“It’s an understood thing, eh?  We are to go to her house, and I’m to introduce you.  You know the thing’s quite between ourselves—­my wife needn’t know.”

Once more in their places, Fauchery and La Faloise noticed a pretty, quietly dressed woman in the second tier of boxes.  She was with a serious-looking gentleman, a chief clerk at the office of the Ministry of the Interior, whom La Faloise knew, having met him at the Muffats’.  As to Fauchery, he was under the impression that her name was Madame Robert, a lady of honorable repute who had a lover, only one, and that always a person of respectability.

But they had to turn round, for Daguenet was smiling at them.  Now that Nana had had a success he no longer hid himself:  indeed, he had just been scoring triumphs in the passages.  By his side was the young truant schoolboy, who had not quitted his seat, so stupefying was the state of admiration into which Nana had plunged him.  That was it, he thought; that was the woman!  And he blushed as he thought so and dragged his gloves on and off mechanically.  Then since his neighbor had spoken of Nana, he ventured to question him.

“Will you pardon me for asking you, sir, but that lady who is acting—­do you know her?”

“Yes, I do a little,” murmured Daguenet with some surprise and hesitation.

“Then you know her address?”

The question, addressed as it was to him, came so abruptly that he felt inclined to respond with a box on the ear.

“No,” he said in a dry tone of voice.

And with that he turned his back.  The fair lad knew that he had just been guilty of some breach of good manners.  He blushed more hotly than ever and looked scared.

The traditional three knocks were given, and among the returning throng, attendants, laden with pelisses and overcoats, bustled about at a great rate in order to put away people’s things.  The clappers applauded the scenery, which represented a grotto on Mount Etna, hollowed out in a silver mine and with sides glittering like new money.  In the background Vulcan’s forge glowed like a setting star.  Diana, since the second act, had come to a good understanding with the god, who was to pretend that he was on a journey, so as to leave the way clear for Venus and Mars.  Then scarcely was Diana alone than Venus made her appearance.  A shiver of delight ran round the house.  Nana was nude.  With quiet audacity she appeared in her nakedness, certain of the sovereign power of her flesh.  Some gauze enveloped her, but her rounded shoulders, her Amazonian bosom, her wide hips, which swayed to and fro voluptuously, her whole body, in fact, could be divined, nay discerned, in all its foamlike whiteness of tint beneath the slight fabric she wore.  It was Venus rising from the waves with no veil save her tresses.  And when Nana lifted her arms the golden hairs in her armpits were observable in the glare of the footlights.  There was no applause.  Nobody laughed any more.