amid universal enjoyment.
'That dirty Bismarck--there's another cad for you!' Maria Blond remarked.
'To think that I should have known him!' cried Simonne. 'If only I could have foreseen, I'm the one that would have put some poison in his glass.'
But Blanche, on whose heart the expulsion of her Prussian still weighed, ventured to defend Bismarck. Perhaps he wasn't such a bad sort. To every man his trade!
'You know,' she added, 'he adores women.'
'What the hell has that got to do with us?' said Clarisse. 'We don't want to cuddle him, eh?'
'There's always too many men of that sort!' declared Louise Violaine gravely. 'It's better to do without 'em than to mix oneself up with such monsters!'
And the discussion continued, and they stripped Bismarck, and, in her Bonapartist zeal, each of them gave him a sounding kick, while Tatan Nene kept saying:
'Bismarck! Why, they've simply driven me crazy with the chap! Oh, I hate him! I didn't know that there Bismarck! One can't know everybody.'
'Never mind,' said Lea de Horn by way of conclusion, 'that Bismarck will give us a jolly good threshing.'
But she could not continue. The ladies were all down on her at once. Eh, what? A threshing? It was Bismarck they were going to escort home with blows from the butt ends of their muskets. What was this bad Frenchwoman going to say next?
'Hush,' whispered Rose, for so much noise hurt her.
The cold influence of the corpse once more overcame them, and they all paused together. They were embarrassed; the dead woman was before them again; a dull thread of coming ill possessed them. On the boulevard the cry was passing, hoarse and wild:
'A BERLIN! A BERLIN! A BERLIN!'
Presently, when they were making up their minds to go, a voice was heard calling from the passage:
'Rose! Rose!'
Gaga opened the door in astonishment and disappeared for a moment. When she returned:
'My dear,' she said, 'it's Fauchery. He's out there at the end of the corridor. He won't come any further, and he's beside himself because you still stay near that body.'
Mignon had at last succeeded in urging the journalist upstairs. Lucy, who was still at the window, leaned out and caught sight of the gentlemen out on the pavement. They were looking up, making energetic signals to her. Mignon was shaking his fists in exasperation, and Steiner, Fontan, Bordenave and the rest were stretching out their arms with looks of anxious reproach, while Daguenet simply stood smoking a cigar with his hands behind his back, so as not to compromise himself.
'It's true, dear,' said Lucy, leaving the window open; 'I promised to make you come down. They're all calling us now.'
Rose slowly and painfully left the chest.
'I'm coming down; I'm coming down,' she whispered. 'It's very certain she no longer needs me. They're going to send in a Sister of Mercy.'
And she turned round, searching for her hat and shawl. Mechanically she filled a basin of water on the toilet table and while washing her hands and face continued:
'I don't know! It's been a great blow to me. We used scarcely to be nice to one another. Ah well! You see I'm quite silly over it now. Oh! I've got all sorts of strange ideas--I want to die myself-- I feel the end of the world's coming. Yes, I need air.'
The corpse was beginning to poison the atmosphere of the room. And after long heedlessness there ensued a panic.
'Let's be off; let's be off, my little pets!' Gaga kept saying. 'It isn't wholesome here.'
They went briskly out, casting a last glance at the bed as they passed it. But while Lucy, Blanche and Caroline still remained behind, Rose gave a final look round, for she wanted to leave the room in order. She drew a curtain across the window, and then it occurred to her that the lamp was not the proper thing and that a taper should take its place. So she lit one of the copper candelabra on the chimney piece and placed it on the night table beside the corpse. A brilliant light suddenly illumined the dead woman's face. The women were horror-struck. They shuddered and escaped.
'Ah, she's changed; she's changed!' murmured Rose Mignon, who was the last to remain.
She went away; she shut the door. Nana was left alone with upturned face in the light cast by the candle. She was fruit of the charnel house, a heap of matter and blood, a shovelful of corrupted flesh thrown down on the pillow. The pustules had invaded the whole of the face, so that each touched its neighbor. Fading and sunken, they had assumed the grayish hue of mud; and on that formless pulp, where the features had ceased to be traceable, they already resembled some decaying damp from the grave. One eye, the left eye, had completely foundered among bubbling purulence, and the other, which remained half open, looked like a deep, black, ruinous hole. The nose was still suppurating. Quite a reddish crush was peeling from one of the cheeks and invading the mouth, which it distorted into a horrible grin. And over this loathsome and grotesque mask of death the hair, the beautiful hair, still blazed like sunlight and flowed downward in rippling gold. Venus was rotting. It seemed as though the poison she had assimilated in the gutters and on the carrion tolerated by the roadside, the leaven with which she had poisoned a whole people, had but now remounted to her face and turned it to corruption.
The room was empty. A great despairing breath came up from the boulevard and swelled the curtain.
'A BERLIN! A BERLIN! A BERLIN!'
