In due course Nana’s very adoration of her darling, her dear old duck, which was all the more passionately blind, seeing that now she paid for everything, plunged her back into the muddiest depths of her calling.  She roamed the streets and loitered on the pavement in quest of a five-franc piece, just as when she was a slipshod baggage years ago.  One Sunday at La Rochefoucauld Market she had made her peace with Satin after having flown at her with furious reproaches about Mme Robert.  But Satin had been content to answer that when one didn’t like a thing there was no reason why one should want to disgust others with it.  And Nana, who was by way of being wide-minded, had accepted the philosophic view that you never can tell where your tastes will lead you and had forgiven her.  Her curiosity was even excited, and she began questioning her about obscure vices and was astounded to be adding to her information at her time of life and with her knowledge.  She burst out laughing and gave vent to various expressions of surprise.  It struck her as so queer, and yet she was a little shocked by it, for she was really quite the philistine outside the pale of her own habits.  So she went back to Laure’s and fed there when Fontan was dining out.  She derived much amusement from the stories and the amours and the jealousies which inflamed the female customers without hindering their appetites in the slightest degree.  Nevertheless, she still was not quite in it, as she herself phrased it.  The vast Laure, meltingly maternal as ever, used often to invite her to pass a day or two at her Asnieries Villa, a country house containing seven spare bedrooms.  But she used to refuse; she was afraid.  Satin, however, swore she was mistaken about it, that gentlemen from Paris swung you in swings and played tonneau with you, and so she promised to come at some future time when it would be possible for her to leave town.

At that time Nana was much tormented by circumstances and not at all festively inclined.  She needed money, and when the Tricon did not want her, which too often happened, she had no notion where to bestow her charms.  Then began a series of wild descents upon the Parisian pavement, plunges into the baser sort of vice, whose votaries prowl in muddy bystreets under the restless flicker of gas lamps.  Nana went back to the public-house balls in the suburbs, where she had kicked up her heels in the early ill-shod days.  She revisited the dark corners on the outer boulevards, where when she was fifteen years old men used to hug her while her father was looking for her in order to give her a hiding.  Both the women would speed along, visiting all the ballrooms and restaurants in a quarter and climbing innumerable staircases which were wet with spittle and spilled beer, or they would stroll quietly about, going up streets and planting themselves in front of carriage gates.  Satin, who had served her apprenticeship in the Quartier Latin, used to take Nana to Bullier’s and the