Nana was now a flower-maker and earned forty sous a day at Titreville’s place in the Rue du Caire, where she had served as apprentice. The Coupeaus had kept her there so that she might remain under the eye of Madame Lerat, who had been forewoman in the workroom for ten years. Of a morning, when her mother looked at the cuckoo clock, off she went by herself, looking very pretty with her shoulders tightly confined in her old black dress, which was both too narrow and too short; and Madame Lerat had to note the hour of her arrival and tell it to Gervaise. She was allowed twenty minutes to go from the Rue de la Goutte-d’Or to the Rue du Caire, and it was enough, for these young hussies have the legs of racehorses. Sometimes she arrived exactly on time but so breathless and flushed that she must have covered most of the distance at a run after dawdling along the way. More often she was a few minutes late. Then she would fawn on her aunt all day, hoping to soften her and keep her from telling. Madame Lerat understood what it was to be young and would lie to the Coupeaus, but she also lectured Nana, stressing the dangers a young girl runs on the streets of Paris. Mon Dieu! she herself was followed often enough!
“Oh! I watch, you needn’t fear,” said the widow to the Coupeaus. “I will answer to you for her as I would for myself. And rather than let a blackguard squeeze her, why I’d step between them.”
The workroom at Titreville’s was a large apartment on the first floor, with a broad work-table standing on trestles in the centre. Round the four walls, the plaster of which was visible in parts where the dirty yellowish-grey paper was torn away, there were several stands covered with old cardboard boxes, parcels and discarded patterns under a thick coating of dust. The gas had left what appeared to be like a daub of soot on the ceiling. The two windows opened so wide that without leaving the work-table the girls could see the people walking past on the pavement over the way.
Madame Lerat arrived the first, in view of setting an example. Then for a quarter of an hour the door swayed to and fro, and all the workgirls scrambled in, perspiring with tumbled hair. One July morning Nana arrived the last, as very often happened. “Ah, me!” she said, “it won’t be a pity when I have a carriage of my own.” And without even taking off her hat, one which she was weary of patching up, she approached the window and leant out, looking to the right and the left to see what was going on in the street.
“What are you looking at?” asked Madame Lerat, suspiciously. “Did your father come with you?”
“No, you may be sure of that,” answered Nana coolly. “I’m looking at nothing—I’m seeing how hot it is. It’s enough to make anyone, having to run like that.”
It was a stifling hot morning. The workgirls had drawn down the Venetian blinds, between which they could spy out into the street; and they had at last begun working on either side of the table, at the upper end of which sat Madame Lerat. They were eight in number, each with her pot of glue, pincers, tools and curling stand in front of her. On the work-table lay a mass of wire, reels, cotton wool, green and brown paper, leaves and petals cut out of silk, satin or velvet. In the centre, in the neck of a large decanter, one flower-girl had thrust a little penny nosegay which had been fading on her breast since the day before.
“Oh, I have some news,” said a pretty brunette named Leonie as she leaned over her cushion to crimp some rose petals. “Poor Caroline is very unhappy about that fellow who used to wait for her every evening.”
“Ah!” said Nana, who was cutting thin strips of green paper. “A man who cheats on her every day!”
Madame Lerat had to display severity over the muffled laughter. Then Leonie whispered suddenly: