“Ah, dear children, how comfortable you are here!” Bosc kept repeating, simply for the sake of pleasing the chums who were standing the dinner.  At bottom the subject of the “nook,” as he called it, nowise touched him.

In the bedroom he harped still more vigorously on the amiable note.  Ordinarily he was wont to treat women like cattle, and the idea of a man bothering himself about one of the dirty brutes excited within him the only angry feelings of which, in his comprehensive, drunken disdain of the universe, he was still capable.

“Ah, ah, the villains,” he continued with a wink, “they’ve done this on the sly.  Well, you were certainly right.  It will be charming, and, by heaven, we’ll come and see you!”

But when Louiset arrived on the scene astride upon a broomstick, Prulliere chuckled spitefully and remarked: 

“Well, I never!  You’ve got a baby already?”

This struck everybody as very droll, and Mme Lerat and Mme Maloir shook with laughter.  Nana, far from being vexed, laughed tenderly and said that unfortunately this was not the case.  She would very much have liked it, both for the little one’s sake and for her own, but perhaps one would arrive all the same.  Fontan, in his role of honest citizen, took Louiset in his arms and began playing with him and lisping.

“Never mind!  It loves its daddy!  Call me ‘Papa,’ you little blackguard!”

“Papa, Papa!” stammered the child.

The company overwhelmed him with caresses, but Bosc was bored and talked of sitting down to table.  That was the only serious business in life.  Nana asked her guests’ permission to put Louiset’s chair next her own.  The dinner was very merry, but Bosc suffered from the near neighborhood of the child, from whom he had to defend his plate.  Mme Lerat bored him too.  She was in a melting mood and kept whispering to him all sorts of mysterious things about gentlemen of the first fashion who were still running after Nana.  Twice he had to push away her knee, for she was positively invading him in her gushing, tearful mood.  Prulliere behaved with great incivility toward Mme Maloir and did not once help her to anything.  He was entirely taken up with Nana and looked annoyed at seeing her with Fontan.  Besides, the turtle doves were kissing so excessively as to be becoming positive bores.  Contrary to all known rules, they had elected to sit side by side.

“Devil take it!  Why don’t you eat?  You’ve got plenty of time ahead of you!” Bosc kept repeating with his mouth full.  “Wait till we are gone!”

But Nana could not restrain herself.  She was in a perfect ecstasy of love.  Her face was as full of blushes as an innocent young girl’s, and her looks and her laughter seemed to overflow with tenderness.  Gazing on Fontan, she overwhelmed him with pet names—­“my doggie, my old bear, my kitten”—­and whenever he passed her the water or the salt she bent forward and kissed him at random on lips, eyes, nose or ear.