ossal scheme and obtained money from the most distant climes. All
these savings, the pounds of speculators and the pence of the poor,
were swallowed up in the Avenue de Villiers. Again he was partner in an
ironworks in Alsace, where in a small provincial town workmen, blackened
with coal dust and soaked with sweat, day and night strained their
sinews and heard their bones crack to satisfy Nana's pleasures. Like a
huge fire she devoured all the fruits of stock-exchange swindling and
the profits of labor. This time she did for Steiner; she brought him to
the ground, sucked him dry to the core, left him so cleaned out that he
was unable to invent a new roguery. When his bank failed he stammered
and trembled at the idea of prosecution. His bankruptcy had just been
published, and the simple mention of money flurried him and threw him
into a childish embarrassment. And this was he who had played with
millions. One evening at Nana's he began to cry and asked her for a loan
of a hundred francs wherewith to pay his maidservant. And Nana, much
affected and amused at the end of this terrible old man who had squeezed
Paris for twenty years, brought it to him and said:

"I say, I'm giving it you because it seems so funny! But listen to me,
my boy, you are too old for me to keep. You must find something else to
do."

Then Nana started on La Faloise at once. He had for some time been
longing for the honor of being ruined by her in order to put the
finishing stroke on his smartness. He needed a woman to launch him
properly; it was the one thing still lacking. In two months all Paris
would be talking of him, and he would see his name in the papers. Six
weeks were enough. His inheritance was in landed estate, houses, fields,
woods and farms. He had to sell all, one after the other, as quickly
as he could. At every mouthful Nana swallowed an acre. The foliage
trembling in the sunshine, the wide fields of ripe grain, the vineyards
so golden in September, the tall grass in which the cows stood
knee-deep, all passed through her hands as if engulfed by an abyss. Even
fishing rights, a stone quarry and three mills disappeared. Nana passed
over them like an invading army or one of those swarms of locusts whose
flight scours a whole province. The ground was burned up where her
little foot had rested. Farm by farm, field by field, she ate up the
man's patrimony very prettily and quite inattentively, just as she would
have eaten a box of sweet-me