At ten o'clock the next morning Nana was still asleep. She occupied the second floor of a large new house in the Boulevard Haussmann, the landlord of which let flats to single ladies in order by their means to dry the paint. A rich merchant from Moscow, who had come to pass a winter in Paris, had installed her there after paying six months' rent in advance. The rooms were too big for her and had never been completely furnished. The vulgar sumptuosity¹ of gilded² consoles and gilded chairs formed a crude contrast therein to the bric-a-brac of a secondhand furniture shop--to mahogany round tables, that is to say, and zinc³ candelabras, which sought to imitate Florentine bronze. All of which smacked⁵ of the courtesan too early deserted⁶ by her first serious protector and fallen back on shabby lovers, of a precarious⁷ first appearance of a bad start, handicapped by refusals of credit and threats of eviction⁸.

Nana was sleeping on her face, hugging in her bare arms a pillow in which she was burying cheeks grown pale in sleep. The bedroom and the dressing⁹ room were the only two apartments which had been properly furnished by a neighboring upholsterer. A ray of light, gliding¹⁰ in under a curtain, rendered visible rosewood furniture and hangings and chairbacks of figured damask with a pattern of big blue flowers on a gray ground. But in the soft atmosphere of that slumbering¹² chamber¹³ Nana suddenly awoke with a start, as though surprised to find an empty place at her side. She looked at the other pillow lying next to hers; there was the

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