in company with Prulliere and Fontan.  Her part was simply spectacular, but it was the great attraction of the piece, consisting, as it did, of three poses PLASTIQUES, each of which represented the same dumb and puissant fairy.  Then one fine morning amid his grand success, when Bordenave, who was mad after advertisement, kept firing the Parisian imagination with colossal posters, it became known that she must have started for Cairo the previous day.  She had simply had a few words with her manager.  Something had been said which did not please her; the whole thing was the caprice of a woman who is too rich to let herself be annoyed.  Besides, she had indulged an old infatuation, for she had long meditated visiting the Turks.

Months passed—­she began to be forgotten.  When her name was mentioned among the ladies and gentlemen, the strangest stories were told, and everybody gave the most contradictory and at the same time prodigious information.  She had made a conquest of the viceroy; she was reigning, in the recesses of a palace, over two hundred slaves whose heads she now and then cut off for the sake of a little amusement.  No, not at all!  She had ruined herself with a great big nigger!  A filthy passion this, which had left her wallowing without a chemise to her back in the crapulous debauchery of Cairo.  A fortnight later much astonishment was produced when someone swore to having met her in Russia.  A legend began to be formed:  she was the mistress of a prince, and her diamonds were mentioned.  All the women were soon acquainted with them from the current descriptions, but nobody could cite the precise source of all this information.  There were finger rings, earrings, bracelets, a REVIERE of phenomenal width, a queenly diadem surmounted by a central brilliant the size of one’s thumb.  In the retirement of those faraway countries she began to gleam forth as mysteriously as a gem-laden idol.  People now mentioned her without laughing, for they were full of meditative respect for this fortune acquired among the barbarians.

One evening in July toward eight o’clock, Lucy, while getting out of her carriage in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore, noticed Caroline Hequet, who had come out on foot to order something at a neighboring tradesman’s.  Lucy called her and at once burst out with: 

“Have you dined?  Are you disengaged?  Oh, then come with me, my dear.  Nana’s back.”

The other got in at once, and Lucy continued: 

“And you know, my dear, she may be dead while we’re gossiping.”

“Dead!  What an idea!” cried Caroline in stupefaction.  “And where is she?  And what’s it of?”

“At the Grand Hotel, of smallpox.  Oh, it’s a long story!”

Lucy had bidden her coachman drive fast, and while the horses trotted rapidly along the Rue Royale and the boulevards, she told what had happened to Nana in jerky, breathless sentences.