“Gee up, Lusignan, you great coward!  The Englishman’s stunning!  Do it again, old boy; do it again!  Oh, that Valerio!  It’s sickening!  Oh, the carcass!  My ten louis damned well lost!  Nana’s the only one!  Bravo, Nana!  Bravo!”

And without being aware of it Nana, upon her seat, had begun jerking her hips and waist as though she were racing herself.  She kept striking her side—­she fancied it was a help to the filly.  With each stroke she sighed with fatigue and said in low, anguished tones: 

“Go it, go it!”

Then a splendid sight was witnessed.  Price, rising in his stirrups and brandishing his whip, flogged Nana with an arm of iron.  The old shriveled-up child with his long, hard, dead face seemed to breath flame.  And in a fit of furious audacity and triumphant will he put his heart into the filly, held her up, lifted her forward, drenched in foam, with eyes of blood.  The whole rush of horses passed with a roar of thunder:  it took away people’s breaths; it swept the air with it while the judge sat frigidly waiting, his eye adjusted to its task.  Then there was an immense re-echoing burst of acclamation.  With a supreme effort Price had just flung Nana past the post, thus beating Spirit by a head.

There was an uproar as of a rising tide.  “Nana!  Nana!  Nana!” The cry rolled up and swelled with the violence of a tempest, till little by little it filled the distance, the depths of the Bois as far as Mont Valerien, the meadows of Longchamps and the Plaine de Boulogne.  In all parts of the field the wildest enthusiasm declared itself.  “Vive Nana!  Vive la France!  Down with England!” The women waved their sunshades; men leaped and spun round, vociferating as they did so, while others with shouts of nervous laughter threw their hats in the air.  And from the other side of the course the enclosure made answer; the people on the stands were stirred, though nothing was distinctly visible save a tremulous motion of the air, as though an invisible flame were burning in a brazier above the living mass of gesticulating arms and little wildly moving faces, where the eyes and gaping mouths looked like black dots.  The noise did not cease but swelled up and recommenced in the recesses of faraway avenues and among the people encamped under the trees, till it spread on and on and attained its climax in the imperial stand, where the empress herself had applauded.  “Nana!  Nana!  Nana!” The cry rose heavenward in the glorious sunlight, whose golden rain beat fiercely on the dizzy heads of the multitude.

Then Nana, looming large on the seat of her landau, fancied that it was she whom they were applauding.  For a moment or two she had stood devoid of motion, stupefied by her triumph, gazing at the course as it was invaded by so dense a flood of people that the turf became invisible beneath the sea of black hats.  By and by, when this crowd had become somewhat less disorderly and a lane had been formed as far as the exit and Nana was again applauded as she went off with Price hanging lifelessly and vacantly over her neck, she smacked her thigh energetically, lost all self-possession, triumphed in crude phrases: