Edouard turned away, forcing a passage through the crowd in front of the office. As he walked along he thought of the numbers that had come out. It was not so quick a way of getting rich as roulette, the chances were less favorable; but the results, when one is lucky, are much more advantageous, as one may win a large sum with a modest coin.
He passed the day thinking about the lottery, and the next morning he decided to tempt fortune in that new manner. He entered the first office that he saw; and he had not to go far, for lottery offices are more numerous than poor relief offices.
It was ten o’clock in the morning. It was the last day of a foreign lottery. The office was full, the crowd was so great that one could hardly enter, and it was necessary to take one’s place at the end of a long line in order to exchange one’s money for some slips of paper.
Edouard decided to wait. He glanced at the crowd that surrounded him. It was composed almost entirely of people of the lower classes—street hawkers, cooks, menders of lace, cobblers, messengers, rag-pickers.
It is not that the upper classes do not try their luck in the lottery; but fashionable people send others to buy tickets for them, and the bourgeois, who are ashamed of what they do, enter only by the private door.
Edouard held his nose, for that assemblage of ladies and gentlemen exhaled an odor anything but agreeable; and the muddy boots of the Savoyard, the fish-woman’s herring, the rag-picker’s bag, the cobbler’s wax, and the cook’s whiting formed a combination of smells which would disgust a grenadier. But the purchasers of lottery tickets are engrossed by their calculations and they smell nothing.
While awaiting their turn, the habitués form groups and confide their dreams and ideas to one another. Everyone talks at once; but in that respect everyone is wise; it is a veritable babel, despite the remonstrances of the mistress of the place, who shouts every five minutes, as they do in court:
“Silence in the corner. Pray be quiet, mesdames, you can’t hear yourself think!”
Edouard, not being accustomed to it, was bewildered by the chatter of the gossips, who talked on without stopping; but wealth cannot be bought too dearly, and he made the best of it, and even determined to profit by what he overheard.
“My girl,” said an old hag covered with rags, to another who held her chafing-dish under her arm; “I saw a gray spider behind my bed this morning before breakfast.”