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 sumptuosity of gilded 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 zinc
candelabras, which sought to imitate Florentine bronze. All of which
smacked of the courtesan too early deserted by her first serious
protector and fallen back on shabby lovers, of a precarious first
appearance of a bad start, handicapped by refusals of credit and threats
of eviction.

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
dressing room were the only two apartments which had been properly
furnished by a neighboring upholsterer. A ray of light, gliding 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 slumbering chamber 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 dint of a human head among its flounces: it was still warm. And
groping with one hand, she pressed the knob of an electric bell by her
bed's head.

"He's gone then?" she asked the maid who presented herself.