When she did not actually throw the men at his head Count Muffat pretended not to know about all this.  However, he suffered not a little from the lesser indignities of their daily life.  The mansion in the Avenue de Villiers was becoming a hell, a house full of mad people, in which every hour of the day wild disorders led to hateful complications.  Nana even fought with her servants.  One moment she would be very nice with Charles, the coachman.  When she stopped at a restaurant she would send him out beer by the waiter and would talk with him from the inside of her carriage when he slanged the cabbies at a block in the traffic, for then he struck her as funny and cheered her up.  Then the next moment she called him a fool for no earthly reason.  She was always squabbling over the straw, the bran or the oats; in spite of her love for animals she thought her horses ate too much.  Accordingly one day when she was settling up she accused the man of robbing her.  At this Charles got in a rage and called her a whore right out; his horses, he said, were distinctly better than she was, for they did not sleep with everybody.  She answered him in the same strain, and the count had to separate them and give the coachman the sack.  This was the beginning of a rebellion among the servants.  When her diamonds had been stolen Victorine and Francois left.  Julien himself disappeared, and the tale ran that the master had given him a big bribe and had begged him to go, because he slept with the mistress.  Every week there were new faces in the servants’ hall.  Never was there such a mess; the house was like a passage down which the scum of the registry offices galloped, destroying everything in their path.  Zoe alone kept her place; she always looked clean, and her only anxiety was how to organize this riot until she had got enough together to set up on her own account in fulfillment of a plan she had been hatching for some time past.

These, again, were only the anxieties he could own to.  The count put up with the stupidity of Mme Maloir, playing bezique with her in spite of her musty smell.  He put up with Mme Lerat and her encumbrances, with Louiset and the mournful complaints peculiar to a child who is being eaten up with the rottenness inherited from some unknown father.  But he spent hours worse than these.  One evening he had heard Nana angrily telling her maid that a man pretending to be rich had just swindled her—­a handsome man calling himself an American and owning gold mines in his own country, a beast who had gone off while she was asleep without giving her a copper and had even taken a packet of cigarette papers with him.  The count had turned very pale and had gone downstairs again on tiptoe so as not to hear more.  But later he had to hear all.  Nana, having been smitten with a baritone in a music hall and having been thrown over by him, wanted to commit suicide during a fit of sentimental melancholia.  She swallowed a glass of water in which she had soaked a box of matches.