ed the doors familiarly and visited the drawing
room and the winter garden, returning thence into the hall. This
overwhelming luxury, this gilded furniture, these silks and velvets,
gradually filled him with such a feeling of admiration that it set his
heart beating. When Zoe came down to fetch him she offered to show him
the other rooms, the dressing room, that is to say, and the bedroom. In
the latter Mignon's feelings overcame him; he was carried away by them;
they filled him with tender enthusiasm.

That damned Nana was simply stupefying him, and yet he thought he knew
a thing or two. Amid the downfall of the house and the servants' wild,
wasteful race to destruction, massed-up riches still filled every gaping
hole and overtopped every ruined wall. And Mignon, as he viewed this
lordly monument of wealth, began recalling to mind the various great
works he had seen. Near Marseilles they had shown him an aqueduct, the
stone arches of which bestrode an abyss, a Cyclopean work which cost
millions of money and ten years of intense labor. At Cherbourg he had
seen the new harbor with its enormous works, where hundreds of men
sweated in the sun while cranes filled the sea with huge squares of rock
and built up a wall where a workman now and again remained crushed into
bloody pulp. But all that now struck him as insignificant. Nana excited
him far more. Viewing the fruit of her labors, he once more experienced
the feelings of respect that had overcome him one festal evening in a
sugar refiner's chateau. This chateau had been erected for the refiner,
and its palatial proportions and royal splendor had been paid for by a
single material--sugar. It was with something quite different, with
a little laughable folly, a little delicate nudity--it was with this
shameful trifle, which is so powerful as to move the universe, that she
alone, without workmen, without the inventions of engineers, had shaken
Paris to its foundations and had built up a fortune on the bodies of
dead men.

"Oh, by God, what an implement!"

Mignon let the words escape him in his ecstasy, for he felt a return of
personal gratitude.

Nana had gradually lapsed into a most mournful condition. To begin with,
the meeting of the marquis and the count had given her a severe fit
of feverish nervousness, which verged at times on laughter. Then the
thought of this old man going away half dead in a cab and of her poor
rough, whom she would never set eyes on again now