Through a door, which was nearly always ajar, the dressing room was visible.  It was all in marble and glass with a white bath, silver jugs and basins and crystal and ivory appointments.  A drawn curtain filled the place with a clear twilight which seemed to slumber in the warm scent of violets, that suggestive perfume peculiar to Nana wherewith the whole house, from the roof to the very courtyard, was penetrated.

The furnishing of the house was a most important undertaking.  Nana certainly had Zoe with her, that girl so devoted to her fortunes.  For months she had been tranquilly awaiting this abrupt, new departure, as became a woman who was certain of her powers of prescience, and now she was triumphant; she was mistress of the house and was putting by a round sum while serving Madame as honestly as possible.  But a solitary lady’s maid was no longer sufficient.  A butler, a coachman, a porter and a cook were wanted.  Besides, it was necessary to fill the stables.  It was then that Labordette made himself most useful.  He undertook to perform all sorts of errands which bored the count; he made a comfortable job of the purchase of horses; he visited the coachbuilders; he guided the young woman in her choice of things.  She was to be met with at the shops, leaning on his arm.  Labordette even got in the servants—­Charles, a great, tall coachman, who had been in service with the Duc de Corbreuse; Julien, a little, smiling, much-becurled butler, and a married couple, of whom the wife Victorine became cook while the husband Francois was taken on as porter and footman.  The last mentioned in powder and breeches wore Nana’s livery, which was a sky-blue one adorned with silver lace, and he received visitors in the hall.  The whole thing was princely in the correctness of its style.

At the end of two months the house was set going.  The cost had been more than three hundred thousand francs.  There were eight horses in the stables, and five carriages in the coach houses, and of these five one was a landau with silver embellishments, which for the moment occupied the attention of all Paris.  And amid this great wealth Nana began settling down and making her nest.  After the third representation of the Petite Duchesse she had quitted the theater, leaving Bordenave to struggle on against a bankruptcy which, despite the count’s money, was imminent.  Nevertheless, she was still bitter about her failure.  It added to that other bitterness, the lesson Fontan had given her, a shameful lesson for which she held all men responsible.  Accordingly she now declared herself very firm and quite proof against sudden infatuations, but thoughts of vengeance took no hold of her volatile brain.  What did maintain a hold on it in the hours when she was not indignant was an ever-wakeful lust of expenditure, added to a natural contempt for the man who paid and to a perpetual passion for consumption and waste, which took pride in the ruin of her lovers.