“Me not a cad, me pay for champagne!”

Then all of a sudden he became aware of the prince’s presence of which he had been totally ignorant.  He stopped short and, assuming an air of farcical solemnity, announced: 

“King Dagobert is in the corridor and is desirous of drinking the health of His Royal Highness.”

The prince having made answer with a smile, Fontan’s sally was voted charming.  But the dressing room was too small to accommodate everybody, and it became necessary to crowd up anyhow, Satin and Mme Jules standing back against the curtain at the end and the men clustering closely round the half-naked Nana.  The three actors still had on the costumes they had been wearing in the second act, and while Prulliere took off his Alpine admiral’s cocked hat, the huge plume of which would have knocked the ceiling, Bosc, in his purple cloak and tinware crown, steadied himself on his tipsy old legs and greeted the prince as became a monarch receiving the son of a powerful neighbor.  The glasses were filled, and the company began clinking them together.

“I drink to Your Highness!” said ancient Bosc royally.

“To the army!” added Prulliere.

“To Venus!” cried Fontan.

The prince complaisantly poised his glass, waited quietly, bowed thrice and murmured: 

“Madame!  Admiral!  Your Majesty!”

Then he drank it off.  Count Muffat and the Marquis de Chouard had followed his example.  There was no more jesting now—­the company were at court.  Actual life was prolonged in the life of the theater, and a sort of solemn farce was enacted under the hot flare of the gas.  Nana, quite forgetting that she was in her drawers and that a corner of her shift stuck out behind, became the great lady, the queen of love, in act to open her most private palace chambers to state dignitaries.  In every sentence she used the words “Royal Highness” and, bowing with the utmost conviction, treated the masqueraders, Bosc and Prulliere, as if the one were a sovereign and the other his attendant minister.  And no one dreamed of smiling at this strange contrast, this real prince, this heir to a throne, drinking a petty actor’s champagne and taking his ease amid a carnival of gods, a masquerade of royalty, in the society of dressers and courtesans, shabby players and showmen of venal beauty.  Bordenave was simply ravished by the dramatic aspects of the scene and began dreaming of the receipts which would have accrued had His Highness only consented thus to appear in the second act of the Blonde Venus.

“I say, shall we have our little women down?” he cried, becoming familiar.

Nana would not hear of it.  But notwithstanding this, she was giving way herself.  Fontan attracted her with his comic make-up.  She brushed against him and, eying him as a woman in the family way might do when she fancies some unpleasant kind of food, she suddenly became extremely familiar: