“They are funny!” murmured Nana, greatly entertained.

“Their features look as if they had been put on the wrong way.  Just you see that big fellow there; I shouldn’t care to meet him all alone in the middle of a wood.”

But Vandeuvres pointed her out a bookmaker, once a shopman in a fancy repository, who had made three million francs in two years.  He was slight of build, delicate and fair, and people all round him treated him with great respect.  They smiled when they addressed him, while others took up positions close by in order to catch a glimpse of him.

They were at length leaving the ring when Vandeuvres nodded slightly to another bookmaker, who thereupon ventured to call him.  It was one of his former coachmen, an enormous fellow with the shoulders of an ox and a high color.  Now that he was trying his fortunes at race meetings on the strength of some mysteriously obtained capital, the count was doing his utmost to push him, confiding to him his secret bets and treating him on all occasions as a servant to whom one shows one’s true character.  Yet despite this protection, the man had in rapid succession lost very heavy sums, and today he, too, was playing his last card.  There was blood in his eyes; he looked fit to drop with apoplexy.

“Well, Marechal,” queried the count in the lowest of voices, “to what amount have you laid odds?”

“To five thousand louis, Monsieur le Comte,” replied the bookmaker, likewise lowering his voice.  “A pretty job, eh?  I’ll confess to you that I’ve increased the odds; I’ve made it three to one.”

Vandeuvres looked very much put out.

“No, no, I don’t want you to do that.  Put it at two to one again directly.  I shan’t tell you any more, Marechal.”

“Oh, how can it hurt, Monsieur le Comte, at this time o’ day?” rejoined the other with the humble smile befitting an accomplice.  “I had to attract the people so as to lay your two thousand louis.”

At this Vandeuvres silenced him.  But as he was going off Marechal remembered something and was sorry he had not questioned him about the shortening of the odds on the filly.  It would be a nice business for him if the filly stood a chance, seeing that he had just laid fifty to one about her in two hundreds.

Nana, though she did not understand a word of what the count was whispering, dared not, however, ask for new explanations.  He seemed more nervous than before and abruptly handed her over to Labordette, whom they came upon in front of the weighing-in room.

“You’ll take her back,” he said.  “I’ve got something on hand.  Au revoir!”

And he entered the room, which was narrow and low-pitched and half filled with a great pair of scales.  It was like a waiting room in a suburban station, and Nana was again hugely disillusioned, for she had been picturing to herself something on a very vast scale, a monumental machine, in fact, for weighing horses.  Dear me, they only weighed the jockeys!  Then it wasn’t worth while making such a fuss with their weighing!  In the scale a jockey with an idiotic expression was waiting, harness on knee, till a stout man in a frock coat should have done verifying his weight.  At the door a stable help was holding a horse, Cosinus, round which a silent and deeply interested throng was clustering.