now falling, and the cold feel of it on his hands calmed him.  He thought of his wife who was staying in a country house near Macon, where her friend Mme de Chezelles had been ailing a good deal since the autumn.  The carriages in the roadway were rolling through a stream of mud.  The country, he thought, must be detestable in such vile weather.  But suddenly he became anxious and re-entered the hot, close passage down which he strode among the strolling people.  A thought struck him:  if Nana were suspicious of his presence there she would be off along the Galerie Montmartre.

After that the count kept a sharp lookout at the very door of the theater, though he did not like this passage end, where he was afraid of being recognized.  It was at the corner between the Galerie des Varietes and the Galerie Saint-Marc, an equivocal corner full of obscure little shops.  Of these last one was a shoemaker’s, where customers never seemed to enter.  Then there were two or three upholsterers’, deep in dust, and a smoky, sleepy reading room and library, the shaded lamps in which cast a green and slumberous light all the evening through.  There was never anyone in this corner save well-dressed, patient gentlemen, who prowled about the wreckage peculiar to a stage door, where drunken sceneshifters and ragged chorus girls congregate.  In front of the theater a single gas jet in a ground-glass globe lit up the doorway.  For a moment or two Muffat thought of questioning Mme Bron; then he grew afraid lest Nana should get wind of his presence and escape by way of the boulevard.  So he went on the march again and determined to wait till he was turned out at the closing of the gates, an event which had happened on two previous occasions.  The thought of returning home to his solitary bed simply wrung his heart with anguish.  Every time that golden-haired girls and men in dirty linen came out and stared at him he returned to his post in front of the reading room, where, looking in between two advertisements posted on a windowpane, he was always greeted by the same sight.  It was a little old man, sitting stiff and solitary at the vast table and holding a green newspaper in his green hands under the green light of one of the lamps.  But shortly before ten o’clock another gentleman, a tall, good-looking, fair man with well-fitting gloves, was also walking up and down in front of the stage door.  Thereupon at each successive turn the pair treated each other to a suspicious sidelong glance.  The count walked to the corner of the two galleries, which was adorned with a high mirror, and when he saw himself therein, looking grave and elegant, he was both ashamed and nervous.