“Stop!  Stop!” said Satin in a great fright.  “You’ll kill yourself.”

Then as they began hammering at the door, she shut the window like a good-natured girl and threw her friend’s clothes down into a cupboard.  She was already resigned to her fate and comforted herself with the thought that, after all, if she were to be put on the official list she would no longer be so “beastly frightened” as of yore.  So she pretended to be heavy with sleep.  She yawned; she palavered and ended by opening the door to a tall, burly fellow with an unkempt beard, who said to her: 

“Show your hands!  You’ve got no needle pricks on them:  you don’t work.  Now then, dress!”

“But I’m not a dressmaker; I’m a burnisher,” Satin brazenly declared.

Nevertheless, she dressed with much docility, knowing that argument was out of the question.  Cries were ringing through the hotel; a girl was clinging to doorposts and refusing to budge an inch.  Another girl, in bed with a lover, who was answering for her legality, was acting the honest woman who had been grossly insulted and spoke of bringing an action against the prefect of police.  For close on an hour there was a noise of heavy shoes on the stairs, of fists hammering on doors, of shrill disputes terminating in sobs, of petticoats rustling along the walls, of all the sounds, in fact, attendant on the sudden awakening and scared departure of a flock of women as they were roughly packed off by three plain-clothes men, headed by a little oily-mannered, fair-haired commissary of police.  After they had gone the hotel relapsed into deep silence.

Nobody had betrayed her; Nana was saved.  Shivering and half dead with fear, she came groping back into the room.  Her bare feet were cut and bleeding, for they had been torn by the grating.  For a long while she remained sitting on the edge of the bed, listening and listening.  Toward morning, however, she went to sleep again, and at eight o’clock, when she woke up, she escaped from the hotel and ran to her aunt’s.  When Mme Lerat, who happened just then to be drinking her morning coffee with Zoe, beheld her bedraggled plight and haggard face, she took note of the hour and at once understood the state of the case.

“It’s come to it, eh?” she cried.  “I certainly told you that he would take the skin off your back one of these days.  Well, well, come in; you’ll always find a kind welcome here.”

Zoe had risen from her chair and was muttering with respectful familiarity: 

“Madame is restored to us at last.  I was waiting for Madame.”

But Mme Lerat insisted on Nana’s going and kissing Louiset at once, because, she said, the child took delight in his mother’s nice ways.  Louiset, a sickly child with poor blood, was still asleep, and when Nana bent over his white, scrofulous face, the memory of all she had undergone during the last few months brought a choking lump into her throat.