Agathe kissed her son, and Madame Descoings slipped a hundred francs into his hand to pay for his losses of the night before.  In ten days the furniture was sold, the appartement given up, and the change in Agathe’s domestic arrangements accomplished with a celerity seldom seen outside of Paris.  During those ten days, Philippe regularly decamped after breakfast, came back for dinner, was off again for the evening, and only got home about midnight to go to bed.  He contracted certain habits half mechanically, and they soon became rooted in him; he got his boots blacked on the Pont Neuf for the two sous it would have cost him to go by the Pont des Arts to the Palais-Royal, where he consumed regularly two glasses of brandy while reading the newspapers, —­an occupation which employed him till midday; after that he sauntered along the rue Vivienne to the cafe Minerve, where the Liberals congregated, and where he played at billiards with a number of old comrades.  While winning and losing, Philippe swallowed four or five more glasses of divers liquors, and smoked ten or a dozen cigars in going and coming, and idling along the streets.  In the evening, after consuming a few pipes at the Hollandais smoking-rooms, he would go to some gambling-place towards ten o’clock at night.  The waiter handed him a card and a pin; he always inquired of certain well-seasoned players about the chances of the red or the black, and staked ten francs when the lucky moment seemed to come; never playing more than three times, win or lose.  If he won, which usually happened, he drank a tumbler of punch and went home to his garret; but by that time he talked of smashing the ultras and the Bourbon body-guard, and trolled out, as he mounted the staircase, “We watch to save the Empire!” His poor mother, hearing him, used to think “How gay Philippe is to-night!” and then she would creep up and kiss him, without complaining of the fetid odors of the punch, and the brandy, and the pipes.

“You ought to be satisfied with me, my dear mother,” he said, towards the end of January; “I lead the most regular of lives.”

The colonel had dined five times at a restaurant with some of his army comrades.  These old soldiers were quite frank with each other on the state of their own affairs, all the while talking of certain hopes which they based on the building of a submarine vessel, expected to bring about the deliverance of the Emperor.  Among these former comrades, Philippe particularly liked an old captain of the dragoons of the Guard, named Giroudeau, in whose company he had seen his first service.  This friendship with the late dragoon led Philippe into completing what Rabelais called “the devil’s equipage”; and he added to his drams, and his tobacco, and his play, a “fourth wheel.”