“You can’t marry Nana!  Isn’t that what’s fetching you, eh?  When they’re all bothering me with their marriages you’re raging in your corner.  It isn’t possible; you must wait till your wife kicks the bucket.  Oh, if she were only to do that, how you’d come rushing round!  How you’d fling yourself on the ground and make your offer with all the grand accompaniments—­sighs and tears and vows!  Wouldn’t it be nice, darling, eh?”

Her voice had become soft, and she was chaffing him in a ferociously wheedling manner.  He was deeply moved and began blushing as he paid her back her kisses.  Then she cried: 

“By God, to think I should have guessed!  He’s thought about it; he’s waiting for his wife to go off the hooks!  Well, well, that’s the finishing touch!  Why, he’s even a bigger rascal than the others!”

Muffat had resigned himself to “the others.”  Nowadays he was trusting to the last relics of his personal dignity in order to remain “Monsieur” among the servants and intimates of the house, the man, in fact, who because he gave most was the official lover.  And his passion grew fiercer.  He kept his position because he paid for it, buying even smiles at a high price.  He was even robbed and he never got his money’s worth, but a disease seemed to be gnawing his vitals from which he could not prevent himself suffering.  Whenever he entered Nana’s bedroom he was simply content to open the windows for a second or two in order to get rid of the odors the others left behind them, the essential smells of fair-haired men and dark, the smoke of cigars, of which the pungency choked him.  This bedroom was becoming a veritable thoroughfare, so continually were boots wiped on its threshold.  Yet never a man among them was stopped by the bloodstain barring the door.  Zoe was still preoccupied by this stain; it was a simple mania with her, for she was a clean girl, and it horrified her to see it always there.  Despite everything her eyes would wander in its direction, and she now never entered Madame’s room without remarking: 

“It’s strange that don’t go.  All the same, plenty of folk come in this way.”

Nana kept receiving the best news from Georges, who was by that time already convalescent in his mother’s keeping at Les Fondettes, and she used always to make the same reply.

“Oh, hang it, time’s all that’s wanted.  It’s apt to grow paler as feet cross it.”

As a matter of fact, each of the gentlemen, whether Foucarmont, Steiner, La Faloise or Fauchery, had borne away some of it on their bootsoles.  And Muffat, whom the bloodstain preoccupied as much as it did Zoe, kept studying it in his own despite, as though in its gradual rosy disappearance he would read the number of men that passed.  He secretly dreaded it and always stepped over it out of a vivid fear of crushing some live thing, some naked limb lying on the floor.