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The Two Brothers

by Honoré de Balzac · English · Gutenberg #1380 · 631,982 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Two Brothers

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Translator: Katharine Prescott Wormeley


        
Release date: August 10, 2005 [eBook #1380]
                Most recently updated: October 29, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1380

Credits: Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TWO BROTHERS ***

THE TWO BROTHERS


By Honore De Balzac



Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley





DEDICATION

To Monsieur Charles Nodier, member of the French Academy, etc.

Here, my dear Nodier, is a book filled with deeds that are screened from
the action of the laws by the closed doors of domestic life; but as
to which the finger of God, often called chance, supplies the place
of human justice, and in which the moral is none the less striking and
instructive because it is pointed by a scoffer.

To my mind, such deeds contain great lessons for the Family and for
Maternity. We shall some day realize, perhaps too late, the effects
produced by the diminution of paternal authority. That authority, which
formerly ceased only at the death of the father, was the sole human
tribunal before which domestic crimes could be arraigned; kings
themselves, on special occasions, took part in executing its judgments.
However good and tender a mother may be, she cannot fulfil the function
of the patriarchal royalty any more than a woman can take the place of
a king upon the throne. Perhaps I have never drawn a picture that shows
more plainly how essential to European society is the indissoluble
marriage bond, how fatal the results of feminine weakness, how great the
dangers arising from selfish interests when indulged without restraint.
May a society which is based solely on the power of wealth shudder as it
sees the impotence of the law in dealing with the workings of a system
which deifies success, and pardons every means of attaining it. May
it return to the Catholic religion, for the purification of its masses
through the inspiration of religious feeling, and by means of an
education other than that of a lay university.

In the “Scenes from Military Life” so many fine natures, so many high
and noble self-devotions will be set forth, that I may here be allowed
to point out the depraving effect of the necessities of war upon certain
minds who venture to act in domestic life as if upon the field of
battle.

You have cast a sagacious glance over the events of our own time; its
philosophy shines, in more than one bitter reflection, through your
elegant pages; you have appreciated, more clearly than other men,
the havoc wrought in the mind of our country by the existence of four
distinct political systems. I cannot, therefore, place this history
under the protection of a more competent authority. Your name may,
perhaps, defend my work against the criticisms that are certain to
follow it,--for where is the patient who keeps silence when the surgeon
lifts the dressing from his wound?

To the pleasure of dedicating this Scene to you, is joined the pride I
feel in thus making known your friendship for one who here subscribes
himself

                                        Your sincere admirer,

                                        De Balzac
                                        Paris, November, 1842.





THE TWO BROTHERS




CHAPTER I

In 1792 the townspeople of Issoudun enjoyed the services of a physician
named Rouget, whom they held to be a man of consummate malignity. Were
we to believe certain bold tongues, he made his wife extremely unhappy,
although she was the most beautiful woman of the neighborhood. Perhaps,
indeed, she was rather silly. But the prying of friends, the slander of
enemies, and the gossip of acquaintances, had never succeeded in laying
bare the interior of that household. Doctor Rouget was a man of whom we
say in common parlance, “He is not pleasant to deal with.” Consequently,
during his lifetime, his townsmen kept silence about him and treated him
civilly. His wife, a demoiselle Descoings, feeble in health during her
girlhood (which was said to be a reason why the doctor married her),
gave birth to a son, and also to a daughter who arrived, unexpectedly,
ten years after her brother, and whose birth took the husband, doctor
though he were, by surprise. This late-comer was named Agathe.

These little facts are so simple, so commonplace, that a writer seems
scarcely justified in placing them in the fore-front of his history; yet
if they are not known, a man of Doctor Rouget’s stamp would be thought
a monster, an unnatural father, when, in point of fact, he was only
following out the evil tendencies which many people shelter under
the terrible axiom that “men should have strength of character,”--a
masculine phrase that has caused many a woman’s misery.

The Descoings, father-in-law and mother-in-law of the doctor, were
commission merchants in the wool-trade, and did a double business by
selling for the producers and buying for the manufacturers of the golden
fleeces of Berry; thus pocketing a commission on both sides. In this way
they grew rich and miserly--the outcome of many such lives. Descoings
the son, younger brother of Madame Rouget, did not like Issoudun. He
went to seek his fortune in Paris, where he set up as a grocer in the
rue Saint-Honore. That step led to his ruin. But nothing could have
hindered it: a grocer is drawn to his business by an attracting force
quite equal to the repelling force which drives artists away from it.
We do not sufficiently study the social potentialities which make up
the various vocations of life. It would be interesting to know what
determines one man to be a stationer rather than a baker; since, in our
day, sons are not compelled to follow the calling of their fathers,
as they were among the Egyptians. In this instance, love decided the
vocation of Descoings. He said to himself, “I, too, will be a grocer!”
 and in the same breath he said (also to himself) some other things
regarding his employer,--a beautiful creature, with whom he had fallen
desperately in love. Without other help than patience and the trifling
sum of money his father and mother sent him, he married the widow of his
predecessor, Monsieur Bixiou.

