o say: 'She loved a ball, and died of
it'? So it is. My grandmother loved the lottery. Old Rouget loved a
loose life, and Lolotte killed him. Madame Bridau, poor woman, loved
Philippe, and perished of it. Vice! vice! my dear friends, do you want
to know what vice is? It is the Bonneau of death."

"Then you'll die of a joke," said Desroches, laughing.

Above the fourth floor, the young men were forced to climb one of the
steep, straight stairways that are almost ladders, by which the attics
of Parisian houses are often reached. Though Joseph, who remembered
Flore in all her beauty, expected to see some frightful change, he was
not prepared for the hideous spectacle which now smote his artist's
eye. In a room with bare, unpapered walls, under the sharp pitch of an
attic roof, on a cot whose scanty mattress was filled, perhaps, with
refuse cotton, a woman lay, green as a body that has been drowned two
days, thin as a consumptive an hour before death. This putrid skeleton
had a miserable checked handkerchief bound about her head, which had
lost its hair. The circle round the hollow eyes was red, and the
eyelids were like the pellicle of an egg. Nothing remained of the
body, once so captivating, but an ignoble, bony structure. As Flore
caught sight of the visitors, she drew across her breast a bit of
muslin which might have been a fragment of a window-curtain, for it
was edged with rust as from a rod. The young men saw two chairs, a
broken bureau on which was a tallow-candle stuck into a potato, a few
dishes on the floor, and an earthen fire-pot in a corner of the
chimney, in which there was no fire; this was all the furniture of the
room. Bixiou noticed the remaining sheets of writing-paper, brought
from some neighboring grocery for the letter which the two women had
doubtless concocted together. The word "disgusting" is a positive to
which no superlative exists, and we must therefore use it to convey
the impression caused by this sight. When the dying woman saw Joseph
approaching her, two great tears rolled down her cheeks.

"She can still weep!" whispered Bixiou. "A strange sight,--tears from
dominos! It is like the miracle of Moses."

"How burnt up!" cried Joseph.

"In the fires of repentance," said Flore. "I cannot get a priest; I
have nothing, not even a crucifix, to help me see God. Ah, monsieur!"
she cried, raising her arms, that were like two pieces of carved wood,
"I am a guilty woman; but God never punished a