France -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Short stories
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. Her toilet kept her till close on five o’clock, and then only
she would wake from her daylong drowse and drive out or receive a whole
mob of men at her own house. She would often dine abroad and always go
to bed very late, only to rise again on the morrow with the same
languor as before and to begin another day, differing in nothing from
its predecessor.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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