her forthwith.  But there was a deuce of a row going on in his shop, which had been turned topsy-turvy by that big damsel’s advent.  Rose Mignon, his star, a comic actress of much subtlety and an adorable singer, was daily threatening to leave him in the lurch, for she was furious and guessed the presence of a rival.  And as for the bill, good God!  What a noise there had been about it all!  It had ended by his deciding to print the names of the two actresses in the same-sized type.  But it wouldn’t do to bother him.  Whenever any of his little women, as he called them—­Simonne or Clarisse, for instance—­wouldn’t go the way he wanted her to he just up with his foot and caught her one in the rear.  Otherwise life was impossible.  Oh yes, he sold ’em; he knew what they fetched, the wenches!

“Tut!” he cried, breaking off short.  “Mignon and Steiner.  Always together.  You know, Steiner’s getting sick of Rose; that’s why the husband dogs his steps now for fear of his slipping away.”

On the pavement outside, the row of gas jets flaring on the cornice of the theater cast a patch of brilliant light.  Two small trees, violently green, stood sharply out against it, and a column gleamed in such vivid illumination that one could read the notices thereon at a distance, as though in broad daylight, while the dense night of the boulevard beyond was dotted with lights above the vague outline of an ever-moving crowd.  Many men did not enter the theater at once but stayed outside to talk while finishing their cigars under the rays of the line of gas jets, which shed a sallow pallor on their faces and silhouetted their short black shadows on the asphalt.  Mignon, a very tall, very broad fellow, with the square-shaped head of a strong man at a fair, was forcing a passage through the midst of the groups and dragging on his arm the banker Steiner, an exceedingly small man with a corporation already in evidence and a round face framed in a setting of beard which was already growing gray.

“Well,” said Bordenave to the banker, “you met her yesterday in my office.”

“Ah!  It was she, was it?” ejaculated Steiner.  “I suspected as much.  Only I was coming out as she was going in, and I scarcely caught a glimpse of her.”

Mignon was listening with half-closed eyelids and nervously twisting a great diamond ring round his finger.  He had quite understood that Nana was in question.  Then as Bordenave was drawing a portrait of his new star, which lit a flame in the eyes of the banker, he ended by joining in the conversation.

“Oh, let her alone, my dear fellow; she’s a low lot!  The public will show her the door in quick time.  Steiner, my laddie, you know that my wife is waiting for you in her box.”