More losses. Again he had been forced to write home. This time there was no ready money in the bank. His mother had been forced to sell some forest land.
He was the first son, after all. The estate was his.
And he had played again. He had tried to win back what he had lost; and that not because he was greedy after either money or cards, but simply because his people were not over-wealthy, and he wanted to recuperate what he had lost.
So he had made a study of cards. He had the cold, logical Latin mind, and set himself to do the thing in earnest. He learned poker, trente et quarante, and then he joined the Cercle Richelieu and passed night after night playing roulette.
Steadily he had lost.
Steadily his mother had sold acres and acres of forest land—then a few rich acres his family owned in Corsica, and finally the vineyard of her father in the Champagne country which had been her dowry, and which she had meant to pass on as a dower to her only daughter. That also had gone.
But she had not complained.
Cold and haughty—he was her first-born son—
