prospered with him, if he could
have economised his villanous gains. His senior partner in that firm
retired into the country with a fine fortune--no doubt the very owner of
those mulberry plantations which were now on sale! But Jasper scattered
napoleons faster than any croupier could rake them away. And Jasper's
natural talent for converting solid gold into thin air had been assisted
by a lady who, in the course of her amiable life, had assisted many
richer men than Jasper to lodgings in _St. Pelagie_, or cells in the
_Maison des Fous_. With that lady he had become acquainted during the
lifetime of his wife, and it was supposed that Matilda's discovery of
this liaison had contributed perhaps to the illness which closed in her
decease; the name of that lady was Gabrielle Desinarets. She might
still be seen daily at the Bois de Boulogne, nightly at opera-house
or theatre; she had apartments in the Chaussee d'Antin far from
inaccessible to Mr. Gotobed, if he coveted the honour of her
acquaintance. But Jasper was less before an admiring world. He was
supposed now to be connected with another gambling-house of lower grade
than the last, in which he had contrived to break his own bank and
plunder his own till. It was supposed also that he remained good friends
with Mademoiselle Desmarets; but if he visited her at her house, he
was never to be seen there. In fact, his temper was so uncertain, his
courage so dauntless, his strength so prodigious, that gentlemen who
did not wish to be thrown out of the window, or hurled down a staircase,
shunned any salon or boudoir in which they had a chance to encounter
him. Mademoiselle Desmarets had thus been condemned to the painful
choice between his society and that of nobody else, or that of anybody
else with the rigid privation of his. Not being a turtle-dove, she had
chosen the latter alternative. It was believed, nevertheless, that if
Gabrielle Desmarets had known the weakness of a kind sentiment, it was
for this turbulent lady-killer; and that, with a liberality she had
never exhibited in any other instance, when she could no longer help him
to squander, she would still, at a pinch, help him to live; though, of
course, in such a reverse of the normal laws of her being, Mademoiselle
Desmarets set those bounds on her own generosity which she would not
have imposed upon his, and had said with a sigh: "I could forgive him if
he beat me and beggared my friends! but to beat my friends and