In 1792 Descoings was thought to be doing an excellent business. At that
time, the old Descoings were still living. They had retired from the
wool-trade, and were employing their capital in buying up the forfeited
estates,--another golden fleece! Their son-in-law Doctor Rouget, who,
about this time, felt pretty sure that he should soon have to mourn for
the death of his wife, sent his daughter to Paris to the care of his
brother-in-law, partly to let her see the capital, but still more to
carry out an artful scheme of his own. Descoings had no children. Madame
Descoings, twelve years older than her husband, was in good health,
but as fat as a thrush after harvest; and the canny Rouget knew enough
professionally to be certain that Monsieur and Madame Descoings,
contrary to the moral of fairy tales, would live happy ever after
without having any children. The pair might therefore become attached to
Agathe.

That young girl, the handsomest maiden in Issoudun, did not resemble
either father or mother. Her birth had caused a lasting breach between
Doctor Rouget and his intimate friend Monsieur Lousteau, a former
sub-delegate who had lately removed from the town. When a family
expatriates itself, the natives of a place as attractive as Issoudun
have a right to inquire into the reasons of so surprising a step. It was
said by certain sharp tongues that Doctor Rouget, a vindictive man, had
been heard to exclaim that Monsieur Lousteau should die by his hand.
Uttered by a physician, this declaration had the force of a cannon-ball.
When the National Assembly suppressed the sub-delegates, Lousteau
and his family left Issoudun, and never returned there. After their
departure Madame Rouget spent most of her time with the sister of the
late sub-delegate, Madame Hochon, who was the godmother of her daughter,
and the only person to whom she confided her griefs. The little that the
good town of Issoudun ever really knew of the beautiful Madame Rouget
was told by Madame Hochon,--though not until after the doctor’s death.

The first words of Madame Rouget, when informed by her husband that
he meant to send Agathe to Paris, were: “I shall never see my daughter
again.”

“And she was right,” said the worthy Madame Hochon.

After this, the poor mother grew as yellow as a quince, and her
appearance did not contradict the tongues of those who declared that
Doctor Rouget was killing her by inches. The behavior of her booby of a
son must have added to the misery of the poor woman so unjustly accused.
Not restrained, possibly encouraged by his father, the young fellow, who
was in every way stupid, paid her neither the attentions nor the respect
which a son owes to a mother. Jean-Jacques Rouget was like his father,
especially on the latter’s worst side; and the doctor at his best was
far from satisfactory, either morally or physically.

The arrival of the charming Agathe Rouget did not bring happiness to her
uncle Descoings; for in the same week (or rather, we should say decade,
for the Republic had then been proclaimed) he was imprisoned on a
hint from Robespierre given to Fouquier-Tinville. Descoings, who was
imprudent enough to think the famine fictitious, had the additional
folly, under the impression that opinions were free, to express that
opinion to several of his male and female customers as he served them
in the grocery. The citoyenne Duplay, wife of a cabinet-maker with whom
Robespierre lodged, and who looked after the affairs of that eminent
citizen, patronized, unfortunately, the Descoings establishment. She
considered the opinions of the grocer insulting to Maximilian the First.
Already displeased with the manners of Descoings, this illustrious
“tricoteuse” of the Jacobin club regarded the beauty of his wife as a
kind of aristocracy. She infused a venom of her own into the grocer’s
remarks when she repeated them to her good and gentle master, and
the poor man was speedily arrested on the well-worn charge of
“accaparation.”

