In spite of the coolness and discretion with which Philippe played his
trifling game every night, it happened every now and then that he was
what gamblers call "cleaned out." Driven by the irresistible necessity
of having his evening stake of ten francs, he plundered the household,
and laid hands on his brother's money and on all that Madame Descoings
or Agathe left about. Already the poor mother had had a dreadful
vision in her first sleep: Philippe entered the room and took from the
pockets of her gown all the money he could find. Agathe pretended to
sleep, but she passed the rest of the night in tears. She saw the
truth only too clearly. "One wrong act is not a vice," Madame
Descoings had declared; but after so many repetitions, vice was
unmistakable. Agathe could doubt no longer; her best-beloved son had
neither delicacy nor honor.
On the morrow of that frightful vision, before Philippe left the house
after breakfast, she drew him into her chamber and begged him, in a
tone of entreaty, to ask her for what money he needed. After that, the
applications were so numerous that in two weeks Agathe was drained of
all her savings. She was literally without a penny, and began to think
of finding work. The means of earning money had been discussed in the
evenings between herself and Madame Descoings, and she had already
taken patterns of worsted work to fill in, from a shop called the
"Pere de Famille,"--an employment which pays about twenty sous a day.
Notwithstanding Agathe's silence on the subject, Madame Descoings had
guessed the motive of this desire to earn money by women's-work. The
change in her appearance was eloquent: her fresh face had withered,
the skin clung to the temples and the cheek-bones, and the forehead
showed deep lines; her eyes lost their clearness; an inward fire was
evidently consuming her; she wept the greater part of the night. A
chief cause of these outward ravages was the necessity of hiding her
anguish, her sufferings, her apprehensions. She never went to sleep
until Philippe came in; she listened for his step, she had learned the
inflections of his voice, the variations of his walk, the very
language of his cane as it touched the pavement. Nothing escaped her.
She knew the degree of drunkenness he had reached, she trembled as she
heard him stumble on the stairs; one night she picked up some pieces
of gold at the spot where he had fallen. When he had drunk and won,
his voice was gruff and his cane dragged; but when he had lost, his
step had something sharp, short and angry about it; he hummed in a
clear voice, and carried his cane in the air as if presenting arms. At
breakfast, if he had won, his behavior was gay and even affectionate;
he joked roughly, but still he joked, with Madame Descoings, with
Joseph, and with his mother; gloomy, on the contrary, when he had
lost, his brusque, rough speech, his hard glance, and his depression,
frightened them. A life of debauch and the abuse of liquors debased,
day by day, a countenance that was once so handsome. The veins of the
face were swollen with blood, the features became coarse, the eyes
lost their lashes and grew hard and dry. No longer careful of his
person, Philippe exhaled the miasmas of a tavern and the smell of
muddy boots, which, to an observer, stamped him with debauchery.
"You ought," said Madame Descoings to Philippe during the last days of
December, "you ought to get yourself new-clothed from head to foot."
"And who is to pay for it?" he answered sharply. "My poor mother
hasn't a sou; and I have five hundred francs a year. It would take my
whole year's pension to pay for the clothes; besides I have mortgaged
it for three years--"
"What for?" asked Joseph.
"A debt of honor. Giroudeau borrowed a thousand francs from Florentine
to lend me. I am not gorgeous, that's a fact; but when one thinks that
Napoleon is at Saint Helena, and has sold his plate for the means of
living, his faithful soldiers can manage to walk on their bare feet,"
he said, showing his boots without heels, as he marched away.
"He is not bad," said Agathe, "he has good feelings."
"You can love the Emperor and yet dress yourself properly," said
Joseph. "If he would take any care of himself and his clothes, he
wouldn't look so like a vagabond."
"Joseph! you ought to have some indulgence for your brother," cried
Agathe. "You do the things you like, while he is certainly not in his
right place."
"What did he leave it for?" demanded Joseph. "What can it matter to
him whether Louis the Eighteenth's bugs or Napoleon's cuckoos are on
the flag, if it is the flag of his country? France is France! For my
part, I'd paint for the devil. A soldier ought to fight, if he is a
soldier, for the love of his art. If he had stayed quietly in the
army, he would have been a general by this time."
"You are unjust to him," said Agathe, "your father, who adored the
Emperor, would have approved of his conduct. However, he has consented
to re-enter the army. God knows the grief it has caused your brother
to do a thing he considers treachery."
Joseph rose to return to his studio, but his mother took his hand and
said:--
"Be good to your brother; he is so unfortunate."
