The feeling of
dizziness which he had experienced when he first visited Nana in the
Boulevard Haussmann once more overcame him. He felt the thick carpet
soften under foot, and the gasjets burning by the dressing table and by
the glass seemed to shoot whistling flames about his temples. For one
moment, being afraid of fainting away under the influence of those
feminine odors which he now re-encountered, intensified by the heat
under the low-pitched ceiling, he sat down on the edge of a softly
padded divan between the two windows. But he got up again almost
directly and, returning to the dressing table, seemed to gaze with
vacant eyes into space, for he was thinking of a bouquet of tuberoses
which had once faded in his bedroom and had nearly killed him in their
death. When tuberoses are turning brown they have a human smell.
"Make haste!" Bordenave whispered, putting his head in behind the
curtain.
The prince, however, was listening complaisantly to the Marquis de
Chouard, who had taken up a hare's-foot on the dressing table and had
begun explaining the way grease paint is put on. In a corner of the room
Satin, with her pure, virginal face, was scanning the gentlemen keenly,
while the dresser, Mme Jules by name, was getting ready Venus' tights
and tunic.
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