ed Mignon sharply.

"Monsieur Steiner has gone away to the Loiret," said Barillot, preparing
to return to the neighborhood of the stage. "I expect he's gone to buy a
country place in those parts."

"Ah yes, I know, Nana's country place."

Mignon had grown suddenly serious. Oh, that Steiner! He had promised
Rose a fine house in the old days! Well, well, it wouldn't do to grow
angry with anybody. Here was a position that would have to be won again.
From fireplace to console table Mignon paced, sunk in thought yet still
unconquered by circumstances. There was no one in the greenroom now save
Fauchery and himself. The journalist was tired and had flung himself
back into the recesses of the big armchair. There he stayed with
half-closed eyes and as quiet as quiet could be, while the other glanced
down at him as he passed. When they were alone Mignon scorned to slap
him at every turn. What good would it have done, since nobody would have
enjoyed the spectacle? He was far too disinterested to be personally
entertained by the farcical scenes in which he figured as a bantering
husband. Glad of this short-lived respite, Fauchery stretched his feet
out languidly toward the fire and let his upturned eyes wander from
the barometer to the clock. In the course of his march Mignon planted
himself in front of Potier's bust, looked at it without seeming to see
it and then turned back to the window, outside which yawned the darkling
gulf of the courtyard. The rain had ceased, and there was now a deep
silence in the room, which the fierce heat of the coke fire and the
flare of the gas jets rendered still more oppressive. Not a sound came
from the wings: the staircase and the passages were deadly still.

That choking sensation of quiet, which behind the scenes immediately
precedes the end of an act, had begun to pervade the empty greenroom.
Indeed, the place seemed to be drowsing off through very breathlessness
amid that faint murmur which the stage gives forth when the whole troupe
are raising the deafening uproar of some grand finale.

"Oh, the cows!" Bordenave suddenly shouted in his hoarse voice.

He had only just come up, and he was already howling complaints about
two chorus girls who had nearly fallen flat on the stage because they
were playing the fool together. When his eye lit on Mignon and Fauchery
he called them; he wanted to show them something. The prince had just
notified a desire to compliment Nana in her dressing room