The great distraction was to go to the Batignolles and see her little Louis at her aunt’s.  For a fortnight at a time she forgot all about him, and then would follow an access of maternal love, and she would hurry off on foot with all the modesty and tenderness becoming a good mother.  On such occasions she would be the bearer of snuff for her aunt and of oranges and biscuits for the child, the kind of presents one takes to a hospital.  Or again she would drive up in her landau on her return from the Bois, decked in costumes, the resplendence of which greatly excited the dwellers in the solitary street.  Since her niece’s magnificent elevation Mme Lerat had been puffed up with vanity.  She rarely presented herself in the Avenue de Villiers, for she was pleased to remark that it wasn’t her place to do so, but she enjoyed triumphs in her own street.  She was delighted when the young woman arrived in dresses that had cost four or five thousand francs and would be occupied during the whole of the next day in showing off her presents and in citing prices which quite stupefied the neighbors.  As often as not, Nana kept Sunday free for the sake of “her family,” and on such occasions, if Muffat invited her, she would refuse with the smile of a good little shopwoman.  It was impossible, she would answer; she was dining at her aunt’s; she was going to see Baby.  Moreover, that poor little man Louiset was always ill.  He was almost three years old, growing quite a great boy!  But he had had an eczema on the back of his neck, and now concretions were forming in his ears, which pointed, it was feared, to decay of the bones of the skull.  When she saw how pale he looked, with his spoiled blood and his flabby flesh all out in yellow patches, she would become serious, but her principal feeling would be one of astonishment.  What could be the matter with the little love that he should grow so weakly?  She, his mother, was so strong and well!

On the days when her child did not engross attention Nana would again sink back into the noisy monotony of her existence, with its drives in the Bois, first nights at the theater, dinners and suppers at the Maison-d’Or or the Cafe Anglais, not to mention all the places of public resort, all the spectacles to which crowds rushed—­Mabille, the reviews, the races.  But whatever happened she still felt that stupid, idle void, which caused her, as it were, to suffer internal cramps.  Despite the incessant infatuations that possessed her heart, she would stretch out her arms with a gesture of immense weariness the moment she was left alone.  Solitude rendered her low spirited at once, for it brought her face to face with the emptiness and boredom within her.  Extremely gay by nature and profession, she became dismal in solitude and would sum up her life in the following ejaculation, which recurred incessantly between her yawns: 

“Oh, how the men bother me!”

One afternoon as she was returning home from a concert, Nana, on the sidewalk in the Rue Montmartre, noticed a woman trotting along in down-at-the-heel boots, dirty petticoats and a hat utterly ruined by the rain.  She recognized her suddenly.