Page:Memoirs of Vidocq, Volume 1.djvu/198

 sooner reached Courtrai, than Lemaire and his clerk were set at liberty. We may imagine their joy; and it was in fact so excessive, that I could not help thinking that the case must have been critical indeed, if their liberation could occasion such transports. The day after his arrival, dining with Lemaire, I found in my napkin a rouleau of a hundred louis. I was weak enough to accept them, and from that hour my ruin was decreed.

Playing high, treating my comrades, and having habits of luxury, I soon spent this sum. Lemaire daily made me fresh offers of service, by which I profitted to borrow several sums of him, amounting to two thousand francs, without being any the richer or more moderate. Fifteen hundred francs borrowed of a Jew, on a post obit for a thousand crowns, and twenty-five louis which the quarter-master advanced me, disappeared with the same alacrity. At last I spent even a sum of five hundred francs which my lieutenant had begged me to keep for him until the arrival of his horse-dealer, to whom he owed this sum. This I lost on one evening at the Café de la Montagne, with a man named Carré, who had already ruined half the regiment.

"The night that followed was a fearful one; agitated by the shame of having abused the confidence of the lieutenant, by squandering what was his little all; enraged at being duped, and tormented with the desire of still playing on; I was twenty times tempted to blow my brains out. When the trumpets sounded the turn-out, I had not closed my eyes; it was my week, and I went out to go through the examination of the stables; the first person I met was the lieutenant, who told me that the horse-dealer had arrived, and he