“Oh, luxuries always pay.  You see, I’ve been with others quite long enough, and now I want others to be with me.”

And a fierce look set her lip curling.  At last she would be “Madame,” and for the sake of earning a few louis all those women whose slops she had emptied during the last fifteen years would prostrate themselves before her.

Mignon wished to be announced, and Zoe left him for a moment after remarking that Madame had passed a miserable day.  He had only been at the house once before, and he did not know it at all.  The dining room with its Gobelin tapestry, its sideboard and its plate filled him with astonishment.  He opened the doors familiarly and visited the drawing room and the winter garden, returning thence into the hall.  This overwhelming luxury, this gilded furniture, these silks and velvets, gradually filled him with such a feeling of admiration that it set his heart beating.  When Zoe came down to fetch him she offered to show him the other rooms, the dressing room, that is to say, and the bedroom.  In the latter Mignon’s feelings overcame him; he was carried away by them; they filled him with tender enthusiasm.

That damned Nana was simply stupefying him, and yet he thought he knew a thing or two.  Amid the downfall of the house and the servants’ wild, wasteful race to destruction, massed-up riches still filled every gaping hole and overtopped every ruined wall.  And Mignon, as he viewed this lordly monument of wealth, began recalling to mind the various great works he had seen.  Near Marseilles they had shown him an aqueduct, the stone arches of which bestrode an abyss, a Cyclopean work which cost millions of money and ten years of intense labor.  At Cherbourg he had seen the new harbor with its enormous works, where hundreds of men sweated in the sun while cranes filled the sea with huge squares of rock and built up a wall where a workman now and again remained crushed into bloody pulp.  But all that now struck him as insignificant.  Nana excited him far more.  Viewing the fruit of her labors, he once more experienced the feelings of respect that had overcome him one festal evening in a sugar refiner’s chateau.  This chateau had been erected for the refiner, and its palatial proportions and royal splendor had been paid for by a single material—­sugar.  It was with something quite different, with a little laughable folly, a little delicate nudity—­it was with this shameful trifle, which is so powerful as to move the universe, that she alone, without workmen, without the inventions of engineers, had shaken Paris to its foundations and had built up a fortune on the bodies of dead men.

“Oh, by God, what an implement!”

Mignon let the words escape him in his ecstasy, for he felt a return of personal gratitude.