his damnation was certain, he felt powerless to strive.  When Nana returned she found him hidden beneath the bedclothes; he was haggard; he had dug his nails into his bosom, and his eyes stared upward as though in search of heaven.  And with that she started to weep again.  Then they both embraced, and their teeth chattered they knew not why, as the same imbecile obsession over-mastered them.  They had already passed a similar night, but on this occasion the thing was utterly idiotic, as Nana declared when she ceased to be frightened.  She suspected something, and this caused her to question the count in a prudent sort of way.  It might be that Rose Mignon had sent the famous letter!  But that was not the case; it was sheer fright, nothing more, for he was still ignorant whether he was a cuckold or no.

Two days later, after a fresh disappearance, Muffat presented himself in the morning, a time of day at which he never came.  He was livid; his eyes were red and his whole man still shaken by a great internal struggle.  But Zoe, being scared herself, did not notice his troubled state.  She had run to meet him and now began crying: 

“Oh, monsieur, do come in!  Madame nearly died yesterday evening!”

And when he asked for particulars: 

“Something it’s impossible to believe has happened—­a miscarriage, monsieur.”

Nana had been in the family way for the past three months.  For long she had simply thought herself out of sorts, and Dr Boutarel had himself been in doubt.  But when afterward he made her a decisive announcement, she felt so bored thereby that she did all she possibly could to disguise her condition.  Her nervous terrors, her dark humors, sprang to some extent from this unfortunate state of things, the secret of which she kept very shamefacedly, as became a courtesan mother who is obliged to conceal her plight.  The thing struck her as a ridiculous accident, which made her appear small in her own eyes and would, had it been known, have led people to chaff her.

“A poor joke, eh?” she said.  “Bad luck, too, certainly.”

She was necessarily very sharp set when she thought her last hour had come.  There was no end to her surprise, too; her sexual economy seemed to her to have got out of order; it produced children then even when one did not want them and when one employed it for quite other purposes!  Nature drove her to exasperation; this appearance of serious motherhood in a career of pleasure, this gift of life amid all the deaths she was spreading around, exasperated her.  Why could one not dispose of oneself as fancy dictated, without all this fuss?  And whence had this brat come?  She could not even suggest a father.  Ah, dear heaven, the man who made him would have a splendid notion had he kept him in his own hands, for nobody asked for him; he was in everybody’s way, and he would certainly not have much happiness in life!

Meanwhile Zoe described the catastrophe.