She had her suspicions about La Faloise, and, as a matter of fact, he was still in his place in the lodge among the gentlemen obstinately waiting on Mme Bron’s chairs.  They all stretched forward, and with that she passed brazenly by in the wake of a friend.  The gentlemen were blinking in bewilderment over the wild whirl of petticoats eddying at the foot of the narrow stairs.  It made them desperate to think they had waited so long, only to see them all flying away like this without being able to recognize a single one.  The litter of little black cats were sleeping on the oilcloth, nestled against their mother’s belly, and the latter was stretching her paws out in a state of beatitude while the big tortoise-shell cat sat at the other end of the table, her tail stretched out behind her and her yellow eyes solemnly following the flight of the women.

“If His Highness will be good enough to come this way,” said Bordenave at the bottom of the stairs, and he pointed to the passage.

Some chorus girls were still crowding along it.  The prince began following Nana while Muffat and the marquis walked behind.

It was a long, narrow passage lying between the theater and the house next door, a kind of contracted by-lane which had been covered with a sloping glass roof.  Damp oozed from the walls, and the footfall sounded as hollow on the tiled floor as in an underground vault.  It was crowded with the kind of rubbish usually found in a garret.  There was a workbench on which the porter was wont to plane such parts of the scenery as required it, besides a pile of wooden barriers which at night were placed at the doors of the theater for the purpose of regulating the incoming stream of people.  Nana had to pick up her dress as she passed a hydrant which, through having been carelessly turned off, was flooding the tiles underfoot.  In the entrance hall the company bowed and said good-by.  And when Bordenave was alone he summed up his opinion of the prince in a shrug of eminently philosophic disdain.

“He’s a bit of a duffer all the same,” he said to Fauchery without entering on further explanations, and with that Rose Mignon carried the journalist off with her husband in order to effect a reconciliation between them at home.

Muffat was left alone on the sidewalk.  His Highness had handed Nana quietly into his carriage, and the marquis had slipped off after Satin and her super.  In his excitement he was content to follow this vicious pair in vague hopes of some stray favor being granted him.  Then with brain on fire Muffat decided to walk home.  The struggle within him had wholly ceased.  The ideas and beliefs of the last forty years were being drowned in a flood of new life.  While he was passing along the boulevards the roll of the last carriages deafened him with the name of Nana; the gaslights set nude limbs dancing before his eyes—­the nude limbs, the lithe arms, the white shoulders, of Nana.  And he felt that he was hers utterly:  he would have abjured everything, sold everything, to possess her for a single hour that very night.  Youth, a lustful puberty of early manhood, was stirring within him at last, flaming up suddenly in the chaste heart of the Catholic and amid the dignified traditions of middle age.