enough to threaten to sell her when she had left him.  Yes, that was a fake by which men lived on their mistresses!  Then, too, there were the dirty women who delivered you up out of sheer treachery if you were prettier than they!  Nana listened to these recitals and felt her terrors growing upon her.  She had always trembled before the law, that unknown power, that form of revenge practiced by men able and willing to crush her in the certain absence of all defenders.  Saint-Lazare she pictured as a grave, a dark hole, in which they buried live women after they had cut off their hair.  She admitted that it was only necessary to leave Fontan and seek powerful protectors.  But as matters stood it was in vain that Satin talked to her of certain lists of women’s names, which it was the duty of the plainclothes men to consult, and of certain photographs accompanying the lists, the originals of which were on no account to be touched.  The reassurance did not make her tremble the less, and she still saw herself hustled and dragged along and finally subjected to the official medical inspection.  The thought of the official armchair filled her with shame and anguish, for had she not bade it defiance a score of times?

Now it so happened that one evening toward the close of September, as she was walking with Satin in the Boulevard Poissonniere, the latter suddenly began tearing along at a terrible pace.  And when Nana asked her what she meant thereby: 

“It’s the plain-clothes men!” whispered Satin.  “Off with you!  Off with you!” A wild stampede took place amid the surging crowd.  Skirts streamed out behind and were torn.  There were blows and shrieks.  A woman fell down.  The crowd of bystanders stood hilariously watching this rough police raid while the plain-clothes men rapidly narrowed their circle.  Meanwhile Nana had lost Satin.  Her legs were failing her, and she would have been taken up for a certainty had not a man caught her by the arm and led her away in front of the angry police.  It was Prulliere, and he had just recognized her.  Without saying a word he turned down the Rue Rougemont with her.  It was just then quite deserted, and she was able to regain breath there, but at first her faintness and exhaustion were such that he had to support her.  She did not even thank him.

“Look here,” he said, “you must recover a bit.  Come up to my rooms.”

He lodged in the Rue Bergere close by.  But she straightened herself up at once.

“No, I don’t want to.”

Thereupon he waxed coarse and rejoined: 

“Why don’t you want to, eh?  Why, everybody visits my rooms.”

“Because I don’t.”

In her opinion that explained everything.  She was too fond of Fontan to betray him with one of his friends.  The other people ceased to count the moment there was no pleasure in the business, and necessity compelled her to it.  In view of her idiotic obstinacy Prulliere, as became a pretty fellow whose vanity had been wounded, did a cowardly thing.