right at table, me on her left, then called to Nanine:

"Before you sit down, tell them in the kitchen not to open to
anybody if there is a ring."

This order was given at one o'clock in the morning.

We laughed, drank, and ate freely at this supper. In a short
while mirth had reached its last limit, and the words that seem
funny to a certain class of people, words that degrade the mouth
that utters them, were heard from time to time, amidst the
applause of Nanine, of Prudence, and of Marguerite. Gaston was
thoroughly amused; he was a very good sort of fellow, but
somewhat spoiled by the habits of his youth. For a moment I tried
to forget myself, to force my heart and my thoughts to become
indifferent to the sight before me, and to take my share of that
gaiety which seemed like one of the courses of the meal. But
little by little I withdrew from the noise; my glass remained
full, and I felt almost sad as I saw this beautiful creature of
twenty drinking, talking like a porter, and laughing the more
loudly the more scandalous was the joke.

Nevertheless, this hilarity, this way of talking and drinking,
which seemed to me in the others the mere results of bad company
or of bad habits, seemed in Marguerite a necessity of forgetting,
a fever, a nervous irritability. At every glass of champagne her
cheeks would flush with a feverish colour, and a cough, hardly
perceptible at the beginning of supper, became at last so violent
that she was obliged to lean her head on the back of her chair
and hold her chest in her hands every time that she coughed. I