Chapter 14

Suddenly Nana disappeared from view: she went under again, she fled, she took off to strange places. Before she left she had endured a stressful sale of the mansion, throwing out everything, including the furniture, jewels, fine clothes, and linen. Figures were bandied about,...

Chapter 4

Earlier that morning Zoë had made the apartment over to a caterer from Brébant’s* and his staff of helpers and waiters. Brébant’s would provide the food, the crockery, the glasses, the tablecloth and napkins, the flowers, and everything down to the chairs...

Chapter 2

At ten o’clock next morning Nana was still asleep. She lived on the second floor of a large new house in the Boulevard Haussmann whose owner rented it out to single ladies before the paint was even dry. A rich Moscow businessman who had...

Chapter 10

And so Nana became a fashionable lady, queen of the boulevards, a woman of pleasure living at ease on the beastliness and stupidity of men. It was a sudden and definitive rise to fame in the glittering world of gallantry, financial folly, and reckless...

Chapter 9

At the Variétés they were rehearsing La Petite Duchesse. They had just finished with Act One and were about to begin on Act Two. At the front of the stage in a couple of old armchairs Fauchery and Bordenave were having a...

Chapter 5

At the Variétés it was the thirty-fourth performance of La Blonde Vénus. The first act had just finished. In the green room Simonne, dressed as a little laundry girl, was standing in front of the table over which there was a mirror,...

Chapter 12

Around one in the morning, in the big bed draped in Venetian lace, Nana and the count were not yet asleep. He had come back the evening before after sulking for three days. The bedroom, lit by a dim lamp, was slumbering, warm and...

Chapter 8

On the fourth floor of a small lodging in the Rue Véron in Montmartre, Nana and Fontan had invited a few friends round for Twelfth Night celebrations. They were having a house-warming, as they had moved in only three days ago. It had happened quite...

Chapter 7

One December evening three months later, Comte Muffat was walking through the Passage des Panoramas.* The evening was very mild, throngs of folk had just packed the arcade because of a sudden downpour. People crowded in, laboriously moving forward between the shops...

Chapter 6

Comte Muffat, accompanied by his wife and daughter, had arrived the night before at Les Fondettes, where Madame Hugon, who was there alone with her son Georges, had invited them to stay the week. The house, built towards the end of the seventeenth century,...