“Aha, here she is at last!” cried La Faloise, who did not abandon a jest when he thought it a good one.  “D’you see Nana coming in over there?”

“Hold your tongue, do, you idiot!” muttered Philippe.

“But I tell you, it is Nana!  They’re playing her waltz for her, by Jove!  She’s making her entry.  And she takes part in the reconciliation, the devil she does!  What?  You don’t see her?  She’s squeezing all three of ’em to her heart—­my cousin Fauchery, my lady cousin and her husband, and she’s calling ’em her dear kitties.  Oh, those family scenes give me a turn!”

Estelle had come up, and Fauchery complimented her while she stood stiffly up in her rose-colored dress, gazing at him with the astonished look of a silent child and constantly glancing aside at her father and mother.  Daguenet, too, exchanged a hearty shake of the hand with the journalist.  Together they made up a smiling group, while M. Venot came gliding in behind them.  He gloated over them with a beatified expression and seemed to envelop them in his pious sweetness, for he rejoiced in these last instances of self-abandonment which were preparing the means of grace.

But the waltz still beat out its swinging, laughing, voluptuous measure; it was like a shrill continuation of the life of pleasure which was beating against the old house like a rising tide.  The band blew louder trills from their little flutes; their violins sent forth more swooning notes.  Beneath the Genoa velvet hangings, the gilding and the paintings, the lusters exhaled a living heat and a great glow of sunlight, while the crowd of guests, multiplied in the surrounding mirrors, seemed to grow and increase as the murmur of many voices rose ever louder.  The couples who whirled round the drawing room, arm about waist, amid the smiles of the seated ladies, still further accentuated the quaking of the floors.  In the garden a dull, fiery glow fell from the Venetian lanterns and threw a distant reflection of flame over the dark shadows moving in search of a breath of air about the walks at its farther end.  And this trembling of walls and this red glow of light seemed to betoken a great ultimate conflagration in which the fabric of an ancient honor was cracking and burning on every side.  The shy early beginnings of gaiety, of which Fauchery one April evening had heard the vocal expression in the sound of breaking glass, had little by little grown bolder, wilder, till they had burst forth in this festival.  Now the rift was growing; it was crannying the house and announcing approaching downfall.  Among drunkards in the slums it is black misery, an empty cupboard, which put an end to ruined families; it is the madness of drink which empties the wretched beds.  Here the waltz tune was sounding the knell of an old race amid the suddenly ignited ruins of accumulated wealth, while Nana, although unseen, stretched her lithe limbs above the dancers’ heads and sent corruption through their caste, drenching the hot air with the ferment of her exhalations and the vagabond lilt of the music.