When the artist got back to his painting-room, followed by Madame
Descoings, who begged him to humor his mother's feelings, and pointed
out to him how changed she was, and what inward suffering the change
revealed, they found Philippe there, to their great amazement.
"Joseph, my boy," he said, in an off-hand way, "I want some money.
Confound it! I owe thirty francs for cigars at my tobacconist's, and I
dare not pass the cursed shop till I've paid it. I've promised to pay
it a dozen times."
"Well, I like your present way best," said Joseph; "take what you want
out of the skull."
"I took all there was last night, after dinner."
"There was forty-five francs."
"Yes, that's what I made it," replied Philippe. "I took them; is there
any objection?"
"No, my friend, no," said Joseph. "If you were rich, I should do the
same by you; only, before taking what I wanted, I should ask you if it
were convenient."
"It is very humiliating to ask," remarked Philippe; "I would rather
see you taking as I do, without a word; it shows more confidence. In
the army, if a comrade dies, and has a good pair of boots, and you
have a bad pair, you change, that's all."
"Yes, but you don't take them while he is living."
"Oh, what meanness!" said Philippe, shrugging his shoulders. "Well, so
you haven't got any money?"
"No," said Joseph, who was determined not to show his hiding-place.
"In a few days we shall be rich," said Madame Descoings.
"Yes, you; you think your trey is going to turn up on the 25th at the
Paris drawing. You must have put in a fine stake if you think you can
make us all rich."
"A paid-up trey of two hundred francs will give three millions,
without counting the couplets and the singles."
"At fifteen thousand times the stake--yes, you are right; it is just
two hundred you must pay up!" cried Philippe.
Madame Descoings bit her lips; she knew she had spoken imprudently. In
fact, Philippe was asking himself as he went downstairs:--
"That old witch! where does she keep her money? It is as good as lost;
I can make a better use of it. With four pools at fifty francs each, I
could win two hundred thousand francs, and that's much surer than the
turning up of a trey."
He tried to think where the old woman was likely to have hid the
money. On the days preceding festivals, Agathe went to church and
stayed there a long time; no doubt she confessed and prepared for the
communion. It was now the day before Christmas; Madame Descoings would
certainly go out to buy some dainties for the "reveillon," the
midnight meal; and she might also take occasion to pay up her stake.
The lottery was drawn every five days in different localities, at
Bordeaux, Lyons, Lille, Strasburg, and Paris. The Paris lottery was
drawn on the twenty-fifth of each month, and the lists closed on the
twenty-fourth, at midnight. Philippe studied all these points and set
himself to watch. He came home at midday; the Descoings had gone out,
and had taken the key of the _appartement_. But that was no difficulty.
Philippe pretended to have forgotten something, and asked the
concierge to go herself and get a locksmith, who lived close by, and
who came at once and opened the door. The villain's first thought was
the bed; he uncovered it, passed his hands over the mattress before he
examined the bedstead, and at the lower end felt the pieces wrapped up
in paper. He at once ripped the ticking, picked out twenty napoleons,
and then, without taking time to sew up the mattress, re-made the bed
neatly enough, so that Madame Descoings could suspect nothing.
The gambler stole off with a light foot, resolving to play at three
different times, three hours apart, and each time for only ten
minutes. Thorough-going players, ever since 1786, the time at which
public gaming-houses were established,--the true players whom the
government dreaded, and who ate up, to use a gambling term, the money
of the bank,--never played in any other way. But before attaining this
measure of experience they lost fortunes. The whole science of
gambling-houses and their gains rests upon three things: the
impassibility of the bank; the even results called "drawn games," when
half the money goes to the bank; and the notorious bad faith
authorized by the government, in refusing to hold or pay the player's
stakes except optionally. In a word, the gambling-house, which refuses
the game of a rich and cool player, devours the fortune of the foolish
and obstinate one, who is carried away by the rapid movement of the
machinery of the game. The croupiers at "trente et quarante" move
nearly as fast as the ball.
Philippe had ended by acquiring the sang-froid of a commanding
general, which enables him to keep his eye clear and his mind prompt
in the midst of tumult. He had reached that statesmanship of gambling
which in Paris, let us say in passing, is the livelihood of thousands
who are strong enough to look every night into an abyss without
getting a vertigo. With his four hundred francs, Philippe resolved to
make his fortune that day. He put aside, in his boots, two hundred
francs, and kept the other two hundred in his pocket. At three o'clock
he went to the gambling-house (which is now turned into the theatre of
the Palais-Royal), where the bank accepted the largest sums. He came
out half an hour later with seven thousand francs in his pocket. Then
he went to see Florentine, paid the five hundred francs which he owed
to her, and proposed a supper at the Rocher de Cancale after the
theatre. Returning to his game, along the rue de Sentier, he stopped
at Giroudeau's newspaper-office to notify him of the gala. By six
o'clock Philippe had won twenty-five thousand francs, and stopped
playing at the end of ten minutes as he had promised himself to do.
