But Nana's greatest cause of distress was her little Louis, a child she had given birth to when she was sixteen and now left in charge of a nurse in a village in the neighborhood of Rambouillet.

This woman was clamoring for the sum of three hundred francs before she would consent to give the little Louis back to her.
Nana, since her last visit to the child, had been seized with a fit of maternal love and was desperate at the thought that she could not realize a project, which had now become a hobby with her.

This was to pay off the nurse and to place the little man with his aunt, Mme Lerat, at the Batignolles, whither she could go and see him as often as she liked.
Meanwhile the lady's maid kept hinting that her mistress ought to have confided her necessities to the old miser.
"To be sure, I told him everything," cried Nana, "and he told me in answer that he had too many big liabilities.

He won't go beyond his thousand francs a month.

The nigger's beggared just at present; I expect he's lost at play.