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“I’m off to the hospital. No one ever loved me as she did. Ah! one is quite right in accusing men of having no hearts! Who knows? she’s perhaps dead already. All the same, I shall ask to see her. I must kiss her once more.”

Labordette and Mignon smiled. She was no longer sad, she smiled also, for those two did not count, they could understand. And they both admired her, in a thoughtful silence, as she finished buttoning her gloves. She alone stood erect, in the midst of the piled-up wealth of her mansion, with a crowd of men trampled beneath her feet. Like those antique monsters whose dreaded domain was covered with bones, she trod on skulls, and catastrophe surrounded her: Vandeuvres’s furious conflagration; the melancholy of Foucarmont, drowned in the China seas; the collapse of Steiner, now forced to live as an honest man; the satisfied imbecility of La Faloise, and the tragical downfall of the Muffats; and George’s white corpse watched over by Philippe, discharged from prison the day before. Her work of ruin and death was accomplished, the fly that had taken its flight from the filth of the slums, carrying with it the ferment of social decay, had poisoned those men merely by touching them. It was good, it was just; she had avenged her people, the rogues and the vagabonds from whom she sprang. And whilst in a halo her sex ascended and shone on her scattered victims like a rising sun lighting up a field of carnage, she retained her unconsciousness of a superb beast, ignorant of her work, always good-natured. She remained big and plump, with beautiful health and unalloyed gaiety. But all that no longer counted. Her mansion seemed to her idiotic—it was so small, and full of a heap of furniture which was always in her way. A mere nothing, she only wanted to commence again. She dreamed, too, of something better; and she went off in a gorgeous costume to kiss Satin a last time—clean, solid, looking quite new, as though she had never been in use.

CHAPTER XIV

Nana abruptly disappeared—another plunge, a wild prank, a flight into strange lands. Before her departure she procured herself the emotion of a sale by auction, sweeping everything off—the mansion, the furniture, the jewellery, and even the dresses and the linen. Figures were quoted. The five days produced more than six hundred thousand francs. For a last time Paris had seen her in a fairy piece, “Mélusine,” at the Gaiety Theatre, that Bordenave had audaciously taken without a sou. She was there with Prullière and Fontan. Her part was a dumb one, all show, but a real hit—three plastic postures of a powerful and silent fairy. Then in the midst of this great success, when Bordenave, advertising-mad, was covering Paris with colossal posters, it was stated one fine morning that the night before she had left for Cairo—a simple discussion with her manager, a word that had not pleased her, the caprice of a woman too rich to allow herself to be annoyed. Besides, it was a fad of hers. For a long time past she had longed to go and see the Turks.

Months passed by. She was forgotten. Whenever her name was mentioned amongst her friends, the strangest stories circulated. Each gave contrary and prodigious information. She had captivated the viceroy; she reigned in the innermost recesses of a palace, over two hundred slaves, whose heads she cut off to make her laugh. Not at all. She had ruined herself with a big negro—a filthy infatuation which had left her without a chemise, in the midst of the crapulous debauchery of Cairo. A fortnight later there was universal astonishment. Some one swore he had met her in Russia. A legend gradually developed. She was the mistress of a prince; her diamonds were talked about. All the women were soon acquainted with them, through the descriptions that were current, without any one being able to give their source—rings, bracelets, earrings, a diamond necklace as broad as two fingers, and a queenly diadem surmounted by a central brilliant as big as one’s thumb. In the unknown of these far-oft lands, she assumed the mysterious radiance of an idol