Nevertheless, despite her luxurious life and her group of courtiers, Nana was nearly bored to death.  She had men for every minute of the night, and money overflowed even among the brushes and combs in the drawers of her dressing table.  But all this had ceased to satisfy her; she felt that there was a void somewhere or other, an empty place provocative of yawns.  Her life dragged on, devoid of occupation, and successive days only brought back the same monotonous hours.  Tomorrow had ceased to be; she lived like a bird:  sure of her food and ready to perch and roost on any branch which she came to.  This certainty of food and drink left her lolling effortless for whole days, lulled her to sleep in conventual idleness and submission as though she were the prisoner of her trade.  Never going out except to drive, she was losing her walking powers.  She reverted to low childish tastes, would kiss Bijou from morning to night and kill time with stupid pleasures while waiting for the man whose caresses she tolerated with an appearance of complaisant lassitude.  Amid this species of self-abandonment she now took no thought about anything save her personal beauty; her sole care was to look after herself, to wash and to perfume her limbs, as became one who was proud of being able to undress at any moment and in face of anybody without having to blush for her imperfections.

At ten in the morning Nana would get up.  Bijou, the Scotch griffon dog, used to lick her face and wake her, and then would ensue a game of play lasting some five minutes, during which the dog would race about over her arms and legs and cause Count Muffat much distress.  Bijou was the first little male he had ever been jealous of.  It was not at all proper, he thought, that an animal should go poking its nose under the bedclothes like that!  After this Nana would proceed to her dressing room, where she took a bath.  Toward eleven o’clock Francois would come and do up her hair before beginning the elaborate manipulations of the afternoon.

At breakfast, as she hated feeding alone, she nearly always had Mme Maloir at table with her.  This lady would arrive from unknown regions in the morning, wearing her extravagantly quaint hats, and would return at night to that mysterious existence of hers, about which no one ever troubled.  But the hardest to bear were the two or three hours between lunch and the toilet.  On ordinary occasions she proposed a game of bezique to her old friend; on others she would read the Figaro, in which the theatrical echoes and the fashionable news interested her.  Sometimes she even opened a book, for she fancied herself in literary matters.  Her toilet kept her till close on five o’clock, and then only she would wake from her daylong drowse and drive out or receive a whole mob of men at her own house.  She would often dine abroad and always go to bed very late, only to rise again on the morrow with the same languor as before and to begin another day, differing in nothing from its predecessor.