breathed one knew not from what feminine mouth.  In front of him Fauchery saw the truant schoolboy half lifted from his seat by passion.  Curiosity led him to look at the Count de Vandeuvres—­he was extremely pale, and his lips looked pinched—­at fat Steiner, whose face was purple to the verge of apoplexy; at Labordette, ogling away with the highly astonished air of a horse dealer admiring a perfectly shaped mare; at Daguenet, whose ears were blood-red and twitching with enjoyment.  Then a sudden idea made him glance behind, and he marveled at what he saw in the Muffats’ box.  Behind the countess, who was white and serious as usual, the count was sitting straight upright, with mouth agape and face mottled with red, while close by him, in the shadow, the restless eyes of the Marquis de Chouard had become catlike phosphorescent, full of golden sparkles.  The house was suffocating; people’s very hair grew heavy on their perspiring heads.  For three hours back the breath of the multitude had filled and heated the atmosphere with a scent of crowded humanity.  Under the swaying glare of the gas the dust clouds in mid-air had grown constantly denser as they hung motionless beneath the chandelier.  The whole house seemed to be oscillating, to be lapsing toward dizziness in its fatigue and excitement, full, as it was, of those drowsy midnight desires which flutter in the recesses of the bed of passion.  And Nana, in front of this languorous public, these fifteen hundred human beings thronged and smothered in the exhaustion and nervous exasperation which belong to the close of a spectacle, Nana still triumphed by right of her marble flesh and that sexual nature of hers, which was strong enough to destroy the whole crowd of her adorers and yet sustain no injury.

The piece drew to a close.  In answer to Vulcan’s triumphant summons all the Olympians defiled before the lovers with ohs and ahs of stupefaction and gaiety.  Jupiter said, “I think it is light conduct on your part, my son, to summon us to see such a sight as this.”  Then a reaction took place in favor of Venus.  The chorus of cuckolds was again ushered in by Iris and besought the master of the gods not to give effect to its petition, for since women had lived at home, domestic life was becoming impossible for the men:  the latter preferred being deceived and happy.  That was the moral of the play.  Then Venus was set at liberty, and Vulcan obtained a partial divorce from her.  Mars was reconciled with Diana, and Jove, for the sake of domestic peace, packed his little laundress off into a constellation.  And finally they extricated Love from his black hole, where instead of conjugating the verb Amo he had been busy in the manufacture of “dollies.”  The curtain fell on an apotheosis, wherein the cuckolds’ chorus knelt and sang a hymn of gratitude to Venus, who stood there with smiling lips, her stature enhanced by her sovereign nudity.