That night, by ten o'clock, he had won seventy-five thousand francs.
After the supper, which was magnificent, Philippe, by that time drunk
and confident, went back to his play at midnight. In defiance of the
rule he had imposed upon himself, he played for an hour and doubled
his fortune. The bankers, from whom, by his system of playing, he had
extracted one hundred and fifty thousand francs, looked at him with
curiosity.
"Will he go away now, or will he stay?" they said to each other by a
glance. "If he stays he is lost."
Philippe thought he had struck a vein of luck, and stayed. Towards
three in the morning, the hundred and fifty thousand francs had gone
back to the bank. The colonel, who had imbibed a considerable quantity
of grog while playing, left the place in a drunken state, which the
cold of the outer air only increased. A waiter from the gambling-house
followed him, picked him up, and took him to one of those horrible
houses at the door of which, on a hanging lamp, are the words:
"Lodgings for the night." The waiter paid for the ruined gambler, who
was put to bed, where he remained till Christmas night. The managers
of gambling-houses have some consideration for their customers,
especially for high players. Philippe awoke about seven o'clock in the
evening, his mouth parched, his face swollen, and he himself in the
grip of a nervous fever. The strength of his constitution enabled him
to get home on foot, where meanwhile he had, without willing it,
brought mourning, desolation, poverty, and death.
The evening before, when dinner was ready, Madame Descoings and Agathe
expected Philippe. They waited dinner till seven o'clock. Agathe
always went to bed at ten; but as, on this occasion, she wished to be
present at the midnight mass, she went to lie down as soon as dinner
was over. Madame Descoings and Joseph remained alone by the fire in
the little salon, which served for all, and the old woman asked the
painter to add up the amount of her great stake, her monstrous stake,
on the famous trey, which she was to pay that evening at the Lottery
office. She wished to put in for the doubles and singles as well, so
as to seize all chances. After feasting on the poetry of her hopes,
and pouring the two horns of plenty at the feet of her adopted son,
and relating to him her dreams which demonstrated the certainty of
success, she felt no other uneasiness than the difficulty of bearing
such joy, and waiting from mid-night until ten o'clock of the morrow,
when the winning numbers were declared. Joseph, who saw nothing of the
four hundred francs necessary to pay up the stakes, asked about them.
The old woman smiled, and led him into the former salon, which was now
her bed-chamber.
"You shall see," she said.
Madame Descoings hastily unmade the bed, and searched for her scissors
to rip the mattress; she put on her spectacles, looked at the ticking,
saw the hole, and let fall the mattress. Hearing a sigh from the
depths of the old woman's breast, as though she were strangled by a
rush of blood to the heart, Joseph instinctively held out his arms to
catch the poor creature, and placed her fainting in a chair, calling
to his mother to come to them. Agathe rose, slipped on her
dressing-gown, and ran in. By the light of a candle, she applied the
ordinary remedies,--eau-de-cologne to the temples, cold water to the
forehead, a burnt feather under the nose,--and presently her aunt
revived.
"They were there is morning; HE has taken them, the monster!" she
said.
"Taken what?" asked Joseph.
"I had twenty louis in my mattress; my savings for two years; no one
but Philippe could have taken them."
"But when?" cried the poor mother, overwhelmed, "he has not been in
since breakfast."
"I wish I might be mistaken," said the old woman. "But this morning in
Joseph's studio, when I spoke before Philippe of my stakes, I had a
presentiment. I did wrong not to go down and take my little all and
pay for my stakes at once. I meant to, and I don't know what prevented
me. Oh, yes!--my God! I went out to buy him some cigars."
"But," said Joseph, "you left the door locked. Besides, it is so
infamous. I can't believe it. Philippe couldn't have watched you, cut
open the mattress, done it deliberately,--no, no!"
"I felt them this morning, when I made my bed after breakfast,"
repeated Madame Descoings.
Agathe, horrified, went down stairs and asked if Philippe had come in
during the day. The concierge related the tale of his return and the
locksmith. The mother, heart-stricken, went back a changed woman.
