“Maman Descoings, my brother has no money to play with,” said Joseph, in the kind and staunch old lady’s ear.
The gambler in the lottery went to fetch twenty francs, and gave them to the artist, who quietly slipped them into his brother’s hand.
All the guests arrived. Two tables were set for boston, and the party grew lively. Philippe proved but a sorry player. After winning a good deal at first, he lost, till, by eleven o’clock, he owed fifty francs to young Desroches and Bixiou. The noise and disputes over the écarté more than once disturbed the peaceful boston players, and they kept covert watch over Philippe. The Colonel gave evidence of such a bad spirit that, in his last wrangle with young Desroches—who was not very good-tempered either—the elder Desroches, though his son was in the right, pronounced against him, and desired him to play no more. Madame Descoings did the same with her grandson, who had begun firing such keen witticisms that Philippe did not understand them; still, they might have led this caustic satirist into danger if by chance one of his barbed arrows had pierced the Colonel’s dense intelligence.
“You must be tired,” said Agathe to Philippe. “Come to your room.”
“Traveling forms the young!” said Bixiou, smiling, when Agathe and the Colonel were out of the room.
Joseph, who rose with the dawn and went early to rest, did not see the evening out. Next morning Agathe and her friend, as they laid breakfast in the front room, could not help thinking that evening company would cost them very dear if Philippe went on playing “that game,” as Madame Descoings phrased it. The old woman, now seventy-six years of age, proposed to sell her furniture, to give up her rooms on the second floor to the landlord—who was most willing to have them—to take Agathe’s drawing-room for her bedroom, and to use the other room as a sitting and dining-room in one. In this way they could save seven hundred francs a year. This retrenchment would enable them to allow Philippe fifty franc a month while he was looking out for something to do. Agathe accepted the sacrifice.
When the Colonel came down, after his mother had asked him if he had been comfortable in his little room, the two widows laid the state of affairs before him. Madame Descoings and Agathe, by combining their incomes, had five thousand three hundred francs a year, of which four thousand were Madame Descoings’ annuity. The old lady allowed Bixiou six hundred francs a year—for the last six months she had owned him to be her grandson—and six hundred to Joseph; the rest, with Agathe’s income, was spent in housekeeping generally. All their savings were gone.
“Be quite easy,” said the Colonel; “I will look out for some appointment. I will cost you nothing. All I want is a crust and a crib for the present.”
Agathe kissed her son, and his old friend slipped a hundred francs into his hand to pay the gambling debt of the evening before.
Within ten days the sale of the furniture, the giving up of the rooms, and the necessary changes in Agathe’s dwelling were affected with the rapidity to be seen only in Paris. During these ten days Philippe regularly made himself scarce after breakfast, came in to dinner, went out in the evening, and did not come home to bed till midnight.
This was the plan of life into which the soldier fell almost mechanically, and which became a rooted habit: he had his boots blacked on the Pont Neuf for the two sous he would otherwise have spent in crossing by the Pont des Arts to the Palais Royal, where he took two liqueur glasses of brandy while reading the papers, an occupation absorbing him till midday; at about noon he made his way by the Rue Vivienne to the Café Minerve, at that time the headquarters of the Liberals, and there he played billiards with some retired fellow-officers. There, while he won or lost, Philippe always got through three or four more glasses of various spirits, and then smoked ten régie cigars as he wandered and lounged about the streets. In the evening, after smoking a few pipes at the Estaminet Hollandais, he went up to the gambling tables at about ten. The waiter handed him a card and a pin; he consulted certain experienced players as to the state of the run on red or black, and staked ten francs at an opportune moment, never playing more than three times, whether he won or lost. When he had won, as be commonly did, he drank a tumbler of punch and made his way home to his attic; but by this time he would be talking of smashing up the ultras and the bodyguard, and sing on the stairs, “Preserve the Empire from its foes.”—His poor mother, as she heard him, would say, “Philippe is in good spirits this evening,” and she would go up to give him a kiss, never complaining of the reek of punch, spirits, and tobacco.
“You ought to be pleased with me, my dear mother,” said he one day towards the end of January. “I am sure I lead the most regular life!”
Philippe had dined out five times with some old comrades. These soldiers had talked over the state of their affairs, and discussed the hopes they founded on the building of a submarine vessel to be employed to deliver the Emperor. Among the fellow-officers he here met again, Philippe was particularly thick with a former captain of the Dragoon Guard named Giroudeau, in whose company he had first smelt gunpowder. This officer of Dragoons was the cause of Philippe’s completing what Rabelais calls the devil’s outfit, and adding a fourth iniquity to his dram, his cigar, and his gambling.
One evening, at the beginning of February,
