“A duel became inevitable; and M. de Brevan, pretending to try and reconcile the two young men, secretly fanned the flame.  The duel came off one Saturday morning, in the woods near Vincennes.  They fought with small-swords; and, after little more than a minute, M. Planix received a stab in his breast, fell, and was dead in an instant.  He was not yet twenty-seven years old.

“Sarah’s joy was almost delirious.  Accomplished actress as she was, she could hardly manage to shed a few tears for the benefit of the public, when the body, still warm, was brought to the house.  And still she had once loved the man, whom she had now assassinated.

“Even as she knelt by the bedside, hiding her face in her handkerchief, she was thinking only of the testament, lying safe and snug, as she knew, in one of the drawers of that bureau, enclosed in a large official envelope with a huge red wax seal.

“It was opened and read the same day by the justice of the peace, who had been sent for to put the seals on the deceased man’s property.  And then Sarah began to cry in good earnest.  Her tears were tears of rage.  For seized by a kind of remorse, and at a moment when Sarah’s absence had rendered him very angry, M. Planix had added two lines as a codicil.

“He still said, ‘I appoint Miss Ernestine Bergot my residuary legatee’; but he had written underneath, ’on condition that she shall pay to each of my sisters the sum of a hundred and fifty thousand francs.’  This was more than three-fourths of his whole fortune.

“When she arrived, therefore, that night, at Brevan’s rooms, her first words were,—­

“’We have been robbed!  Planix was a wretch!  We won’t have a hundred thousand francs left.’

“Maxime, however, recovered his equanimity pretty soon; for the sum appeared to him quite large enough to pay for a crime in which they had run no risk, and he was quite as willing as before to marry Sarah; but she refused to listen to him, saying that a hundred thousand francs were barely enough for a year’s income, and that they must wait.  It was then that M. de Brevan became a gambler.  The wretch actually believed in the cards; he believed that fortunes could be made by playing.  He had systems of his own which could not fail, and which he was bent upon trying.

“He proposed to Sarah to risk the hundred thousand francs, promising to make a million out of them; and she yielded, tempted by the very boldness of his proposition.

“They resolved they would not stop playing till they had won a million, or lost everything.  And so they went to Homburg.  There they led a mad life for a whole month, spending ten hours every day at the gaming-table, feverish, breathless, fighting the bank with marvellous skill and almost incredible coolness.  I have met an old croupier who recollects them even now.  Twice they were on the point of staking their last thousand-franc-note; and one lucky day they won as much as four hundred thousand francs.  That day, Maxime proposed they should leave Homburg.  Sarah, who kept the money, refused, repeating her favorite motto, ‘All, or nothing.’