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