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-powerful fairy of the poor, bestowed the gift of magic hopes.  The turn of the wheel which opens to the gambler a vista of gold and happiness, lasts no longer than a flash of lightning, but the lottery gave five days’ existence to that magnificent flash.  What social power can to-day, for the sum of five sous, give us five days’ happiness and launch us ideally into all the joys of civilization?  Tobacco, a craving far more immoral than play, destroys the body, attacks the mind, and stupefies a nation; while the lottery did nothing of the kind.  This passion, moreover, was forced to keep within limits by the long periods that occurred between the drawings, and by the choice of wheels which each investor individually clung to.  Madame Descoings never staked on any but the “wheel of Paris.”  Full of confidence that the trey cherished for twenty-one years was about to triumph, she now imposed upon herself enormous privations, that she might stake a large amount of savings upon the last drawing of the year.  When she dreamed her cabalistic visions (for all dreams did not correspond with the numbers of the lottery), she went and told them to Joseph, who was the sole being who would listen, and not only not scold her, but give her the kindly