“It’s true:  we’ve only got a minute left for our talk.”

Her face and arms were now finished, and with her fingers she put two large dabs of carmine on her lips.  Count Muffat felt more excited than ever.  He was ravished by the perverse transformation wrought by powders and paints and filled by a lawless yearning for those young painted charms, for the too-red mouth and the too-white face and the exaggerated eyes, ringed round with black and burning and dying for very love.  Meanwhile Nana went behind the curtain for a second or two in order to take off her drawers and slip on Venus’ tights.  After which, with tranquil immodesty, she came out and undid her little linen stays and held out her arms to Mme Jules, who drew the short-sleeved tunic over them.

“Make haste; they’re growing angry!” she muttered.

The prince with half-closed eyes marked the swelling lines of her bosom with an air of connoisseurship, while the Marquis de Chouard wagged his head involuntarily.  Muffat gazed at the carpet in order not to see any more.  At length Venus, with only her gauze veil over her shoulders, was ready to go on the stage.  Mme Jules, with vacant, unconcerned eyes and an expression suggestive of a little elderly wooden doll, still kept circling round her.  With brisk movements she took pins out of the inexhaustible pincushion over her heart and pinned up Venus’ tunic, but as she ran over all those plump nude charms with her shriveled hands, nothing was suggested to her.  She was as one whom her sex does not concern.

“There!” said the young woman, taking a final look at herself in the mirror.

Bordenave was back again.  He was anxious and said the third act had begun.

“Very well!  I’m coming,” replied Nana.  “Here’s a pretty fuss!  Why, it’s usually I that waits for the others.”

The gentlemen left the dressing room, but they did not say good-by, for the prince had expressed a desire to assist behind the scenes at the performance of the third act.  Left alone, Nana seemed greatly surprised and looked round her in all directions.

“Where can she be?” she queried.

She was searching for Satin.  When she had found her again, waiting on her trunk behind the curtain, Satin quietly replied: 

“Certainly I didn’t want to be in your way with all those men there!”

And she added further that she was going now.  But Nana held her back.  What a silly girl she was!  Now that Bordenave had agreed to take her on!  Why, the bargain was to be struck after the play was over!  Satin hesitated.  There were too many bothers; she was out of her element!  Nevertheless, she stayed.

As the prince was coming down the little wooden staircase a strange sound of smothered oaths and stamping, scuffling feet became audible on the other side of the theater.  The actors waiting for their cues were being scared by quite a serious episode.  For some seconds past Mignon had been renewing his jokes and smothering Fauchery with caresses.  He had at last invented a little game of a novel kind and had begun flicking the other’s nose in order, as he phrased it, to keep the flies off him.  This kind of game naturally diverted the actors to any extent.