White as the linen of her chemise, she walked as we might fancy a
spectre walks, slowly, noiselessly, moved by some superhuman power,
and yet mechanically. She held a candle in her hand, whose light fell
full upon her face and showed her eyes, fixed with horror.
Unconsciously, her hands by a desperate movement had dishevelled the
hair about her brow; and this made her so beautiful with anguish that
Joseph stood rooted in awe at the apparition of that remorse, the
vision of that statue of terror and despair.
"My aunt," she said, "take my silver forks and spoons. I have enough
to make up the sum; I took your money for Philippe's sake; I thought I
could put it back before you missed it. Oh! I have suffered much."
She sat down. Her dry, fixed eyes wandered a little.
"It was he who did it," whispered the old woman to Joseph.
"No, no," cried Agathe; "take my silver plate, sell it; it is useless
to me; we can eat with yours."
She went to her room, took the box which contained the plate, felt its
light weight, opened it, and saw a pawnbroker's ticket. The poor
mother uttered a dreadful cry. Joseph and the Descoings ran to her,
saw the empty box, and her noble falsehood was of no avail. All three
were silent, and avoided looking at each other; but the next moment,
by an almost frantic gesture, Agathe laid her finger on her lips as if
to entreat a secrecy no one desired to break. They returned to the
salon, and sat beside the fire.
"Ah! my children," cried Madame Descoings, "I am stabbed to the heart:
my trey will turn up, I am certain of it. I am not thinking of myself,
but of you two. Philippe is a monster," she continued, addressing her
niece; "he does not love you after all that you have done for him. If
you do not protect yourself against him he will bring you to beggary.
Promise me to sell out your Funds and buy a life-annuity. Joseph has a
good profession and he can live. If you will do this, dear Agathe, you
will never be an expense to Joseph. Monsieur Desroches has just
started his son as a notary; he would take your twelve thousand francs
and pay you an annuity."
Joseph seized his mother's candlestick, rushed up to his studio, and
came down with three hundred francs.
"Here, Madame Descoings!" he cried, giving her his little store, "it
is no business of ours what you do with your money; we owe you what
you have lost, and here it is, almost in full."
"Take your poor little all?--the fruit of those privations that have
made me so unhappy! are you mad, Joseph?" cried the old woman, visibly
torn between her dogged faith in the coming trey, and the sacrilege of
accepting such a sacrifice.
"Oh! take it if you like," said Agathe, who was moved to tears by this
action of her true son.
Madame Descoings took Joseph by the head, and kissed him on the
forehead:--
"My child," she said, "don't tempt me. I might only lose it. The
lottery, you see, is all folly."
No more heroic words were ever uttered in the hidden dramas of
domestic life. It was, indeed, affection triumphant over inveterate
vice. At this instant, the clocks struck midnight.
"It is too late now," said Madame Descoings.
"Oh!" cried Joseph, "here are your cabalistic numbers."
The artist sprang at the paper, and rushed headlong down the staircase
to pay the stakes. When he was no longer present, Agathe and Madame
Descoings burst into tears.
"He has gone, the dear love," cried the old gambler; "but it shall all
be his; he pays his own money."
Unhappily, Joseph did not know the way to any of the lottery-offices,
which in those days were as well known to most people as the
cigarshops to a smoker in ours. The painter ran along, reading the
street names upon the lamps. When he asked the passers-by to show him
a lottery-office, he was told they were all closed, except the one
under the portico of the Palais-Royal which was sometimes kept open a
little later. He flew to the Palais-Royal: the office was shut.
"Two minutes earlier, and you might have paid your stake," said one of
the vendors of tickets, whose beat was under the portico, where he
vociferated this singular cry: "Twelve hundred francs for forty sous,"
and offered tickets all paid up.
By the glimmer of the street lamp and the lights of the cafe de la
Rotonde, Joseph examined these tickets to see if, by chance, any of
them bore the Descoings's numbers. He found none, and returned home
grieved at having done his best in vain for the old woman, to whom he
related his ill-luck. Agathe and her aunt went together to the
midnight mass at Saint-Germain-des-Pres. Joseph went to bed. The
collation did not take place. Madame Descoings had lost her head; and
in Agathe's heart was eternal mourning.
