“Oh, how silly he looks!” she said at the top of her voice to Vandeuvres.  She was anxious to pay everything a visit.  This small parklike region, with its green lawns and groups of trees, rather charmed her than otherwise.  A vendor of ices had set up a large buffet near the entrance gates, and beneath a rustic thatched roof a dense throng of people were shouting and gesticulating.  This was the ring.  Close by were some empty stalls, and Nana was disappointed at discovering only a gendarme’s horse there.  Then there was the paddock, a small course some hundred meters in circumference, where a stable help was walking about Valerio II in his horsecloths.  And, oh, what a lot of men on the graveled sidewalks, all of them with their tickets forming an orange-colored patch in their bottonholes!  And what a continual parade of people in the open galleries of the grandstands!  The scene interested her for a moment or two, but truly, it was not worth while getting the spleen because they didn’t admit you inside here.

Daguenet and Fauchery passed by and bowed to her.  She made them a sign, and they had to come up.  Thereupon she made hay of the weighing-in enclosure.  But she broke off abruptly: 

“Dear me, there’s the Marquis de Chouard!  How old he’s growing!  That old man’s killing himself!  Is he still as mad about it as ever?”

Thereupon Daguenet described the old man’s last brilliant stroke.  The story dated from the day before yesterday, and no one knew it as yet.  After dangling about for months he had bought her daughter Amelie from Gaga for thirty thousand francs, they said.

“Good gracious!  That’s a nice business!” cried Nana in disgust.  “Go in for the regular thing, please!  But now that I come to think of it, that must be Lili down there on the grass with a lady in a brougham.  I recognized the face.  The old boy will have brought her out.”

Vandeuvres was not listening; he was impatient and longed to get rid of her.  But Fauchery having remarked at parting that if she had not seen the bookmakers she had seen nothing, the count was obliged to take her to them in spite of his obvious repugnance.  And she was perfectly happy at once; that truly was a curious sight, she said!

Amid lawns bordered by young horse-chestnut trees there was a round open enclosure, where, forming a vast circle under the shadow of the tender green leaves, a dense line of bookmakers was waiting for betting men, as though they had been hucksters at a fair.  In order to overtop and command the surrounding crowd they had taken up positions on wooden benches, and they were advertising their prices on the trees beside them.  They had an ever-vigilant glance, and they booked wagers in answer to a single sign, a mere wink, so rapidly that certain curious onlookers watched them openmouthed, without being able to understand it all.  Confusion reigned; prices were shouted, and any unexpected change in a quotation was received with something like tumult.  Occasionally scouts entered the place at a run and redoubled the uproar as they stopped at the entrance to the rotunda and, at the tops of their voices, announced departures and arrivals.  In this place, where the gambling fever was pulsing in the sunshine, such announcements were sure to raise a prolonged muttering sound.