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By Root 1465 0

giving three francs every morning; but he expected all sorts of things for his money. He wanted everything for his three francs—butter, meat, early fruit, and vegetables; and if she hazarded an observation—if she insinuated that it was impossible to purchase all in the market for three twenty sous pieces—he fumed, he called her a good-for-nothing, an extravagant hussy, a stupid fool whom the market people robbed, and invariably wound up by threatening to get his meals elsewhere. Then after the expiration of a month, on some mornings he would forget to leave the three francs on the top of the chest of drawers. She ventured to ask him for them timidly, in a round-about way; but this had occasioned such quarrels—he made her life so miserable on the first pretext he could get hold of—that she preferred no longer to count on him. Whenever he had not left the money, and found all the same a good dinner ready for him, he was as gay as a lark, and most amiable, embracing Nana and waltzing about the room with the chairs. And this made her so happy that she reached the point of wishing not to find anything on the drawers, in spite of the difficulty she had in making both ends meet. One morning even she returned him his three francs, telling him a long rigmarole about having some money left from the previous day. As he had given nothing for two days he hesitated for a moment, fearing a lesson. But she looked at him with her eyes overflowing with love, she embraced him with a complete abandonment of her whole person; and he put the money back into his pocket, with the slight convulsive trepidation of a miser recovering an amount that had been in danger. From that day he ceased to trouble himself, never asking where the money came from, looking very black when there were only potatoes, and laughing fit to dislocate his jaws on beholding a turkey or a leg of mutton; without prejudice, however, to sundry cuffs with which he favoured Nana, even in his happiest moments, just to keep his hand in training.

Nana had therefore found means of supplying everything. On certain days the house was glutted with food. Bosc feasted there so sumptuously twice a week that he suffered from indigestion. One evening as Madame Lerat was leaving, angry at seeing before the fire an abundant dinner of which she was not to partake, she could not resist bluntly asking who it was who paid for it. Nana, taken by surprise, no longer knew what she was about and began to cry.

“Well! it’s a nice state of things,” said the aunt, who understood.

Nana had resigned herself for the sake of peace and quietness in her home. It was partly, too, the fault of old Tricon, whom she had met in the Rue de Laval one day when Fontan had gone off in a fury because there had been nothing but salt cod for dinner. So she had said “yes” to old Tricon, who happened to be in a difficulty. After that, as Fontan never came home before six in the evening, she was able to dispose of her afternoons, and often brought back as much as forty or sixty francs, and sometimes more. She might have made as much as ten and fifteen louis had she been entirely free; but still she was very glad to get enough to keep things going. At night-time she forgot all, when Bosc was almost bursting with food, and Fontan, with his elbows on the table, let her kiss his eyes with the self-satisfied air of a man who is loved for himself alone.

Then, whilst adoring her darling, her dear love, with a passion all the more blinding as it was she who now paid for all, Nana reverted again to the depravity of her early days. She walked the streets as she did when a young girl in quest of a five francs piece. One Sunday, at the Rochefoucauld market, she made it up with Satin, after flying at her and bullying her on account of Madame Robert. But Satin merely replied that when one did not like a thing, one had no right to seek to disgust others with it; and Nana, who was by no means narrow-minded, yielded to the philosophical idea that one never knows how one may end, and forgave her. And her curiosity being awakened, she even