When she did not actually throw the men at his head Count Muffat
pretended not to know about all this. However, he suffered not a little
from the lesser indignities of their daily life. The mansion in the
Avenue de Villiers was becoming a hell, a house full of mad people, in
which every hour of the day wild disorders led to hateful complications.
Nana even fought with her servants. One moment she would be very nice
with Charles, the coachman. When she stopped at a restaurant she would
send him out beer by the waiter and would talk with him from the inside
of her carriage when he slanged the cabbies at a block in the traffic,
for then he struck her as funny and cheered her up. Then the next moment
she called him a fool for no earthly reason. She was always squabbling
over the straw, the bran or the oats; in spite of her love for animals
she thought her horses ate too much. Accordingly one day when she was
settling up she accused the man of robbing her. At this Charles got in
a rage and called her a whore right out; his horses, he said, were
distinctly better than she was, for they did not sleep with everybody.
She answered him in the same strain, and the count had to separate them
and give the coachman the sack.
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