But a slight rustling movement ran through the house; Rose Mignon had just come on the stage as Diana.  Now though she had neither the face nor the figure for the part, being thin and dark and of the adorable type of ugliness peculiar to a Parisian street child, she nonetheless appeared charming and as though she were a satire on the personage she represented.  Her song at her entrance on the stage was full of lines quaint enough to make you cry with laughter and of complaints about Mars, who was getting ready to desert her for the companionship of Venus.  She sang it with a chaste reserve so full of sprightly suggestiveness that the public warmed amain.  The husband and Steiner, sitting side by side, were laughing complaisantly, and the whole house broke out in a roar when Prulliere, that great favorite, appeared as a general, a masquerade Mars, decked with an enormous plume and dragging along a sword, the hilt of which reached to his shoulder.  As for him, he had had enough of Diana; she had been a great deal too coy with him, he averred.  Thereupon Diana promised to keep a sharp eye on him and to be revenged.  The duet ended with a comic yodel which Prulliere delivered very amusingly with the yell of an angry tomcat.  He had about him all the entertaining fatuity of a young leading gentleman whose love affairs prosper, and he rolled around the most swaggering glances, which excited shrill feminine laughter in the boxes.

Then the public cooled again, for the ensuing scenes were found tiresome.  Old Bosc, an imbecile Jupiter with head crushed beneath the weight of an immense crown, only just succeeded in raising a smile among his audience when he had a domestic altercation with Juno on the subject of the cook’s accounts.  The march past of the gods, Neptune, Pluto, Minerva and the rest, was well-nigh spoiling everything.  People grew impatient; there was a restless, slowly growing murmur; the audience ceased to take an interest in the performance and looked round at the house.  Lucy began laughing with Labordette; the Count de Vandeuvres was craning his neck in conversation behind Blanche’s sturdy shoulders, while Fauchery, out of the corners of his eyes, took stock of the Muffats, of whom the count appeared very serious, as though he had not understood the allusions, and the countess smiled vaguely, her eyes lost in reverie.  But on a sudden, in this uncomfortable state of things, the applause of the clapping contingent rattled out with the regularity of platoon firing.  People turned toward the stage.  Was it Nana at last?  This Nana made one wait with a vengeance.