Her stable devoured fifty thousand for her, and in six months she ran
up a bill of a hundred and twenty thousand francs at her ladies' tailor.
Though she had not enlarged her scheme of expenditure, which Labordette
reckoned at four hundred thousand francs on an average, she ran up that
same year to a million. She was herself stupefied by the amount and was
unable to tell whither such a sum could have gone. Heaps upon heaps of
men, barrowfuls of gold, failed to stop up the hole, which, amid this
ruinous luxury, continually gaped under the floor of her house.
Meanwhile Nana had cherished her latest caprice. Once more exercised
by the notion that her room needed redoing, she fancied she had hit on
something at last. The room should be done in velvet of the color of tea
roses, with silver buttons and golden cords, tassels and fringes, and
the hangings should be caught up to the ceiling after the manner of a
tent. This arrangement ought to be both rich and tender, she thought,
and would form a splendid background to her blonde vermeil-tinted skin.
However, the bedroom was only designed to serve as a setting to the bed,
which was to be a dazzling affair, a prodigy. Nana meditated a bed such
as had never before existed; it was to be a throne, an altar, whither
Paris was to come in order to adore her sovereign nudity.
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