“I tell you, my children, I am heartbroken,” said Madame Descoings. “My numbers will be drawn, I am quite positive! I am not thinking of myself, but of you two!—Philippe is a monster,” she went on, turning to her niece. “He does not love you, in spite of all you have done for him. If you do not find some means to protect yourself, the wretch will turn you into the street. Promise me to sell your stock, realize the capital, and sink it in an annuity. By taking that step you will never be a burden on Joseph. Monsieur Desroches wants to set up his son in an office, and the boy” (he was now six-and-twenty) “has found one. He will take your twelve thousand francs and pay you an annuity.”
Joseph seized his mother’s candlestick and hurried up to the studio; he came down with three hundred francs.
“Here, Maman Descoings,” said he, offering her his little hoard, “it is no business of ours to inquire what you do with your money; we owe you what is missing, and here it is—almost all of it.”
“I!—take your little treasure, the result of your privations, which distress me so much! Are you mad, Joseph?” cried the old woman, evidently torn by her stupid belief in the luck of her numbers in the State lottery, and what seemed to her the sacrilege of such a proceeding.
“Oh! do what you will with it,” said Agathe, moved to tears by this action of her true son’s.
Madame Descoings took Joseph’s head in her hands and kissed his forehead.
“My child, do not tempt me,” she said; “I should only lose it. The lottery is a fool’s game!”
Never was anything so heroical said in any of the obscure dramas of private life. Was it not, in fact, the triumph of affection over an inveterate vice?
At this minute the bells began to toll for midnight mass.
“Besides, it is too late,” added the old woman.
“Oh!” cried Joseph; “here are your cabalistic calculations.”
The magnanimous artist seized the tickets, flew downstairs, and away to pay the stake. When he was gone, Agathe and Madame Descoings melted into tears.
“He is gone!” exclaimed the old gambler. “But it will all be his, for it is his money.”
Joseph, unluckily, did not in the least know where to find the lottery-ticket offices, which those who frequented them knew as well in Paris as, in these days, smokers know the tobacco shops. The painter rushed wildly on, looking at the lamp signs. When he asked someone he met to tell him where there was a lottery-office, he was told that they were closed, but that one by the steps of the Palais Royal sometimes remained open a little later. The artist flew to the Palais Royal; the office was shut.
“Two minutes sooner and you could have paid in your stake,” said one of the ticket-criers who stood at the bottom of the steps, shouting these strange words, “Twelve hundred francs for forty sous!” and selling ready numbered tickets.
By the glimmer of a street lamp and the lights in the Café de la Rotonde, Joseph examined these tickets to see whether by chance either of them bore Madame Descoings’ pet numbers; but he could not find one, and returned home in grief at having done in vain all that lay in his power to please the old woman, to whom he related his disappointments.
Agathe and her aunt went off to mass at Saint-Grermain-des-Pres. Joseph went to bed. No one kept Christmas Eve. Madame Descoings had lost her head; Agathe’s heart was forever broken.
The two women rose late. Ten o’clock was striking when Madame Descoings bestirred herself to get breakfast, which was not ready till half-past eleven. By that time the long frames hanging outside the lottery-ticket offices showed an array of figures. If Madame Descoings had had her ticket, she would have gone by half-past nine o’clock to the Rue Neuve des Petits Champs to learn her fate, which was decided in a house next door to the offices of the Minister of Finance, on a spot now occupied by the Square and the Ventadour theatre.
Every time the lottery was drawn, the curious could see at the door of this building a posse of old women, cooks, and old men, who at that time constituted as strange a spectacle as that of the stockholders forming a queue on the day when dividends are paid at the Treasury.
“Well, so you are rolling in riches!” exclaimed old Desroches, coming in just as Madame Descoings was swallowing her last mouthful of coffee.
“How?” cried poor Agathe.
“Her three numbers have come out,” said he, holding out a list of numbers written on a scrap of paper, such as office clerks kept by the hundred in the paper-tray on their desks.
Joseph read the list. Agathe read the list. Madame Descoings read nothing. She fell back as if stricken by lightning; seeing her face change and hearing her cry, old Desroches and Joseph carried her to her bed. Agathe went for a doctor. The poor woman had fallen in a fit of apoplexy, and she did not recover consciousness till about four in the afternoon. Old Doctor Haudry, her physician, pronounced that, notwithstanding this amelioration, she would do well to settle her affairs and think of her religious duties. She had uttered but two words, “Three millions!”
Old Desroches, to whom Joseph explained the circumstances with the necessary reservations, spoke of numbers of lottery-gamblers who had in the same way missed a fortune on the day when by some fatality they had failed to pay up their stakes; still, he understood how mortal a
