It was ten o’clock in the morning. It was the last day of a foreign lottery. The office was full, the crowd was so great that one could hardly enter, and it was necessary to take one’s place at the end of a long line in order to exchange one’s money for some slips of paper. Edouard decided to wait. He glanced at the crowd that surrounded him. It was composed almost entirely of people of the lower classes--street hawkers, cooks, menders of lace, cobblers, messengers, rag-pickers. It is not that the upper classes do not try their luck in the lottery; but fashionable people send others to buy tickets for them, and the bourgeois, who are ashamed of what they do, enter only by the private door. Edouard held his nose, for that assemblage of ladies and gentlemen exhaled an odor anything but agreeable; and the muddy boots of the Savoyard, the fish-woman’s herring, the rag-picker’s bag, the cobbler’s wax, and the cook’s whiting formed a combination of smells which would disgust a grenadier. But the purchasers of lottery tickets are engrossed by their calculations and they smell nothing. While awaiting their turn, the habitués form groups and confide their dreams and ideas to one another. Everyone talks at once; but in that respect everyone is wise; it is a veritable babel, despite the remonstrances of the mistress of the place, who shouts every five minutes, as they do in court: “Silence in the corner. Pray be quiet, mesdames, you can’t hear yourself think!” Edouard, not being accustomed to it, was bewildered by the chatter of the gossips, who talked on without stopping; but wealth cannot be bought too dearly, and he made the best of it, and even determined to profit by what he overheard. “My girl,” said an old hag covered with rags, to another who held her chafing-dish under her arm; “I saw a gray spider behind my bed this morning before breakfast.” “Pardi!” replied the other--”spiders! I see ’em every day at home!” “No matter, they bring luck; I’m going to put a crown on 9, 30 and 51; I’m sure they won’t all draw blanks.” And the poor creature, who wore no stockings and whose skirt was full of holes, took a crown from her pocket to put on her spider. To those who believe firmly in dreams, numbers cease to be numbers, and become the objects they have seen in their dreams, all of which are represented by particular numbers, as set forth in the books of dreams, the _Petit Cagliostro_, the _Aveugle du Bonheur_, and a thousand nice little works of about the same value, which the ticket buyers know by heart. The keeper of the office, who knew her trade, and, when the customer was worth the trouble, could make calculations on the mists of the Seine, told them what numbers to take, when they described their dreams to her. “Monsieur, give me my oxen,” said an oyster woman, presenting her thirty-sou piece. “Monsieur, put twenty-four sous on a white cat for me.” “My aunt’s dressing jacket, monsieur.”