cherished her latest caprice. Once more exercised
by the notion that her room needed redoing, she fancied she had hit on
something at last. The room should be done in velvet of the color of tea
roses, with silver buttons and golden cords, tassels and fringes, and
the hangi