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After that her experiments on La Faloise having whetted her appetite, she treated him like an animal, threshing him and chasing him to an accompaniment of kicks. "Gee up! Gee up! You're a horse. Hoi! Gee up! Won't you hurry up, you dirty screw?" At other times he was a dog.
She was with a serious-looking gentleman, a chief clerk at the office of the Ministry of the Interior, whom La Faloise knew, having met him at the Muffats'. As to Fauchery, he was under the impression that her name was Madame Robert, a lady of honorable repute who had a lover, only one, and that always a person of respectability. But they had to turn round, for Daguenet was smiling at them.
La Faloise kept reiterating, for Paris still astonished him. The bell rang for some time; the foyer emptied. There was a hurrying of people in the passages. The curtain was already up when whole bands of spectators re-entered the house amid the irritated expressions of those who were once more in their places. Everyone took his seat again with an animated look and renewed attention.
All the latter smiled discreetly at her while she, in her superiority, pretended not to know them. She wasn't there for business purposes: she was watching the races for the love of the thing, as became a frantic gambler with a passion for horseflesh. "Dear me, there's that idiot La Faloise!" said Georges suddenly. It was a surprise to them all.
In the long run, perhaps, after the close of the exhibition she would, if her business had flourished, be able to retire to a little house at Jouvisy, which she had long had her eye on. "What's to be done?" she said to La Faloise. "One never gets what one wants! Oh, if only one were still really loved!"
She wore a dress of faded green silk and a round hat which blows had dinted. The cool air of the night made her look very pale. "Egad, there's Satin," murmured Fauchery when his eye lit upon her. La Faloise questioned him. Oh dear, yes, she was a streetwalker she didn't count. But she was such a scandalous sort that people amused themselves by making her talk.
And amid this swooning murmur, these perishing sighs of sound, the orchestra struck up the small, lively notes of a waltz with a vagabond rhythm bubbling with roguish laughter. The public were titillated; they were already on the grin. But the gang of clappers in the foremost rows of the pit applauded furiously. The curtain rose. "By George!" exclaimed La Faloise, still talking away.
Bordenave had just then opened a little door and, peeping out, had obtained from Fauchery the formal promise of an article. He was dripping with perspiration, his face blazed, as though he were drunk with success. "You're good for two hundred nights," La Faloise said to him with civility. "The whole of Paris will visit your theater."
Whereupon, in order to retain his position, he had recently broken it off with Nana. La Faloise bluntly reported this account of matters to the young woman and, addressing her as his Juliet, again offered himself. But she laughed merrily and remarked: "It's idiotic! You won't know him; I've only to say, 'Come here, for him to chuck up everything."
At the end of the room, in front of the bar, a man with a huge corporation was drinking a glass of fruit syrup. But Fauchery, in order to breathe more freely, had gone to the balcony. La Faloise, who was studying the photographs of actresses hung in frames alternating with the mirrors between the columns, ended by following him.
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