The dog howled outside the garden gate.
"You cannot imagine," resumed the commissary, "the disasters caused in this municipality by the pari mutuel. I am not exaggerating when I assert that at least thirty per cent of the suicides which I have to look into are caused by gambling. Everybody gambles here. Every hairdresser's shop is a clandestine betting agency. No later than last week a concierge in the Avenue du Roule was found hanging from a tree in the Bois de Boulogne. Now, working men, servants, and junior clerks who gamble do not need to take their own lives. They move to another quarter, they disappear. But a man of position, an official whom gambling has ruined, who is overwhelmed by clamorous creditors, threatened with distraint, and on the point of being dragged before a court of justice, cannot disappear. What is to become of him?"
"I have it!" exclaimed the physician. "He recited The Duel in the Prairie. People are rather tired of monologues, but that is very funny. You remember! 'Will you fight with the sword?' 'No, sir.' 'The pistol?' 'No, sir.' 'The sabre, the knife?' 'No, sir.' 'Ah, then, I see what you want. You are not fastidious. What you want is a duel in the prairie. I agree. We will replace the prairie by a five-storied house. You are permitted to conceal yourself in the vegetation.' Chevalier used to recite The Duel in the Prairie in a very humorous manner. He amused me greatly that night. It is true that I am not an ungrateful audience; I worship the theatre."
The commissary was not listening. He was following up his own train of thought.
"It will never be known, how many fortunes and lives are devoured each year by the pari mutuel. Gambling never releases its victims; when it has despoiled them of everything, it still remains their only hope. What else, indeed, will permit them to hope?"
He ceased, straining his ear to catch the distant cry of a newsvendor, and rushed out into the avenue in pursuit of the fugitive yelping shadow, hailed him, and snatched from him a sporting paper, which he spread out under the light of a gas-lamp, scanning its pages for certain names of horses: Fleur-des-pois, La Châtelaine, Lucrèce. With haggard eyes, trembling hands, dumbfounded, crushed, he dropped the sheet: his horse had not won.
And Dr. Hibry, observing him from a distance, reflected that some day, in his capacity of physician to the dead, he might well be called upon to certify the suicide of his commissary of police, and he made up his mind in advance to conclude, as far as possible, that his death was due to accidental causes.
Suddenly he seized his umbrella.
"I must be off," he said. "I have been given a seat for the Opéra-Comique to-night. It would be a pity to waste it."