es. The four friends reached
Flore's retreat in the rue du Houssay an hour later.

"That Mephistopheles on horseback, named Philippe Bridau," said Bixiou,
as they mounted the staircase, "has sailed his boat cleverly to get rid
of his wife. You know our old friend Lousteau? well, Philippe paid him a
thousand francs a month to keep Madame Bridau in the society of Florine,
Mariette, Tullia, and the Val-Noble. When Philippe saw his crab-girl so
used to pleasure and dress that she couldn't do without them, he stopped
paying the money, and left her to get it as she could--it is easy to
know how. By the end of eighteen months, the brute had forced his wife,
stage by stage, lower and lower; till at last, by the help of a young
officer, he gave her a taste for drinking. As he went up in the world,
his wife went down; and the countess is now in the mud. The girl, bred
in the country, has a strong constitution. I don't know what means
Philippe has lately taken to get rid of her. I am anxious to study this
precious little drama, for I am determined to avenge Joseph here. Alas,
friends," he added, in a tone which left his three companions in doubt
whether he was jesting or speaking seriously, "give a man over to a vice
and you'll get rid of him. Didn't Hugo say: 'She loved a ball, and died
of it'? So it is. My grandmother loved the lottery. Old Rouget loved
a loose life, and Lolotte killed him. Madame Bridau, poor woman, loved
Philippe, and perished of it. Vice! vice! my dear friends, do you want
to know what vice is? It is the Bonneau of death."

"Then you'll die of a joke," said Desroches, laughing.

Above the fourth floor, the young men were forced to climb one of the
steep, straight stairways that are almost ladders, by which the attics
of Parisian houses are often reached. Though Joseph, who remembered
Flore in all her beauty, expected to see some frightful change, he was
not prepared for the hideous spectacle which now smote his artist's eye.
In a room with bare, unpapered walls, under the sharp pitch of an attic
roof, on a cot whose scanty mattress was filled, perhaps, with refuse
cotton, a woman lay, green as a body that has been drowned two days,
thin as a consumptive an hour before death. This putrid skeleton had a
miserable checked handkerchief bound about her head, which had lost its
hair. The circle round the hollow eyes was red, and the eyelids were
like the pellicle of an egg. Nothing remained of the body, once so
c