Labordette looked at her with a singular expression.  She leaned forward and asked him questions in a low voice, for she was aware that Vandeuvres commissioned him to arrange matters with the bookmakers so as to be able to bet the more easily.  Supposing him to have got to know something, he might quite well tell it her.  But without entering into explanations Labordette persuaded her to trust to his sagacity.  He would put on her fifty louis for her as he might think best, and she would not repent of his arrangement.

“All the horses you like!” she cried gaily, letting him take his departure, “but no Nana; she’s a jade!”

There was a burst of uproarious laughter in the carriage.  The young men thought her sally very amusing, while Louiset in his ignorance lifted his pale eyes to his mother’s face, for her loud exclamations surprised him.  However, there was no escape for Labordette as yet.  Rose Mignon had made a sign to him and was now giving him her commands while he wrote figures in a notebook.  Then Clarisse and Gaga called him back in order to change their bets, for they had heard things said in the crowd, and now they didn’t want to have anything more to do with Valerio II and were choosing Lusignan.  He wrote down their wishes with an impassible expression and at length managed to escape.  He could be seen disappearing between two of the stands on the other side of the course.

Carriages were still arriving.  They were by this time drawn up five rows deep, and a dense mass of them spread along the barriers, checkered by the light coats of white horses.  Beyond them other carriages stood about in comparative isolation, looking as though they had stuck fast in the grass.  Wheels and harness were here, there and everywhere, according as the conveyances to which they belonged were side by side, at an angle, across and across or head to head.  Over such spaces of turf as still remained unoccupied cavaliers kept trotting, and black groups of pedestrians moved continually.  The scene resembled the field where a fair is being held, and above it all, amid the confused motley of the crowd, the drinking booths raised their gray canvas roofs which gleamed white in the sunshine.  But a veritable tumult, a mob, an eddy of hats, surged round the several bookmakers, who stood in open carriages gesticulating like itinerant dentists while their odds were pasted up on tall boards beside them.

“All the same, it’s stupid not to know on what horse one’s betting,” Nana was remarking.  “I really must risk some louis in person.”

She had stood up to select a bookmaker with a decent expression of face but forgot what she wanted on perceiving a perfect crowd of her acquaintance.  Besides the Mignons, besides Gaga, Clarisse and Blanche, there were present, to the right and left, behind and in the middle of the mass of carriages now hemming in her landau, the following ladies:  Tatan Nene and Maria Blond in a victoria, Caroline Hequet with