“Well, and what about me?” said Prulliere with much bitterness.  “I haven’t got more than two hundred lines.  I wanted to give the part up.  It’s too bad to make me play that fellow Saint-Firmin; why, it’s a regular failure!  And then what a style it’s written in, my dears!  It’ll fall dead flat, you may be sure.”

But just then Simonne, who had been chatting with Father Barillot, came back breathless and announced: 

“By the by, talking of Nana, she’s in the house.”

“Where, where?” asked Clarisse briskly, getting up to look for her.

The news spread at once, and everyone craned forward.  The rehearsal was, as it were, momentarily interrupted.  But Bordenave emerged from his quiescent condition, shouting: 

“What’s up, eh?  Finish the act, I say.  And be quiet out there; it’s unbearable!”

Nana was still following the piece from the corner box.  Twice Labordette showed an inclination to chat, but she grew impatient and nudged him to make him keep silent.  The second act was drawing to a close, when two shadows loomed at the back of the theater.  They were creeping softly down, avoiding all noise, and Nana recognized Mignon and Count Muffat.  They came forward and silently shook hands with Bordenave.

“Ah, there they are,” she murmured with a sigh of relief.

Rose Mignon delivered the last sentences of the act.  Thereupon Bordenave said that it was necessary to go through the second again before beginning the third.  With that he left off attending to the rehearsal and greeted the count with looks of exaggerated politeness, while Fauchery pretended to be entirely engrossed with his actors, who now grouped themselves round him.  Mignon stood whistling carelessly, with his hands behind his back and his eyes fixed complacently on his wife, who seemed rather nervous.

“Well, shall we go upstairs?” Labordette asked Nana.  “I’ll install you in the dressing room and come down again and fetch him.”

Nana forthwith left the corner box.  She had to grope her way along the passage outside the stalls, but Bordenave guessed where she was as she passed along in the dark and caught her up at the end of the corridor passing behind the scenes, a narrow tunnel where the gas burned day and night.  Here, in order to bluff her into a bargain, he plunged into a discussion of the courtesan’s part.

“What a part it is, eh?  What a wicked little part!  It’s made for you.  Come and rehearse tomorrow.”

Nana was frigid.  She wanted to know what the third act was like.

“Oh, it’s superb, the third act is!  The duchess plays the courtesan in her own house and this disgusts Beaurivage and makes him amend his way.  Then there’s an awfully funny quid Pro quo, when Tardiveau arrives and is under the impression that he’s at an opera dancer’s house.”

“And what does Geraldine do in it all?” interrupted Nana.