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By Root 1320 0

inside her landau, highly amused, thinking him very funny as he roundly abused the other drivers whenever there was a block in the street. Then, without rhyme or reason, she completely changed and treated him as a fool. She was always wrangling about the straw, the bran, and the oats; in spite of her love for animals, she considered that her horses ate too much. So at length, one settling day, as she accused him of robbing her, Charles flew into a passion, and bluntly called her a strumpet; her horses, anyhow, were worth more than she, they did not let everyone muck them about. She retorted in a similar style, and the count was obliged to separate them and turn the coachman off the premises.

But this was only the beginning of a general stampede of the servants. Victorine and François went off, after the discovery of a robbery of diamonds. Even Julien disappeared, and a story was circulated that the count had implored him to go, giving him at the same time a large sum of money, because madame had taken a great fancy to him. Every week fresh faces were seen in the servants’ hall. Never had there been such waste; the house was like a passage through which the scum of the servants’ registry-offices defiled in a massacring gallop. Zoé alone kept her place, with her neat look and her only anxiety of organising the disorder, so long as she had not saved sufficient to settle down on her own account, a plan which she had been working at for a long time past.

And yet those were only the avowable cares. The count bore with Madame Maloir’s stupidity, playing at bezique with her, in spite of her rank odour. He put up with Madame Lerat and her cackling, and with little Louis and his doleful complaints of a child devoured by disease—some putrefaction bequeathed by an unknown father. But he had to endure other things far worse. One night, behind a door, he had heard Nana furiously telling her maid that a pretended rich man had just taken her in. Yes, a handsome fellow, who said he was American, and owned gold mines in his own country—a mean vagabond who had gone off whilst she was asleep, without leaving a sou behind, and even taking a packet of cigarette papers away with him; and the count, very pale, had crept downstairs again on tiptoe, so that he might feign ignorance of the occurrence. On another occasion he was obliged to be aware of everything. Nana, infatuated with a singer at a music-hall, and forsaken by him, wanted to commit suicide in a fit of gloomy sentimentality. She swallowed a glass of water in which she had soaked a handful of matches, and was horribly ill in consequence, but did not die. The count had to nurse her and listen to the story of her passion intermingled with tears and oaths never to care for men again. In her contempt for the pigs, as she called them, she could not, however, keep her heart free, having always some sweetheart about her skirts, and indulging in the most inexplicable caprices, through the depraved tastes of her wearied body.

Since Zoé relaxed her supervision to meet her own ends, the good management of the household had disappeared to the extent that Muffat dared not open a door, draw a curtain, or look into a cupboard. The machinery no longer worked. Gentlemen were hanging about everywhere; at every minute they were knocking up against each other. Now, he invariably coughed before entering a room, having almost found the young woman with her arms round Francis’s neck one evening that he had left the dressing-room for a couple of minutes to order the carriage, whilst the hairdresser was giving a few finishing touches to madame’s hair. It was for ever sudden abandonments behind his back—pleasures snatched in odd corners, quickly, and in her chemise or in her most gorgeous costumes, with whoever happened to be with her. Then delighted with her robbery, she would rejoin him, looking very red in the face. With him there would have been no pleasure; he was such an abominable nuisance!

In the agony of his jealousy, the unhappy man had reached the state of feeling easy whenever he left Nana and