there such a mess; the house was like a
passage down which the scum of the registry offices galloped, destroying
everything in their path. Zoe alone kept her place; she always looked
clean, and her only anxiety was how to organize this riot until she had
got enough together to set up on her own account in fulfillment of a
plan she had been hatching for some time past.

These, again, were only the anxieties he could own to. The count put up
with the stupidity of Mme Maloir, playing bezique with her in spite of
her musty smell. He put up with Mme Lerat and her encumbrances, with
Louiset and the mournful complaints peculiar to a child who is being
eaten up with the rottenness inherited from some unknown father. But
he spent hours worse than these. One evening he had heard Nana angrily
telling her maid that a man pretending to be rich had just swindled
her--a handsome man calling himself an American and owning gold mines in
his own country, a beast who had gone off while she was asleep without
giving her a copper and had even taken a packet of cigarette papers with
him. The count had turned very pale and had gone downstairs again on
tiptoe so as not to hear more. But later he had to hear all. Nana,
having been smitten with a baritone in a music hall and having been
thrown over by him, wanted to commit suicide during a fit of sentimental
melancholia. She swallowed a glass of water in which she had soaked a
box of matches. This made her terribly sick but did not kill her. The
count had to nurse her and to listen to the whole story of her passion,
her tearful protests and her oaths never to take to any man again.
In her contempt for those swine, as she called them, she could not,
however, keep her heart free, for she always had some sweetheart round
her, and her exhausted body inclined to incomprehensible fancies and
perverse tastes. As Zoe designedly relaxed her efforts the service of
the house had got to such a pitch that Muffat did not dare to push open
a door, to pull a curtain or to unclose a cupboard. The bells did
not ring; men lounged about everywhere and at every moment knocked up
against one another. He had now to cough before entering a room, having
almost caught the girl hanging round Francis' neck one evening that
he had just gone out of the dressing room for two minutes to tell the
coachman to put the horses to, while her hairdresser was finishing
her hair. She gave herself up suddenly behind his back; she took he