The men strained forward with serious faces, sharp features, mouths irritated and parched.  A wind seemed to have passed, a soft, soft wind, laden with a secret menace.  Suddenly in the bouncing child the woman stood discovered, a woman full of restless suggestion, who brought with her the delirium of sex and opened the gates of the unknown world of desire.  Nana was smiling still, but her smile was now bitter, as of a devourer of men.

“By God,” said Fauchery quite simply to La Faloise.

Mars in the meantime, with his plume of feathers, came hurrying to the trysting place and found himself between the two goddesses.  Then ensued a passage which Prulliere played with great delicacy.  Petted by Diana, who wanted to make a final attack upon his feelings before delivering him up to Vulcan, wheedled by Venus, whom the presence of her rival excited, he gave himself up to these tender delights with the beatified expression of a man in clover.  Finally a grand trio brought the scene to a close, and it was then that an attendant appeared in Lucy Stewart’s box and threw on the stage two immense bouquets of white lilacs.  There was applause; Nana and Rose Mignon bowed, while Prulliere picked up the bouquets.  Many of the occupants of the stalls turned smilingly toward the ground-floor occupied by Steiner and Mignon.  The banker, his face blood-red, was suffering from little convulsive twitchings of the chin, as though he had a stoppage in his throat.

What followed took the house by storm completely.  Diana had gone off in a rage, and directly afterward, Venus, sitting on a moss-clad seat, called Mars to her.  Never yet had a more glowing scene of seduction been ventured on.  Nana, her arms round Prulliere’s neck, was drawing him toward her when Fontan, with comically furious mimicry and an exaggerated imitation of the face of an outraged husband who surprises his wife in flagrante DELICTO, appeared at the back of the grotto.  He was holding the famous net with iron meshes.  For an instant he poised and swung it, as a fisherman does when he is going to make a cast, and by an ingenious twist Venus and Mars were caught in the snare; the net wrapped itself round them and held them motionless in the attitude of happy lovers.

A murmur of applause swelled and swelled like a growing sigh.  There was some hand clapping, and every opera glass was fixed on Venus.  Little by little Nana had taken possession of the public, and now every man was her slave.

A wave of lust had flowed from her as from an excited animal, and its influence had spread and spread and spread till the whole house was possessed by it.  At that moment her slightest movement blew the flame of desire:  with her little finger she ruled men’s flesh.  Backs were arched and quivered as though unseen violin bows had been drawn across their muscles; upon men’s shoulders appeared fugitive hairs, which flew in air, blown by warm and wandering breaths,