everything her eyes would wander in its direction, and she now never
entered Madame's room without remarking:

"It's strange that don't go. All the same, plenty of folk come in this
way."

Nana kept receiving the best news from Georges, who was by that time
already convalescent in his mother's keeping at Les Fondettes, and she
used always to make the same reply.

"Oh, hang it, time's all that's wanted. It's apt to grow paler as feet
cross it."

As a matter of fact, each of the gentlemen, whether Foucarmont, Steiner,
La Faloise or Fauchery, had borne away some of it on their bootsoles.
And Muffat, whom the bloodstain preoccupied as much as it did Zoe,
kept studying it in his own despite, as though in its gradual rosy
disappearance he would read the number of men that passed. He secretly
dreaded it and always stepped over it out of a vivid fear of crushing
some live thing, some naked limb lying on the floor.

But in the bedroom within he would grow dizzy and intoxicated and would
forget everything--the mob of men which constantly crossed it, the
sign of mourning which barred its door. Outside, in the open air of the
street, he would weep occasionally out of sheer shame and disgust and
would vow never to enter the room again. And the moment the portiere had
closed behind him he was under the old influence once more and felt his
whole being melting in the damp warm air of the place, felt his flesh
penetrated by a perfume, felt himself overborne by a voluptuous yearning
for self-annihilation. Pious and habituated to ecstatic experiences in
sumptuous chapels, he there re-encountered precisely the same mystical
sensations as when he knelt under some painted window and gave way
to the intoxication of organ music and incense. Woman swayed him as
jealously and despotically as the God of wrath, terrifying him, granting
him moments of delight, which were like spasms in their keenness, in
return for hours filled with frightful, tormenting visions of hell and
eternal tortures. In Nana's presence, as in church, the same stammering
accents were his, the same prayers and the same fits of despair--nay,
the same paroxysms of humility peculiar to an accursed creature who is
crushed down in the mire from whence he has sprung. His fleshly desires,
his spiritual needs, were confounded together and seemed to spring from
the obscure depths of his being and to bear but one blossom on the
tree of his existence. He abandoned himself to the p