make head against the peer, and by the month of April he was compelled
by his passion, notwithstanding some luck at cards, to dip into the
funds of which he was cashier. By May he had taken eleven hundred
francs. In that fatal month Mariette started for London, to see what
could be done with the lords while the temporary opera house in the
Hotel Choiseul, rue Lepelletier, was being prepared. The luckless
Philippe had ended, as often happens, in loving Mariette
notwithstanding her flagrant infidelities; she herself had never
thought him anything but a dull-minded, brutal soldier, the first rung
of a ladder on which she had never intended to remain long. So,
foreseeing the time when Philippe would have spent all his money, she
captured other journalistic support which released her from the
necessity of depending on him; nevertheless, she did feel the peculiar
gratitude that class of women acknowledge towards the first man who
smooths their way, as it were, among the difficulties and horrors of a
theatrical career.

Forced to let his terrible mistress go to London without him, Philippe
went into winter quarters, as he called it,--that is, he returned to
his attic room in his mother's _appartement_. He made some gloomy
reflections as he went to bed that night, and when he got up again. He
was conscious within himself of the inability to live otherwise than
as he had been living the last year. The luxury that surrounded
Mariette, the dinners, the suppers, the evenings in the side-scenes,
the animation of wits and journalists, the sort of racket that went on
around him, the delights that tickled both his senses and his vanity,
--such a life, found only in Paris, and offering daily the charm of
some new thing, was now more than habit,--it had become to Philippe as
much a necessity as his tobacco or his brandy. He saw plainly that he
could not live without these continual enjoyments. The idea of suicide