From one end of the social ladder to the other everybody was on the loose!  Good gracious!  Some nice things ought to be going on in Paris between nine o’clock in the evening and three in the morning!  And with that she began making very merry and declaring that if one could only have looked into every room one would have seen some funny sights—­the little people going it head over ears and a good lot of swells, too, playing the swine rather harder than the rest.  Oh, she was finishing her education!

One evening when she came to call for Satin she recognized the Marquis de Chouard.  He was coming downstairs with quaking legs; his face was ashen white, and he leaned heavily on the banisters.  She pretended to be blowing her nose.  Upstairs she found Satin amid indescribable filth.  No household work had been done for a week; her bed was disgusting, and ewers and basins were standing about in all directions.  Nana expressed surprise at her knowing the marquis.  Oh yes, she knew him!  He had jolly well bored her confectioner and her when they were together.  At present he used to come back now and then, but he nearly bothered her life out, going sniffing into all the dirty corners—­yes, even into her slippers!

“Yes, dear girl, my slippers!  Oh, he’s the dirtiest old beast, always wanting one to do things!”

The sincerity of these low debauches rendered Nana especially uneasy.  Seeing the courtesans around her slowly dying of it every day, she recalled to mind the comedy of pleasure she had taken part in when she was in the heyday of success.  Moreover, Satin inspired her with an awful fear of the police.  She was full of anecdotes about them.  Formerly she had been the mistress of a plain-clothes man, had consented to this in order to be left in peace, and on two occasions he had prevented her from being put “on the lists.”  But at present she was in a great fright, for if she were to be nabbed again there was a clear case against her.  You had only to listen to her!  For the sake of perquisites the police used to take up as many women as possible.  They laid hold of everybody and quieted you with a slap if you shouted, for they were sure of being defended in their actions and rewarded, even when they had taken a virtuous girl among the rest.  In the summer they would swoop upon the boulevard in parties of twelve or fifteen, surround a whole long reach of sidewalk and fish up as many as thirty women in an evening.  Satin, however, knew the likely places, and the moment she saw a plain-clothes man heaving in sight she took to her heels, while the long lines of women on the pavements scattered in consternation and fled through the surrounding crowd.  The dread of the law and of the magistracy was such that certain women would stand as though paralyzed in the doorways of the cafes while the raid was sweeping the avenue without.  But Satin was even more afraid of being denounced, for her pastry cook had proved blackguard