Then Nana took up with Steiner without disgust but without love.  She called him a dirty Jew; she seemed to be paying back an old grudge, of which she had no distinct recollection.  He was fat; he was stupid, and she got him down and took two bites at a time in order the quicker to do for this Prussian.  As for him, he had thrown Simonne over.  His Bosphorous scheme was getting shaky, and Nana hastened the downfall by wild expenses.  For a month he struggled on, doing miracles of finance.  He filled Europe with posters, advertisements and prospectuses of a colossal scheme and obtained money from the most distant climes.  All these savings, the pounds of speculators and the pence of the poor, were swallowed up in the Avenue de Villiers.  Again he was partner in an ironworks in Alsace, where in a small provincial town workmen, blackened with coal dust and soaked with sweat, day and night strained their sinews and heard their bones crack to satisfy Nana’s pleasures.  Like a huge fire she devoured all the fruits of stock-exchange swindling and the profits of labor.  This time she did for Steiner; she brought him to the ground, sucked him dry to the core, left him so cleaned out that he was unable to invent a new roguery.  When his bank failed he stammered and trembled at the idea of prosecution.  His bankruptcy had just been published, and the simple mention of money flurried him and threw him into a childish embarrassment.  And this was he who had played with millions.  One evening at Nana’s he began to cry and asked her for a loan of a hundred francs wherewith to pay his maidservant.  And Nana, much affected and amused at the end of this terrible old man who had squeezed Paris for twenty years, brought it to him and said: 

“I say, I’m giving it you because it seems so funny!  But listen to me, my boy, you are too old for me to keep.  You must find something else to do.”

Then Nana started on La Faloise at once.  He had for some time been longing for the honor of being ruined by her in order to put the finishing stroke on his smartness.  He needed a woman to launch him properly; it was the one thing still lacking.  In two months all Paris would be talking of him, and he would see his name in the papers.  Six weeks were enough.  His inheritance was in landed estate, houses, fields, woods and farms.  He had to sell all, one after the other, as quickly as he could.  At every mouthful Nana swallowed an acre.  The foliage trembling in the sunshine, the wide fields of ripe grain, the vineyards so golden in September, the tall grass in which the cows stood knee-deep, all passed through her hands as if engulfed by an abyss.  Even fishing rights, a stone quarry and three mills disappeared.  Nana passed over them like an invading army or one of those swarms of locusts whose flight scours a whole province.  The ground was burned up where her little foot had rested.  Farm by farm, field by field, she ate up the man’s patrimony very prettily and quite inattentively, just as she