At night he brought the ten thousand francs.  Nana put up her lips, and he took a long kiss which consoled him for the whole day of anguish.  What annoyed the young woman was to have him continually tied to her apron strings.  She complained to M. Venot, begging him to take her little rough off to the countess.  Was their reconciliation good for nothing then?  She was sorry she had mixed herself up in it, since despite everything he was always at her heels.  On the days when, out of anger, she forgot her own interest, she swore to play him such a dirty trick that he would never again be able to set foot in her place.  But when she slapped her leg and yelled at him she might quite as well have spat in his face too:  he would still have stayed and even thanked her.  Then the rows about money matters kept continually recurring.  She demanded money savagely; she rowed him over wretched little amounts; she was odiously stingy with every minute of her time; she kept fiercely informing him that she slept with him for his money, not for any other reasons, and that she did not enjoy it a bit, that, in fact, she loved another and was awfully unfortunate in needing an idiot of his sort!  They did not even want him at court now, and there was some talk of requiring him to send in his resignation.  The empress had said, “He is too disgusting.”  It was true enough.  So Nana repeated the phrase by way of closure to all their quarrels.

“Look here!  You disgust me!”

Nowadays she no longer minded her ps and qs; she had regained the most perfect freedom.

Every day she did her round of the lake, beginning acquaintanceships which ended elsewhere.  Here was the happy hunting ground par excellence, where courtesans of the first water spread their nets in open daylight and flaunted themselves amid the tolerating smiles and brilliant luxury of Paris.  Duchesses pointed her out to one another with a passing look—­rich shopkeepers’ wives copied the fashion of her hats.  Sometimes her landau, in its haste to get by, stopped a file of puissant turnouts, wherein sat plutocrats able to buy up all Europe or Cabinet ministers with plump fingers tight-pressed to the throat of France.  She belonged to this Bois society, occupied a prominent place in it, was known in every capital and asked about by every foreigner.  The splendors of this crowd were enhanced by the madness of her profligacy as though it were the very crown, the darling passion, of the nation.  Then there were unions of a night, continual passages of desire, which she lost count of the morning after, and these sent her touring through the grand restaurants and on fine days, as often as not, to “Madrid.”  The staffs of all the embassies visited her, and she, Lucy Stewart, Caroline Hequet and Maria Blond would dine in the society of gentlemen who murdered the French language and paid to be amused, engaging them by the evening with orders to be funny and yet proving so blase and so worn out that they never even touched them.  This the ladies called “going on a spree,” and they would return home happy at having been despised and would finish the night in the arms of the lovers of their choice.