“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 captivating, but an ignoble, bony structure.  As Flore caught sight of the visitors, she drew across her breast a bit of muslin which might have been a fragment of a window-curtain, for it was edged with rust as from a rod.  The young men saw two chairs, a broken bureau on which was a tallow-candle stuck into a potato, a few dishes on the floor, and an earthen fire-pot in a corner of the chimney, in which there was no fire; this was all the furniture of the room.  Bixiou noticed the remaining sheets of writing-paper, brought from some neighboring grocery for the letter which the two women had doubtless concocted together.  The word “disgusting” is a positive to which no superlative exists, and we must therefore use it to convey the impression caused by this sight.  When the dying woman saw Joseph approaching her, two great tears rolled down her cheeks.