passions gratified, only prompt them to study how it happened that
they succeeded in getting round all social laws; the result is they
become alarmingly adroit.

A fortnight later, Philippe, once more a man of leisure, lazy and
bored, renewed his fatal cafe life,--his drams, his long games of
billiards embellished with punch, his nightly resort to the
gambling-table, where he risked some trifling stake and won enough to
pay for his dissipations. Apparently very economical, the better to
deceive his mother and Madame Descoings, he wore a hat that was greasy,
with the nap rubbed off at the edges, patched boots, a shabby overcoat,
on which the red ribbon scarcely showed so discolored and dirty was it
by long service at the buttonhole and by the spatterings of coffee and
liquors. His buckskin gloves, of a greenish tinge, lasted him a long
while; and he only gave up his satin neckcloth when it was ragged
enough to look like wadding. Mariette was the sole object of the
fellow's love, and her treachery had greatly hardened his heart. When
he happened to win more than usual, or if he supped with his old
comrade, Giroudeau, he followed some Venus of the slums, with brutal
contempt for the whole sex. Otherwise regular in his habits, he
breakfasted and dined at home and came in every night about one
o'clock. Three months of this horrible life restored Agathe to some
degree of confidence.

As for Joseph, who was working at the splendid picture to which he
afterwards owed his reputation, he lived in his atelier. On the
prediction of her grandson Bixiou, Madame Descoings believed in
Joseph's future glory, and she showed him every sort of motherly
kindness; she took his breakfast to him, she did his errands, she
blacked his boots. The painter was never seen till dinner-time, and