“Let us just try twenty-five francs,” said Lucien.

The new venture was soon made—­and lost.  The twenty-five francs went in five stakes.  Then Lucien, in a frenzy, flung down his last twenty-five francs on the number of his age, and won.  No words can describe how his hands trembled as he raked in the coins which the bank paid him one by one.  He handed ten louis to Lousteau.

“Fly!” he cried; “take it to Very’s.”

Lousteau took the hint and went to order dinner.  Lucien, left alone, laid his thirty louis on the red and won.  Emboldened by the inner voice which a gambler always hears, he staked the whole again on the red, and again he won.  He felt as if there were a furnace within him.  Without heeding the voice, he laid a hundred and twenty louis on the black and lost.  Then to the torturing excitement of suspense succeeded the delicious feeling of relief known to the gambler who has nothing left to lose, and must perforce leave the palace of fire in which his dreams melt and vanish.

He found Lousteau at Very’s, and flung himself upon the cookery (to make use of Lafontaine’s expression), and drowned his cares in wine.  By nine o’clock his ideas were so confused that he could not imagine why the portress in the Rue de Vendome persisted in sending him to the Rue de la Lune.

“Mlle. Coralie has gone,” said the woman.  “She has taken lodgings elsewhere.  She left her address with me on this scrap of paper.”

Lucien was too far gone to be surprised at anything.  He went back to the cab which had brought him, and was driven to the Rue de la Lune, making puns to himself on the name of the street as he went.

The news of the failure of the Panorama-Dramatique had come like a thunder-clap.  Coralie, taking alarm, made haste to sell her furniture (with the consent of her creditors) to little old Cardot, who installed Florentine in the rooms at once.  The tradition of the house remained unbroken.  Coralie paid her creditors and satisfied the landlord, proceeding with her “washing-day,” as she called it, while Berenice bought the absolutely indispensable necessaries to furnish a fourth-floor lodging in the Rue de la Lune, a few doors from the Gymnase.  Here Coralie was waiting for Lucien’s return.  She had brought her love unsullied out of the shipwreck and twelve hundred francs.

Lucien, more than half intoxicated, poured out his woes to Coralie and Berenice.

“You did quite right, my angel,” said Coralie, with her arms about his neck.  “Berenice can easily negotiate your bills with Braulard.”

The next morning Lucien awoke to an enchanted world of happiness made about him by Coralie.  She was more loving and tender in those days than she had ever been; perhaps she thought that the wealth of love in her heart should make him amends for the poverty of their lodging.  She looked bewitchingly charming, with the loose hair straying from under the crushed white silk handkerchief about her head; there was soft laughter in her eyes; her words were as bright as the first rays of sunrise that shone in through the windows, pouring a flood of gold upon such charming poverty.