A very few moments later, the great man, in incognito, came out, very well dressed, smiled at his friends, and turned to go with them in the direction of the Passage des Panoramas, where he meant to complete his toilet by the polishing of his boots.

“If you see Samanon in a bookseller’s shop, or calling on a paper-merchant or a printer, you may know that it is all over with that man,” said the artist.  “Samanon is the undertaker come to take the measurements for a coffin.”

“You won’t discount your bills now, Lucien,” said Etienne.

“If Samanon will not take them, nobody else will; he is the ultima ratio,” said the stranger.  “He is one of Gigonnet’s lambs, a spy for Palma, Werbrust, Gobseck, and the rest of those crocodiles who swim in the Paris money-market.  Every man with a fortune to make, or unmake, is sure to come across one of them sooner or later.”

“If you cannot discount your bills at fifty per cent,” remarked Lousteau, “you must exchange them for hard cash.”

“How?”

“Give them to Coralie; Camusot will cash them for her.—­You are disgusted,” added Lousteau, as Lucien cut him short with a start.  “What nonsense!  How can you allow such a silly scruple to turn the scale, when your future is in the balance?”

“I shall take this money to Coralie in any case,” began Lucien.

“Here is more folly!” cried Lousteau.  “You will not keep your creditors quiet with four hundred francs when you must have four thousand.  Let us keep a little and get drunk on it, if we lose the rest at rouge et noir.”

“That is sound advice,” said the great man.

Those words, spoken not four paces from Frascati’s, were magnetic in their effect.  The friends dismissed their cab and went up to the gaming-table.

At the outset they won three thousand francs, then they lost and fell to five hundred; again they won three thousand seven hundred francs, and again they lost all but a five-franc piece.  After another turn of luck they staked two thousand francs on an even number to double the stake at a stroke; an even number had not turned up for five times in succession, and this was the sixth time.  They punted the whole sum, and an odd number turned up once more.

After two hours of all-absorbing, frenzied excitement, the two dashed down the staircase with the hundred francs kept back for the dinner.  Upon the steps, between two pillars which support the little sheet-iron veranda to which so many eyes have been upturned in longing or despair, Lousteau stopped and looked into Lucien’s flushed, excited face.

“Let us just try fifty francs,” he said.

And up the stairs again they went.  An hour later they owned a thousand crowns.  Black had turned up for the fifth consecutive time; they trusted that their previous luck would not repeat itself, and put the whole sum on the red—­black turned up for the sixth time.  They had lost.  It was now six o’clock.