then that he was
what gamblers call "cleaned out." Driven by the irresistible necessity
of having his evening stake of ten francs, he plundered the household,
and laid hands on his brother's money and on all that Madame Descoings
or Agathe left about. Already the poor mother had had a dreadful vision
in her first sleep: Philippe entered the room and took from the pockets
of her gown all the money he could find. Agathe pretended to sleep, but
she passed the rest of the night in tears. She saw the truth only too
clearly. "One wrong act is not a vice," Madame Descoings had declared;
but after so many repetitions, vice was unmistakable. Agathe could doubt
no longer; her best-beloved son had neither delicacy nor honor.

On the morrow of that frightful vision, before Philippe left the house
after breakfast, she drew him into her chamber and begged him, in a
tone of entreaty, to ask her for what money he needed. After that, the
applications were so numerous that in two weeks Agathe was drained of
all her savings. She was literally without a penny, and began to think
of finding work. The means of earning money had been discussed in the
evenings between herself and Madame Descoings, and she had already taken
patterns of worsted work to fill in, from a shop called the "Pere
de Famille,"--an employment which pays about twenty sous a day.
Notwithstanding Agathe's silence on the subject, Madame Descoings had
guessed the motive of this desire to earn money by women's-work. The
change in her appearance was eloquent: her fresh face had withered, the
skin clung to the temples and the cheek-bones, and the forehead showed
deep lines; her eyes lost their clearness; an inward fire was evidently
consuming her; she wept the greater part of the night. A chief cause
of these outward ravages was the necessity of hiding her anguish, her
sufferings, her apprehensions. She never went to sleep until Philippe
came in; she listened for his step, she had learned the inflections of
his voice, the variations of his walk, the very language of his cane
as it touched the pavement. Nothing escaped her. She knew the degree of
drunkenness he had reached, she trembled as she heard him stumble on the
stairs; one night she picked up some pieces of gold at the spot where he
had fallen. When he had drunk and won, his voice was gruff and his cane
dragged; but when he had lost, his step had something sharp, short and
angry about it; he hummed in a clear voice, and ca