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By Root 1368 0

des Panoramas. It was a very mild evening. A shower had just driven a crowd of people into the Passage. There was quite a mob, and it was a slow and difficult task to pass along between the shops on either side. Beneath the glass roof, brightened by the reflection, there was a most fierce illumination, consisting of an endless string of lights—white globes, red and blue lamps, rows of flaring gas-jets, and monstrous watches and fans formed of flames of fire—burning without any protection whatsoever; and the medley of colours in the various shop windows—the gold of the jewellers, the crystal vases of the confectioners, the pale silks of the milliners—blazed behind the spotless plate-glass, in the strong light cast by the reflectors; whilst among the chaos of gaudily painted signs, an enormous red glove in the distance looked like a bleeding hand, cut off and fixed to a yellow cuff.

Count Muffat had strolled leisurely as far as the Boulevard. He cast a glance on the pavement, then slowly retraced his footsteps, keeping close to the shops. A damp and warm air filled the narrow thoroughfare with a kind of luminous vapour. Along the flagstones, wet from the drippings of umbrellas, footsteps reverberated continuously, without the sound of a single voice. The passers-by, elbowing the count at each turn, gazed at his impassive face, rendered paler than usual by the glare of the gas. So, to escape from their curiosity, he went and stood in front of a stationer’s shop, where he inspected, apparently with profound attention, a display of glass paper-weights, containing coloured representations of landscapes and flowers.

But in reality he saw nothing. He was thinking of Nana. Why had she lied to him again? That morning she had written to tell him not to come to her in the evening, pretending that little Louis was ill, and that she would stay with him all night at 193 her aunt’s. But he, being suspicious, had called at her house, and had learned from the concierge that madame had just gone off to her theatre. It surprised him, for he knew that she had no part in the new piece. Why, then, that lie, and what could she be doing at the Variety Theatre that evening?

Pushed against by some passer-by, the count, without knowing he did so, quitted the paper-weights, and found himself in front of a window full of miscellaneous articles, and looking in his absorbed way at a quantity of pocket-books and cigar-cases, all which had the same little blue swallow painted on one of the corners. Nana was certainly altered. In the early days, after her return from the country, she used to send him mad when she kissed him on the face and whiskers, with the little playful ways of a kitten, swearing that he was her ducky darling, the only little man whom she adored. He no longer feared George, who was kept by his mother at Les Fondettes. There remained fat old Steiner, whose place he supposed he had taken, but he had never dared to ask a question on the subject. He knew that Steiner was in a great mess about money matters, and on the point of being declared a defaulter at the Bourse, and that his only chance was a rise in the shares of the Salt Works of the Landes. If he ever met him at Nana’s she would always explain, in a reasonable sort of way, that she had not the heart to send him off like a dog, after all he had spent upon her. Besides, for three months past, he, the count, had lived in the midst of a sort of a sensual whirlpool, outside of which he understood nothing very clearly but the necessity of possessing Nana. This late awakening of his flesh was like the gluttony of a child, which leaves no room for either vanity or jealousy. Only a precise sensation could strike him: Nana was not as nice as at first, she no longer kissed him on the beard. This caused him some anxiety, and, as a man ignorant of the ways of women, he asked himself what she could have to reproach him with. Yet, he fancied that he satisfied all her desires; and his thoughts returned to the letter of the morning, to that complicated lie, told for the simple object of spending