ngs should be caught up to the ceiling after the manner of a
tent. This arrangement ought to be both rich and tender, she thought,
and would form a splendid background to her blonde vermeil-tinted skin.
However, the bedroom was only designed to serve as a setting to the bed,
which was to be a dazzling affair, a prodigy. Nana meditated a bed such
as had never before existed; it was to be a throne, an altar, whither
Paris was to come in order to adore her sovereign nudity. It was to be
all in gold and silver beaten work--it should suggest a great piece of
jewelry with its golden roses climbing on a trelliswork of silver. On
the headboard a band of Loves should peep forth laughing from amid the
flowers, as though they were watching the voluptuous dalliance within
the shadow of the bed curtains. Nana had applied to Labordette who
had brought two goldsmiths to see her. They were already busy with the
designs. The bed would cost fifty thousand francs, and Muffat was to
give it her as a New Year's present.

What most astonished the young woman was that she was endlessly short of
money amid a river of gold, the tide of which almost enveloped her. On
certain days she was at her wit's end for want of ridiculously small
sums--sums of only a few louis. She was driven to borrow from Zoe, or
she scraped up cash as well as she could on her own account. But before
resignedly adopting extreme measures she tried her friends and in a
joking sort of way got the men to give her all they had about them, even
down to their coppers. For the last three months she had been emptying
Philippe's pockets especially, and now on days of passionate enjoyment
he never came away but he left his purse behind him. Soon she grew
bolder and asked him for loans of two hundred francs, three hundred
francs--never more than that--wherewith to pay the interest of bills
or to stave off outrageous debts. And Philippe, who in July had been
appointed paymaster to his regiment, would bring the money the day
after, apologizing at the same time for not being rich, seeing that good
Mamma Hugon now treated her sons with singular financial severity. At
the close of three months these little oft-renewed loans mounted up to
a sum of ten thousand francs. The captain still laughed his
hearty-sounding laugh, but he was growing visibly thinner, and sometimes
he seemed absent-minded, and a shade of suffering would pass over his
face. But one look from Nana's eyes would transfigure