But she always recollected him kindly.  They had both enjoyed themselves so much at the expense of that fool of a La Faloise!  They would never have thought of seeing each other again if the delight of fooling such a perfect idiot had not egged them on!  It seemed an awfully good joke to kiss each other under his very nose.  They cut a regular dash with his coin; they would send him off full speed to the other end of Paris in order to be alone and then when he came back, they would crack jokes and make allusions he could not understand.  One day, urged by the journalist, she bet that she would smack his face, and that she did the very same evening and went on to harder blows, for she thought it a good joke and was glad of the opportunity of showing how cowardly men were.  She called him her “slapjack” and would tell him to come and have his smack!  The smacks made her hands red, for as yet she was not up to the trick.  La Faloise laughed in his idiotic, languid way, though his eyes were full of tears.  He was delighted at such familiarity; he thought it simply stunning.

One night when he had received sundry cuffs and was greatly excited: 

“Now, d’you know,” he said, “you ought to marry me.  We should be as jolly as grigs together, eh?”

This was no empty suggestion.  Seized with a desire to astonish Paris, he had been slyly projecting this marriage.  “Nana’s husband!  Wouldn’t that sound smart, eh?” Rather a stunning apotheosis that!  But Nana gave him a fine snubbing.

“Me marry you!  Lovely!  If such an idea had been tormenting me I should have found a husband a long time ago!  And he’d have been a man worth twenty of you, my pippin!  I’ve had a heap of proposals.  Why, look here, just reckon ’em up with me:  Philippe, Georges, Foucarmont, Steiner—­that makes four, without counting the others you don’t know.  It’s a chorus they all sing.  I can’t be nice, but they forthwith begin yelling, ’Will you marry me?  Will you marry me?’”

She lashed herself up and then burst out in fine indignation: 

“Oh dear, no!  I don’t want to!  D’you think I’m built that way?  Just look at me a bit!  Why, I shouldn’t be Nana any longer if I fastened a man on behind!  And, besides, it’s too foul!”

And she spat and hiccuped with disgust, as though she had seen all the dirt in the world spread out beneath her.

One evening La Faloise vanished, and a week later it became known that he was in the country with an uncle whose mania was botany.  He was pasting his specimens for him and stood a chance of marrying a very plain, pious cousin.  Nana shed no tears for him.  She simply said to the count: 

“Eh, little rough, another rival less!  You’re chortling today.  But he was becoming serious!  He wanted to marry me.”

He waxed pale, and she flung her arms round his neck and hung there, laughing, while she emphasized every little cruel speech with a caress.