You must find something else to
do."
Then Nana started on La Faloise at once. He had for some time been
longing for the honor of being ruined by her in order to put the
finishing stroke on his smartness. He needed a woman to launch him
properly; it was the one thing still lacking. In two months all Paris
would be talking of him, and he would see his name in the papers. Six
weeks were enough. His inheritance was in landed estate, houses, fields,
woods and farms. He had to sell all, one after the other, as quickly
as he could. At every mouthful Nana swallowed an acre. The foliage
trembling in the sunshine, the wide fields of ripe grain, the vineyards
so golden in September, the tall grass in which the cows stood
knee-deep, all passed through her hands as if engulfed by an abyss. Even
fishing rights, a stone quarry and three mills disappeared. Nana passed
over them like an invading army or one of those swarms of locusts whose
flight scours a whole province. The ground was burned up where her
little foot had rested. Farm by farm, field by field, she ate up the
man's patrimony very prettily and quite inattentively, just as she would
have eaten a box of sweet-meats flung into her lap between mealtimes.
Pages:
690
691
692
693
694
695
696
697
698
699
700
701
702
703
704
705
706
707
708
709
710
711
712
713
714