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 the cafe de la Rotonde, Joseph examined these tickets to see if, by chance, any of them bore the Descoings’s numbers.  He found none, and returned home grieved at having done his best in vain for the old woman, to whom he related his ill-luck.  Agathe and her aunt went together to the midnight mass at Saint-Germain-des-Pres.  Joseph went to bed.  The collation did not take place.  Madame Descoings had lost her head; and in Agathe’s heart was eternal mourning.

The two rose late on Christmas morning.  Ten o’clock had struck before Madame Descoings began to bestir herself about the breakfast, which was only ready at half-past eleven.  At that hour, the oblong frames containing the winning numbers are hung over the doors of the lottery-offices.  If Madame Descoings had paid her stake and held her ticket, she would have gone by half-past nine o’clock to learn her fate at a building close to the ministry of Finance, in the rue Neuve-des-Petits Champs, a situation now occupied by the Theatre Ventadour in the place of the same name.  On the days when the drawings took place, an observer might watch with curiosity the crowd of old women, cooks, and old men assembled about the door of this building; a sight as remarkable as the cue of people about the Treasury on the days when the dividends are paid.

“Well, here you are, rolling in wealth!” said old Desroches, coming into the room just as the Descoings was swallowing her last drop of coffee.