The two rose late on Christmas morning. Ten o'clock had struck before
Madame Descoings began to bestir herself about the breakfast, which
was only ready at half-past eleven. At that hour, the oblong frames
containing the winning numbers are hung over the doors of the
lottery-offices. If Madame Descoings had paid her stake and held her
ticket, she would have gone by half-past nine o'clock to learn her fate
at a building close to the ministry of Finance, in the rue
Neuve-des-Petits Champs, a situation now occupied by the Theatre
Ventadour in the place of the same name. On the days when the drawings
took place, an observer might watch with curiosity the crowd of old
women, cooks, and old men assembled about the door of this building;
a sight as remarkable as the cue of people about the Treasury on the
days when the dividends are paid.
"Well, here you are, rolling in wealth!" said old Desroches, coming
into the room just as the Descoings was swallowing her last drop of
coffee.
"What do you mean?" cried poor Agathe.
"Her trey has turned up," he said, producing the list of numbers
written on a bit of paper, such as the officials of the lottery put by
hundreds into little wooden bowls on their counters.
Joseph read the list. Agathe read the list. The Descoings read
nothing; she was struck down as by a thunderbolt. At the change in her
face, at the cry she gave, old Desroches and Joseph carried her to her
bed. Agathe went for a doctor. The poor woman was seized with
apoplexy, and she only recovered consciousness at four in the
afternoon; old Haudry, her doctor, then said that, in spite of this
improvement, she ought to settle her worldly affairs and think of her
salvation. She herself only uttered two words:--
"Three millions!"
Old Desroches, informed by Joseph, with due reservations, of the state
of things, related many instances where lottery-players had seen a
fortune escape them on the very day when, by some fatality, they had
forgotten to pay their stakes; but he thoroughly understood that such
a blow might be fatal when it came after twenty years' perseverance.
About five o'clock, as a deep silence reigned in the little
_appartement_, and the sick woman, watched by Joseph and his mother, the
one sitting at the foot, the other at the head of her bed, was
expecting her grandson Bixiou, whom Desroches had gone to fetch, the
sound of Philippe's step and cane resounded on the staircase.
"There he is! there he is!" cried the Descoings, sitting up in bed and
suddenly able to use her paralyzed tongue.
Agathe and Joseph were deeply impressed by this powerful effect of the
horror which violently agitated the old woman. Their painful suspense
was soon ended by the sight of Philippe's convulsed and purple face,
his staggering walk, and the horrible state of his eyes, which were
deeply sunken, dull, and yet haggard; he had a strong chill upon him,
and his teeth chattered.
"Starvation in Prussia!" he cried, looking about him. "Nothing to eat
or drink?--and my throat on fire! Well, what's the matter? The devil
is always meddling in our affairs. There's my old Descoings in bed,
looking at me with her eyes as big as saucers."
"Be silent, monsieur!" said Agathe, rising. "At least, respect the
sorrows you have caused."
"_Monsieur_, indeed!" he cried, looking at his mother. "My dear little
mother, that won't do. Have you ceased to love your son?"
"Are you worthy of love? Have you forgotten what you did yesterday? Go
and find yourself another home; you cannot live with us any longer,
--that is, after to-morrow," she added; "for in the state you are in
now it is difficult--"
"To turn me out,--is that it?" he interrupted. "Ha! are you going to
play the melodrama of 'The Banished Son'? Well done! is that how you
take things? You are all a pretty set! What harm have I done? I've
cleaned out the old woman's mattress. What the devil is the good of
money kept in wool? Do you call that a crime? Didn't she take twenty
thousand francs from you? We are her creditors, and I've paid myself
as much as I could get,--that's all."
"My God! my God!" cried the dying woman, clasping her hands and
praying.
"Be silent!" exclaimed Joseph, springing at his brother and putting
his hand before his mouth.
"To the right about, march! brat of a painter!" retorted Philippe,
laying his strong hand on Joseph's head, and twirling him round, as he
flung him on a sofa. "Don't dare to touch the moustache of a commander
of a squadron of the dragoons of the Guard!"
"She has paid me back all that she owed me," cried Agathe, rising and
turning an angry face to her son; "and besides, that is my affair. You
have killed her. Go away, my son," she added, with a gesture that took
all her remaining strength, "and never let me see you again. You are a
monster."
"I kill her?"
"Her trey has turned up," cried Joseph, "and you stole the money for
her stake."
"Well, if she is dying of a lost trey, it isn't I who have killed
her," said the drunkard.
"Go, go!" said Agathe. "You fill me with horror; you have every vice.
My God! is this my son?"
A hollow rattle sounded in Madame Descoings's throat, increasing
Agathe's anger.
