But Agathe's motherhood had
received a deadly wound. Her belief in her son once shaken, she lived
in perpetual fear, mingled with some satisfactions, as she saw her
worst apprehensions unrealized.
When men like Philippe, who are endowed with physical courage, and yet
are cowardly and ignoble in their moral being, see matters and things
resuming their accustomed course about them after some catastrophe in
which their honor and decency is well-nigh lost, such family kindness,
or any show of friendliness towards them is a premium of
encouragement. They count on impunity; their minds distorted, their
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.
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