Agathe, who now had no company in the evening, read her prayers by the fire; while Madame Descoings read her fortune by the cards, interpreting her dreams, and applying the rules of the Cabala to her stakes. The lighthearted and obstinate old woman never missed a drawing of lottery-tickets; she still staked on the same three numbers which had never yet been drawn. This set of numbers was now nearly twenty-one years old—it would soon be of age. Its holder based high hopes on this trivial fact. One of the numbers had never come out at any drawing of either of the wheels ever since the lottery was founded, so she staked heavily on this number, and on every combination of the three figures. The bottom mattress of her bed was the hiding-place for the poor old creature’s savings; she unsewed it, pushed in the gold piece she had saved on her necessities, neatly wrapped in wool, and sewed it up again. She was resolved, at the last Paris drawing, to risk all her savings on the combinations of her cherished three numbers.
This passion, universally condemned, has never been duly studied. No one has understood this opium to poverty. Did not the lottery, the most puissant fairy in the world, give rise of magical hopes? The turn at roulette, which gives the player a vision of limitless gold and enjoyments, only lasted as long as a lightning flash; while the lottery gave five days of life to that glorious gleam. What social power can, in these days, make you happy for five days, and bestow on you in fancy all the delights of civilized life—for forty sous? Tobacco, a mania a thousand times more mischievous than gambling, destroys the body, undermines the intellect, stupefies the nation; the lottery caused no misfortunes of that kind. The passion was compelled to moderation by the interval between the drawings, and by the particular wheel the ticket-holder might affect. Madame Descoings never staked on any but the Paris wheel. In the hope of seeing the three numbers drawn which she had kept in hand for twenty years, she had subjected herself to the greatest privations to enable her to stake freely on the last drawing of the year.
When she had cabalistic dreams—for all her dreams did not bear on the numbers of the lottery—she would go and tell them to Joseph; he was the only being who would listen to her, not merely without scolding her, but saying the kindly words by which artists can soothe a monomania. All really great minds respect and sympathize with genuine passions; they understand them, finding their root in the heart or the brain. As Joseph saw things, his brother loved tobacco and spirits, his old Maman Descoings loved lottery-tickets, his mother loved God, young Desroches loved lawsuits, old Desroches loved fly-fishing; everyone, said he, loves something. What he loved was ideal beauty in all things; he loved Byron’s poetry, Géricault’s painting, Rossini’s music, Walter Scott’s romances.
“Every man to his taste, maman,” he would say, “but your three-pounder hangs fire.”
“It will not miss. You shall be a rich man, and my little Bixiou as well!”
“Give it all to your grandson,” cried Joseph. “After all, do you as you please.”
“Oh, if it comes out, I shall have enough for everybody. To begin with, you shall have a fine studio; you shall not have to give up going to the Opera in order to pay your models and colorman.—Do you know, child,” she went on, “that you have not given me a very creditable part in that picture of yours?”
Joseph, from motives of economy, had used Madame Descoings as the model for a head in his splendid painting of a young courtesan introduced by an old woman to a Venetian senator. This work, a masterpiece of modern art, mistaken for a Titian by Gros himself, prepared the younger painters to recognize and proclaim Joseph’s superiority in the Salon of 1823.
“Those who know you, know well what you are,” said he gaily, “and why should you care about those who do not know you?”
In the last ten years the old woman’s face had acquired the mellow tone of an Easter pippin. Her wrinkles had become set in the full flesh that had grown cold and pulpy. Her eyes, full of sparkle still, seemed animated by a youthful and eager thought, which might the more easily be regarded as one of greed, because there is always some little greed in a gambler. Her plump features betrayed deep dissimulation, and a dominant idea buried far down in her heart. Her passion required secretiveness. The movement of her lips gave a hint of gluttony. Thus, though she was in fact the worthy and kindhearted woman we have seen, the eye might be mistaken in her. She was a perfect model for the old woman Joseph wished to represent.
Coralie, a young actress of exquisite beauty, who died in the bloom of her youth, the mistress of a friend of Bridau’s, Lucien de Rubempré, a young poet, had given him
