Thus did Edouard commune with himself on the day of Dufresne’s departure for Villeneuve-Saint-Georges. He came out of an academy—a decent method of designating a gambling hell,—where he had lost a large part of the sum he had borrowed on his house. He strode angrily along the streets of Paris; he dreamed of cards, of martingales, of series, of parolis, and of all those unlucky combinations which constantly perturb the brain of a gambler. A noisy burst of music, the booming of a bass drum, the strains of two clarinets and a pair of cymbals, roused him from his reverie; he raised his eyes with the intention of walking away from the musicians, whose uproar tired him, and saw that he was in front of a lottery office. The music which he heard was produced by one of those travelling bands which, for a forty-sou piece given them by the keeper of the office, raise an infernal tumult before the door and attract all the gossips of the neighborhood to the “lucky office” where the list of ambes, ternes, and even quaternes, said to have been won, is hung at the door with an exact statement of the result of the lottery; the whole embellished with pink and blue ribbons like the sweetmeats in a confectioner’s window.
Edouard stopped instinctively, and like all the rest, gazed at the seductive list. Seventy-five thousand francs won with twenty sous! That was very enticing! To be sure, the winner had had a quaterne; that is very rare; but still it has been seen, and one man’s chance is as good as another’s.
“Ah! neighbor, what a fine drawing!” said a fish dealer to a fruit woman, who stood near Edouard, copying the result of the lottery; “11, 20, 44, 19, 76.—I ought to be as rich as a queen to-day. Here, for more than a year I have been following up a dry terne on the first three numbers that come out; the day before yesterday was the last day. I was waiting for Thomas, who works at La Vallée; he was going to bring me a goose stuffed with chestnuts for our supper, with some sixteen-sou wine from Eustache’s at the Barreaux Verts, which has a fine bouquet! It was my idea to have a nice little supper in a private room—that brings luck—and to take my ticket when we went home to bed.—But not a bit of it. Thomas kept me cooling my heels, waiting for him. I got tired of it and went to his garret, and he had colic in the loins from dancing too much on Sunday at the Rabbits. I had to stay and nurse him, the closing time passed and I forgot my dry terne while I was giving him injections.”
“Poor Françoise! that was hard luck.—Well! my poor dead man might have had pains in his belly—that wouldn’t ‘a’ made me forget my tickets! For the last ten years I’ve always paid my rent with number 20; it went a little by the date this time, but I got it all the same—I put my counterpane up the spout to do it. You see, I’d rather have sold my chemise than dropped it, for I was bound to have it.”
“Do you know any of those that won the big prize?”
“Why, the dry goods dealer’s cook. Three numbers taken out of the wheel at random!”
“That’s what I call luck!”
“Oh! it ain’t to be wondered at; she dreamed that her master used the soup-kettle for a chamber.”
“Then it was sure money! I’m down on my luck; I’ve never been able to dream of nasty things.”
“Oh! as for me, I often used to dream some in my late husband’s time.”