“Now do look!” she said, pausing anew before a jeweler’s window, “what a funny bracelet!”

She adored the Passage des Panoramas.  The tinsel of the article de Paris, the false jewelry, the gilded zinc, the cardboard made to look like leather, had been the passion of her early youth.  It remained, and when she passed the shop-windows she could not tear herself away from them.  It was the same with her today as when she was a ragged, slouching child who fell into reveries in front of the chocolate maker’s sweet-stuff shows or stood listening to a musical box in a neighboring shop or fell into supreme ecstasies over cheap, vulgarly designed knickknacks, such as nutshell workboxes, ragpickers’ baskets for holding toothpicks, Vendome columns and Luxor obelisks on which thermometers were mounted.  But that evening she was too much agitated and looked at things without seeing them.  When all was said and done, it bored her to think she was not free.  An obscure revolt raged within her, and amid it all she felt a wild desire to do something foolish.  It was a great thing gained, forsooth, to be mistress of men of position!  She had been devouring the prince’s substance and Steiner’s, too, with her childish caprices, and yet she had no notion where her money went.  Even at this time of day her flat in the Boulevard Haussmann was not entirely furnished.  The drawing room alone was finished, and with its red satin upholsteries and excess of ornamentation and furniture it struck a decidedly false note.  Her creditors, moreover, would now take to tormenting her more than ever before whenever she had no money on hand, a fact which caused her constant surprise, seeing that she was wont to quote her self as a model of economy.  For a month past that thief Steiner had been scarcely able to pay up his thousand francs on the occasions when she threatened to kick him out of doors in case he failed to bring them.  As to Muffat, he was an idiot:  he had no notion as to what it was usual to give, and she could not, therefore, grow angry with him on the score of miserliness.  Oh, how gladly she would have turned all these folks off had she not repeated to herself a score of times daily a whole string of economical maxims!

One ought to be sensible, Zoe kept saying every morning, and Nana herself was constantly haunted by the queenly vision seen at Chamont.  It had now become an almost religious memory with her, and through dint of being ceaselessly recalled it grew even more grandiose.  And for these reasons, though trembling with repressed indignation, she now hung submissively on the count’s arm as they went from window to window among the fast-diminishing crowd.  The pavement was drying outside, and a cool wind blew along the gallery, swept the close hot air up beneath the glass that imprisoned it and shook the colored lanterns and the lines of gas jets and the giant fan which was flaring away like a set piece in an illumination.  At the door of the restaurant a waiter was putting out the gas, while the motionless attendants in the empty, glaring shops looked as though they had dropped off to sleep with their eyes open.