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Updated: June 13, 2025
When he had marched forwards for a street or two, Gambouge counted the money which he had received, and found that he was in possession of no less than a hundred francs. It was night, as he reckoned out his equivocal gains, and he counted them at the light of a lamp.
So Gambouge shovelled dish and spoons into the flap of his surtout, and ran down stairs as if the Devil were behind him as, indeed, he was. He immediately made for the house of his old friend the pawnbroker that establishment which is called in France the Mont de Piété. “I am obliged to come to you again, my old friend,” said Simon, “with some family plate, of which I beseech you to take care.”
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Gambogio, Than are dreamed of in your philosophy.” Gambouge, being a Frenchman, did not understand the quotation, but felt somehow strangely and singularly interested in the conversation of his new friend. Diabolus continued: “You are a man of merit, and want money; you will starve on your merit; you can only get money from me.
Gambouge was out of the way. One day, as he sat disconsolately at his easel, furbishing up a picture of his wife, in the character of Peace, which he had commenced a year before, he was more than ordinarily desperate, and cursed and swore in the most pathetic manner. “O miserable fate of genius!” cried he, “was I, a man of such commanding talents, born for this? to be bullied by a fiend of a wife; to have my masterpieces neglected by the world, or sold only for a few pieces?
“I am inclined to think, holy sir,” said Gambouge, after he had concluded his history, and shown how, in some miraculous way, all his desires were accomplished, “that, after all, this demon was no other than the creation of my own brain, heated by the effects of that bottle of wine, the cause of my crime and my prosperity.”
So Gambouge shovelled dish and spoons into the flap of his surtout, and ran down stairs as if the Devil were behind him as, indeed, he was. He immediately made for the house of his old friend the pawnbroker that establishment which is called in France the Mont de Piete. "I am obliged to come to you again, my old friend," said Simon, "with some family plate, of which I beseech you to take care."
He was allowed no rest, night or day: he moped about his fine house, solitary and wretched, and cursed his stars that he ever had married the butcher’s daughter. It wanted six months of the time. A sudden and desperate resolution seemed all at once to have taken possession of Simon Gambouge.
"Excuse me, gentlemen," he said, as he took a place opposite them, and began reading the papers of the day. "Bah!" said he, at last, "sont-ils grands ces journaux Anglais? Look, sir," he said, handing over an immense sheet of The Times to Mr. Gambouge, "was ever anything so monstrous?" Gambouge smiled politely, and examined the proffered page. "It is enormous" he said; "but I do not read English."
Suffice it to say, that Simon won half, and retired from the Palais Royal with a thick bundle of bank-notes crammed into his dirty three-cornered hat. He had been but half an hour in the place, and he had won the revenues of a prince for half a year! Gambouge, as soon as he felt that he was a capitalist, and that he had a stake in the country, discovered that he was an altered man.
Gambouge sidled up to her husband’s side, and took him tenderly by the hand. “Simon!” said she, “is it true? and do you really love your Griskinissa?”
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