Never yet had she felt anything
comparable to this. The country filled her with tender thoughts. As a
little girl she had long wished to dwell in a meadow, tending a goat,
because one day on the talus of the fortifications she had seen a goat
bleating at the end of its tether. Now this estate, this stretch of land
belonging to her, simply swelled her heart to bursting, so utterly
had her old ambition been surpassed. Once again she tasted the novel
sensations experienced by chits of girls, and at night when she went
upstairs, dizzy with her day in the open air and intoxicated by the
scent of green leaves, and rejoined her Zizi behind the curtain, she
fancied herself a schoolgirl enjoying a holiday escapade. It was an
amour, she thought, with a young cousin to whom she was going to be
married. And so she trembled at the slightest noise and dread lest
parents should hear her, while making the delicious experiments and
suffering the voluptuous terrors attendant on a girl's first slip from
the path of virtue.
Nana in those days was subject to the fancies a sentimental girl will
indulge in. She would gaze at the moon for hours. One night she had a
mind to go down into the garden with Georges when all the household was
asleep.
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