At ten in the morning Nana would get up. Bijou, the Scotch griffon dog,
used to lick her face and wake her, and then would ensue a game of play
lasting some five minutes, during which the dog would race about over
her arms and legs and cause Count Muffat much distress. Bijou was the
first little male he had ever been jealous of. It was not at all
proper, he thought, that an animal should go poking its nose under the
bedclothes like that! After this Nana would proceed to her dressing
room, where she took a bath. Toward eleven o'clock Francois would come
and do up her hair before beginning the elaborate manipulations of the
afternoon.
At breakfast, as she hated feeding alone, she nearly always had Mme
Maloir at table with her. This lady would arrive from unknown regions in
the morning, wearing her extravagantly quaint hats, and would return
at night to that mysterious existence of hers, about which no one ever
troubled. But the hardest to bear were the two or three hours between
lunch and the toilet. On ordinary occasions she proposed a game of
bezique to her old friend; on others she would read the Figaro, in which
the theatrical echoes and the fashionable news interested her. Sometimes
she even opened a book, for she fancied herself in literary matters.
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