Ten o’clock struck, and suddenly it occurred to Muffat that it would be very easy to find out whether Nana were in her dressing room or not.  He went up the three steps, crossed the little yellow-painted lobby and slipped into the court by a door which simply shut with a latch.  At that hour of the night the narrow, damp well of a court, with its pestiferous water closets, its fountain, its back view of the kitchen stove and the collection of plants with which the portress used to litter the place, was drenched in dark mist; but the two walls, rising pierced with windows on either hand, were flaming with light, since the property room and the firemen’s office were situated on the ground floor, with the managerial bureau on the left, and on the right and upstairs the dressing rooms of the company.  The mouths of furnaces seemed to be opening on the outer darkness from top to bottom of this well.  The count had at once marked the light in the windows of the dressing room on the first floor, and as a man who is comforted and happy, he forgot where he was and stood gazing upward amid the foul mud and faint decaying smell peculiar to the premises of this antiquated Parisian building.  Big drops were dripping from a broken waterspout, and a ray of gaslight slipped from Mme Bron’s window and cast a yellow glare over a patch of moss-clad pavement, over the base of a wall which had been rotted by water from a sink, over a whole cornerful of nameless filth amid which old pails and broken crocks lay in fine confusion round a spindling tree growing mildewed in its pot.  A window fastening creaked, and the count fled.

Nana was certainly going to come down.  He returned to his post in front of the reading room; among its slumbering shadows, which seemed only broken by the glimmer of a night light, the little old man still sat motionless, his side face sharply outlined against his newspaper.  Then Muffat walked again and this time took a more prolonged turn and, crossing the large gallery, followed the Galerie des Varietes as far as that of Feydeau.  The last mentioned was cold and deserted and buried in melancholy shadow.  He returned from it, passed by the theater, turned the corner of the Galerie Saint-Marc and ventured as far as the Galerie Montmartre, where a sugar-chopping machine in front of a grocer’s interested him awhile.  But when he was taking his third turn he was seized with such dread lest Nana should escape behind his back that he lost all self-respect.  Thereupon he stationed himself beside the fair gentleman in front of the very theater.  Both exchanged a glance of fraternal humility with which was mingled a touch of distrust, for it was possible they might yet turn out to be rivals.  Some sceneshifters who came out smoking their pipes between the acts brushed rudely against them, but neither one nor the other ventured to complain.  Three big wenches with untidy hair and dirty gowns appeared on the doorstep.  They were munching apples and spitting out the cores, but the two men bowed their heads and patiently braved their impudent looks and rough speeches, though they were hustled and, as it were, soiled by these trollops, who amused themselves by pushing each other down upon them.