id. He insisted so
much on the subject that even an honest girl would have fired up. Even
when he was abusing her, he taught her a few things she did not know as
yet, which, to say the least was astonishing. Then, little by little she
acquired some singular habits. One morning he noticed her rummaging in
a paper bag and rubbing something on her face. It was rice powder, which
she plastered on her delicate satin-like skin with perverse taste. He
caught up the paper bag and rubbed it over her face violently enough to
graze her skin and called her a miller's daughter. On another occasion
she brought some ribbon home, to do up her old black hat which she was
so ashamed of. He asked her in a furious voice where she had got those
ribbons from. Had she earned them by lying on her back or had she bagged
them somewhere? A hussy or a thief, and perhaps both by now?

More than once he found her with some pretty little doodad. She had
found a little interlaced heart in the street on Rue d'Aboukir. Her
father crushed the heart under his foot, driving her to the verge of
throwing herself at him to ruin something of his. For two years she had
been longing for one of those hearts, and now he had smashed it! This
was too much, she was reaching the end of the line with him.

Coupeau was often in the wrong in the manner in which he tried to rule
Nana. His injustice exasperated her. She at last left off attending the
workshop and when the zinc-worker gave her a hiding, she declared she
would not return to Titreville's again, for she was always placed next
to Augustine, who must have swallowed her feet to have such a foul
breath. Then Coupeau took her himself to the Rue du Caire and requested
the mistress of the establishment to place her always next to Augustine,
by way of punishment. Every morning for a fortnight he took the trouble
to come down from the Barriere Poissonniere to escort Nana to the door
of the flower shop. And he remained for five minutes on the footway, to
make sure that she had gone in. But one morning while he was drinking a
glass with a friend in a wineshop in the Rue Saint-Denis, he perceived
the hussy darting down the street. For a fortnight she had been
deceiving him; instead of going into the workroom, she climbed a story
higher, and sat down on the stairs, waiting till he had gone off. When
Coupeau began casting the blame on Madame Lerat, the latter flatly
replied that she would not accept it. She had told her nie