Day was about to dawn, and Nana turned her eyes away from the door, for she was relinquishing all hope.  The company were bored to distraction.  Rose Mignon had refused to sing the “Slipper” and sat huddled up on a sofa, chatting in a low voice with Fauchery and waiting for Mignon, who had by now won some fifty louis from Vandeuvres.  A fat gentleman with a decoration and a serious cast of countenance had certainly given a recitation in Alsatian accents of “Abraham’s Sacrifice,” a piece in which the Almighty says, “By My blasted Name” when He swears, and Isaac always answers with a “Yes, Papa!” Nobody, however, understood what it was all about, and the piece had been voted stupid.  People were at their wits’ end how to make merry and to finish the night with fitting hilarity.  For a moment or two Labordette conceived the idea of denouncing different women in a whisper to La Faloise, who still went prowling round each individual lady, looking to see if she were hiding his handkerchief in her bosom.  Soon, as there were still some bottles of champagne on the sideboard, the young men again fell to drinking.  They shouted to one another; they stirred each other up, but a dreary species of intoxication, which was stupid enough to drive one to despair, began to overcome the company beyond hope of recovery.  Then the little fair-haired fellow, the man who bore one of the greatest names in France and had reached his wit’s end and was desperate at the thought that he could not hit upon something really funny, conceived a brilliant notion:  he snatched up his bottle of champagne and poured its contents into the piano.  His allies were convulsed with laughter.

“La now!  Why’s he putting champagne into the piano?” asked Tatan Nene in great astonishment as she caught sight of him.

“What, my lass, you don’t know why he’s doing that?” replied Labordette solemnly.  “There’s nothing so good as champagne for pianos.  It gives ’em tone.”

“Ah,” murmured Tatan Nene with conviction.

And when the rest began laughing at her she grew angry.  How should she know?  They were always confusing her.

Decidedly the evening was becoming a big failure.  The night threatened to end in the unloveliest way.  In a corner by themselves Maria Blond and Lea de Horn had begun squabbling at close quarters, the former accusing the latter of consorting with people of insufficient wealth.  They were getting vastly abusive over it, their chief stumbling block being the good looks of the men in question.  Lucy, who was plain, got them to hold their tongues.  Good looks were nothing, according to her; good figures were what was wanted.  Farther off, on a sofa, an attache had slipped his arm round Simonne’s waist and was trying to kiss her neck, but Simonne, sullen and thoroughly out of sorts, pushed him away at every fresh attempt with cries of “You’re pestering me!” and sound slaps of the fan across his face.  For the matter of that, not one of the ladies allowed herself