“Now, d’you know,” he said, “you ought to marry me. We should be as jolly as grigs together, eh?”
This was no empty suggestion. Seized with a desire to astonish Paris, he had been slyly projecting this marriage. “Nana’s husband! Wouldn’t that sound smart, eh?” Rather a stunning apotheosis that! But Nana gave him a fine snubbing.
“Me marry you! Lovely! If such an idea had been tormenting me I should have found a husband a long time ago! And he’d have been a man worth twenty of you, my pippin! I’ve had a heap of proposals. Why, look here, just reckon ’em up with me: Philippe, Georges, Foucarmont, Steiner—that makes four, without counting the others you don’t know. It’s a chorus they all sing. I can’t be nice, but they forthwith begin yelling, ‘Will you marry me? Will you marry me?’”
She lashed herself up and then burst out in fine indignation:
“Oh dear, no! I don’t want to! D’you think I’m built that way? Just look at me a bit! Why, I shouldn’t be Nana any longer if I fastened a man on behind! And, besides, it’s too foul!”
And she spat and hiccuped with disgust, as though she had seen all the dirt in the world spread out beneath her.
One evening La Faloise vanished, and a week later it became known that he was in the country with an uncle whose mania was botany. He was pasting his specimens for him and stood a chance of marrying a very plain, pious cousin. Nana shed no tears for him. She simply said to the count:
“Eh, little rough, another rival less! You’re chortling today. But he was becoming serious! He wanted to marry me.”
He waxed pale, and she flung her arms round his neck and hung there, laughing, while she emphasized every little cruel speech with a caress.
“You can’t marry Nana! Isn’t that what’s fetching you, eh? When they’re all bothering me with their marriages you’re raging in your corner. It isn’t possible; you must wait till your wife kicks the bucket. Oh, if she were only to do that, how you’d come rushing round! How you’d fling yourself on the ground and make your offer with all the grand accompaniments—sighs and tears and vows! Wouldn’t it be nice, darling, eh?”