“To the army!” added Prullière.
“To Venus!” cried Fontan.
The prince complaisantly poised his glass, waited quietly, bowed thrice and murmured:
“Madame! Admiral! Your Majesty!”
Then he drank it off. Count Muffat and the Marquis de Chouard had followed his example. There was no more jesting now—the company were at court. Actual life was prolonged in the life of the theater, and a sort of solemn farce was enacted under the hot flare of the gas. Nana, quite forgetting that she was in her drawers and that a corner of her shift stuck out behind, became the great lady, the queen of love, in act to open her most private palace chambers to state dignitaries. In every sentence she used the words “Royal Highness” and, bowing with the utmost conviction, treated the masqueraders, Bosc and Prullière, as if the one were a sovereign and the other his attendant minister. And no one dreamed of smiling at this strange contrast, this real prince, this heir to a throne, drinking a petty actor’s champagne and taking his ease amid a carnival of gods, a masquerade of royalty, in the society of dressers and courtesans, shabby players and showmen of venal beauty. Bordenave was simply ravished by the dramatic aspects of the scene and began dreaming of the receipts which would have accrued had His Highness only consented thus to appear in the second act of the Blonde Venus.
“I say, shall we have our little women down?” he cried, becoming familiar.
Nana would not hear of it. But notwithstanding this, she was giving way herself. Fontan attracted her with his comic make-up. She brushed against him and, eying him as a woman in the family way might do when she fancies some unpleasant kind of food, she suddenly became extremely familiar:
“Now then, fill up again, ye great brute!”
Fontan charged the glasses afresh, and the company drank, repeating the same toasts.
“To His Highness!”