"I love you still, my mother,--you who are the cause of all my
misfortunes," said Philippe. "You turn me out of doors on
Christmas-day. What did you do to grandpa Rouget, to your father,
that he should drive you away and disinherit you? If you had not
displeased him, we should all be rich now, and I should not be
reduced to misery. What did you do to your father,--you who are a
good woman? You see by your own self, I may be a good fellow and
yet be turned out of house and home,--I, the glory of the family--"
"The disgrace of it!" cried the Descoings.
"You shall leave this room, or you shall kill me!" cried Joseph,
springing on his brother with the fury of a lion.
"My God! my God!" cried Agathe, trying to separate the brothers.
At this moment Bixiou and Haudry the doctor entered. Joseph had just
knocked his brother over and stretched him on the ground.
"He is a regular wild beast," he cried. "Don't speak another word, or
I'll--"
"I'll pay you for this!" roared Philippe.
"A family explanation," remarked Bixiou.
"Lift him up," said the doctor, looking at him. "He is as ill as
Madame Descoings; undress him and put him to bed; get off his boots."
"That's easy to say," cried Bixiou, "but they must be cut off; his
legs are swollen."
Agathe took a pair of scissors. When she had cut down the boots, which
in those days were worn outside the clinging trousers, ten pieces of
gold rolled on the floor.
"There it is,--her money," murmured Philippe. "Cursed fool that I was,
I forgot it. I too have missed a fortune."
He was seized with a horrible delirium of fever, and began to rave.
Joseph, assisted by old Desroches, who had come back, and by Bixiou,
carried him to his room. Doctor Haudry was obliged to write a line to
the Hopital de la Charite and borrow a strait-waistcoat; for the
delirium ran so high as to make him fear that Philippe might kill
himself,--he was raving. At nine o'clock calm was restored. The Abbe
Loraux and Desroches endeavored to comfort Agathe, who never ceased to
weep at her aunt's bedside. She listened to them in silence, and
obstinately shook her head; Joseph and the Descoings alone knew the
extent and depth of her inward wound.
"He will learn to do better, mother," said Joseph, when Desroches and
Bixiou had left.
"Oh!" cried the widow, "Philippe is right,--my father cursed me: I
have no right to-- Here, here is your money," she said to Madame
Descoings, adding Joseph's three hundred francs to the two hundred
found on Philippe. "Go and see if your brother does not need
something," she said to Joseph.
"Will you keep a promise made to a dying woman?" asked Madame
Descoings, who felt that her mind was failing her.
"Yes, aunt."
"Then swear to me to give your property to young Desroches for a life
annuity. My income ceases at my death; and from what you have just
said, I know you will let that wretch wring the last farthing out of
you."
"I swear it, aunt."
The old woman died on the 31st of December, five days after the
terrible blow which old Desroches had so innocently given her. The
five hundred francs--the only money in the household--were barely
enough to pay for her funeral. She left a small amount of silver and
some furniture, the value of which Madame Bixiou paid over to her
grandson Bixiou. Reduced to eight hundred francs' annuity paid to her
by young Desroches, who had bought a business without clients, and
himself took the capital of twelve thousand francs, Agathe gave up her
_appartement_ on the third floor, and sold all her superfluous
furniture. When, at the end of a month, Philippe seemed to be
convalescent, his mother coldly explained to him that the costs of his
illness had taken all her ready money, that she should be obliged in
future to work for her living, and she urged him, with the utmost
kindness, to re-enter the army and support himself.
"You might have spared me that sermon," said Philippe, looking at his
mother with an eye that was cold from utter indifference. "I have seen
all along that neither you nor my brother love me. I am alone in the
world; I like it best!"
"Make yourself worthy of our affection," answered the poor mother,
struck to the very heart, "and we will give it back to you--"
"Nonsense!" he cried, interrupting her.
He took his old hat, rubbed white at the edges, stuck it over one ear,
and went downstairs, whistling.
"Philippe! where are you going without any money?" cried his mother,
who could not repress her tears. "Here, take this--"
She held out to him a hundred francs in gold, wrapped up in paper.
Philippe came up the stairs he had just descended, and took the money.
"Well; won't you kiss me?" she said, bursting into tears.
He pressed his mother in his arms, but without the warmth of feeling
which was all that could give value to the embrace.
"Where shall you go?" asked Agathe.
"To Florentine, Girodeau's mistress. Ah! they are real friends!" he
answered brutally.
He went away. Agathe turned back with trembling limbs, and failing
eyes, and aching heart. She fell upon her knees, prayed God to take
her unnatural child into His own keeping, and abdicated her woeful
motherhood.