in her place, even for one evening, now that the exhibition was on.  Toward the close of August he spoke of October.  Nana was furious and declared that she would be at La Mignotte in the middle of September.  Nay, in order to dare Bordenave, she even invited a crowd of guests in his very presence.  One afternoon in her rooms, as Muffat, whose advances she still adroitly resisted, was beseeching her with tremulous emotion to yield to his entreaties, she at length promised to be kind, but not in Paris, and to him, too, she named the middle of September.  Then on the twelfth she was seized by a desire to be off forthwith with Zoe as her sole companion.  It might be that Bordenave had got wind of her intentions and was about to discover some means of detaining her.  She was delighted at the notion of putting him in a fix, and she sent him a doctor’s certificate.  When once the idea had entered her head of being the first to get to La Mignotte and of living there two days without anybody knowing anything about it, she rushed Zoe through the operation of packing and finally pushed her into a cab, where in a sudden burst of extreme contrition she kissed her and begged her pardon.  It was only when they got to the station refreshment room that she thought of writing Steiner of her movements.  She begged him to wait till the day after tomorrow before rejoining her if he wanted to find her quite bright and fresh.  And then, suddenly conceiving another project, she wrote a second letter, in which she besought her aunt to bring little Louis to her at once.  It would do Baby so much good!  And how happy they would be together in the shade of the trees!  In the railway carriage between Paris and Orleans she spoke of nothing else; her eyes were full of tears; she had an unexpected attack of maternal tenderness and mingled together flowers, birds and child in her every sentence.

La Mignotte was more than three leagues away from the station, and Nana lost a good hour over the hire of a carriage, a huge, dilapidated calash, which rumbled slowly along to an accompaniment of rattling old iron.  She had at once taken possession of the coachman, a little taciturn old man whom she overwhelmed with questions.  Had he often passed by La Mignotte?  It was behind this hill then?  There ought to be lots of trees there, eh?  And the house could one see it at a distance?  The little old man answered with a succession of grunts.  Down in the calash Nana was almost dancing with impatience, while Zoe, in her annoyance at having left Paris in such a hurry, sat stiffly sulking beside her.  The horse suddenly stopped short, and the young woman thought they had reached their destination.  She put her head out of the carriage door and asked: 

“Are we there, eh?”

By way of answer the driver whipped up his horse, which was in the act of painfully climbing a hill.  Nana gazed ecstatically at the vast plain beneath the gray sky where great clouds were banked up.