f, and which all men of talent strive after between the ages of
twenty and thirty. Agathe, seeing very little of Joseph, and feeling
no uneasiness about him, lived only for Philippe, who gave her the
alternations of fears excited and terrors allayed, which seem the life,
as it were, of sentiment, and to be as necessary to maternity as to
love. Desroches, who came once a week to see the widow of his patron
and friend, gave her hopes. The Duc de Maufrigneuse had asked to have
Philippe in his regiment; the minister of war had ordered an inquiry;
and as the name of Bridau did not appear on any police list, nor an any
record at the Palais de Justice, Philippe would be reinstated in the
army early in the coming year.

To arrive at this result, Desroches set all the powers that he could
influence in motion. At the prefecture of police he learned that
Philippe spent his evenings in the gambling-house; and he thought it
best to tell this fact privately to Madame Descoings, exhorting her keep
an eye on the lieutenant-colonel, for one outbreak would imperil all; as
it was, the minister of war was not likely to inquire whether Philippe
gambled. Once restored to his rank under the flag of his country, he
would perhaps abandon a vice only taken up from idleness. Agathe, who
no longer received her friends in the evening, sat in the chimney-corner
reading her prayers, while Madame Descoings consulted the cards,
interpreted her dreams, and applied the rules of the "cabala" to her
lottery ventures. This jovial fanatic never missed a single drawing; she
still pursued her trey,--which never turned up. It was nearly twenty-one
years old, just approaching its majority; on this ridiculous idea the
old woman now pinned her faith. One of its three numbers had stayed at
the bottom of all the wheels ever since the institution of the lottery.
Accordingly, Madame Descoings laid heavy stakes on that particular
number, as well as on all the combinations of the three numbers. The
last mattress remaining to her bed was the place where she stored her
savings; she unsewed the ticking, put in from time to time the bit of
gold saved from her needs, wrapped carefully in wool, and then sewed the
mattress up again. She intended, at the last drawing, to risk all her
savings on the different combinations of her treasured trey.

This passion, so universally condemned, has never been fairly studied.
No one has understood this opium of poverty. The lottery, all-po