That particular evening she wanted to have a better view of herself, and she lit the six candles attached to the frame of the mirror.  But while letting her shift slip down she paused.  She had been preoccupied for some moments past, and a question was on her lips.

“You haven’t read the Figaro article, have you?  The paper’s on the table.”  Daguenet’s laugh had recurred to her recollections, and she was harassed by a doubt.  If that Fauchery had slandered her she would be revenged.

“They say that it’s about me,” she continued, affecting indifference.  “What’s your notion, eh, darling?”

And letting go her shift and waiting till Muffat should have done reading, she stood naked.  Muffat was reading slowly Fauchery’s article entitled “The Golden Fly,” describing the life of a harlot descended from four or five generations of drunkards and tainted in her blood by a cumulative inheritance of misery and drink, which in her case has taken the form of a nervous exaggeration of the sexual instinct.  She has shot up to womanhood in the slums and on the pavements of Paris, and tall, handsome and as superbly grown as a dunghill plant, she avenges the beggars and outcasts of whom she is the ultimate product.  With her the rottenness that is allowed to ferment among the populace is carried upward and rots the aristocracy.  She becomes a blind power of nature, a leaven of destruction, and unwittingly she corrupts and disorganizes all Paris, churning it between her snow-white thighs as milk is monthly churned by housewives.  And it was at the end of this article that the comparison with a fly occurred, a fly of sunny hue which has flown up out of the dung, a fly which sucks in death on the carrion tolerated by the roadside and then buzzing, dancing and glittering like a precious stone enters the windows of palaces and poisons the men within by merely settling on them in her flight.

Muffat lifted his head; his eyes stared fixedly; he gazed at the fire.

“Well?” asked Nana.

But he did not answer.  It seemed as though he wanted to read the article again.  A cold, shivering feeling was creeping from his scalp to his shoulders.  This article had been written anyhow.  The phrases were wildly extravagant; the unexpected epigrams and quaint collocations of words went beyond all bounds.  Yet notwithstanding this, he was struck by what he had read, for it had rudely awakened within him much that for months past he had not cared to think about.

He looked up.  Nana had grown absorbed in her ecstatic self-contemplation.  She was bending her neck and was looking attentively in the mirror at a little brown mark above her right haunch.  She was touching it with the tip of her finger and by dint of bending backward was making it stand out more clearly than ever.  Situated where it was, it doubtless struck her as both quaint and pretty.  After that she studied other parts of her body with an amused expression and much of the vicious curiosity