No sooner was he put in prison, than his wife set to work to obtain his
release. But the steps she took were so ill-judged that any one hearing
her talk to the arbiters of his fate might have thought that she was in
reality seeking to get rid of him. Madame Descoings knew Bridau, one
of the secretaries of Roland, then minister of the interior,--the
right-hand man of all the ministers who succeeded each other in
that office. She put Bridau on the war-path to save her grocer. That
incorruptible official--one of the virtuous dupes who are always
admirably disinterested--was careful not to corrupt the men on whom
the fate of the poor grocer depended; on the contrary, he endeavored to
enlighten them. Enlighten people in those days! As well might he have
begged them to bring back the Bourbons. The Girondist minister, who was
then contending against Robespierre, said to his secretary, “Why do you
meddle in the matter?” and all others to whom the worthy Bridau appealed
made the same atrocious reply: “Why do you meddle?” Bridau then sagely
advised Madame Descoings to keep quiet and await events. But instead of
conciliating Robespierre’s housekeeper, she fretted and fumed against
that informer, and even complained to a member of the Convention,
who, trembling for himself, replied hastily, “I will speak of it to
Robespierre.” The handsome petitioner put faith in this promise, which
the other carefully forgot. A few loaves of sugar, or a bottle or two of
good liqueur, given to the citoyenne Duplay would have saved Descoings.

This little mishap proves that in revolutionary times it is quite
as dangerous to employ honest men as scoundrels; we should rely on
ourselves alone. Descoings perished; but he had the glory of going to
the scaffold with Andre Chenier. There, no doubt, grocery and poetry
embraced for the first time in the flesh; although they have, and ever
have had, intimate secret relations. The death of Descoings produced far
more sensation than that of Andre Chenier. It has taken thirty years to
prove to France that she lost more by the death of Chenier than by that
of Descoings.

This act of Robespierre led to one good result: the terrified grocers
let politics alone until 1830. Descoings’s shop was not a hundred yards
from Robespierre’s lodging. His successor was scarcely more fortunate
than himself. Cesar Birotteau, the celebrated perfumer of the “Queen
of Roses,” bought the premises; but, as if the scaffold had left some
inexplicable contagion behind it, the inventor of the “Paste of Sultans”
 and the “Carminative Balm” came to his ruin in that very shop. The
solution of the problem here suggested belongs to the realm of occult
science.

During the visits which Roland’s secretary paid to the unfortunate
Madame Descoings, he was struck with the cold, calm, innocent beauty
of Agathe Rouget. While consoling the widow, who, however, was too
inconsolable to carry on the business of her second deceased husband, he
married the charming girl, with the consent of her father, who hastened
to give his approval to the match. Doctor Rouget, delighted to hear that
matters were going beyond his expectations,--for his wife, on the death
of her brother, had become sole heiress of the Descoings,--rushed to
Paris, not so much to be present at the wedding as to see that the
marriage contract was drawn to suit him. The ardent and disinterested
love of citizen Bridau gave carte blanche to the perfidious doctor, who
made the most of his son-in-law’s blindness, as the following history
will show.

Madame Rouget, or, to speak more correctly, the doctor, inherited all
the property, landed and personal, of Monsieur and Madame Descoings the
elder, who died within two years of each other; and soon after that,
Rouget got the better, as we may say, of his wife, for she died at the
beginning of the year 1799. So he had vineyards and he bought farms, he
owned iron-works and he sold fleeces. His well-beloved son was stupidly
incapable of doing anything; but the father destined him for the state
in life of a land proprietor and allowed him to grow up in wealth and
silliness, certain that the lad would know as much as the wisest if he
simply let himself live and die. After 1799, the cipherers of Issoudun
put, at the very least, thirty thousand francs’ income to the doctor’s
credit. From the time of his wife’s death he led a debauched life,
though he regulated it, so to speak, and kept it within the closed doors
of his own house. This man, endowed with “strength of character,” died
in 1805, and God only knows what the townspeople of Issoudun said about
him then, and how many anecdotes they related of his horrible private
life. Jean-Jacques Rouget, whom his father, recognizing his stupidity,
had latterly treated with severity, remained a bachelor for certain
reasons, the explanation of which will form an important part of this
history. His celibacy was partly his father’s fault, as we shall see
later.

Meantime, it is well to inquire into the results of the secret vengeance
the doctor took on a daughter whom he did not recognize as his own, but
who, you must understand at once, was legitimately his. Not a person in
Issoudun had noticed one of those capricious facts that make the whole
subject of generation a vast abyss in which science flounders. Agathe
bore a strong likeness to the mother of Doctor Rouget. Just as gout
is said to skip a generation and pass from grandfather to grandson,
resemblances not uncommonly follow the same course.

In like manner, the eldest of Agathe’s children, who physically
resembled his mother, had the moral qualities of his grandfather, Doctor
Rouget. We will leave the solution of this problem to the twentieth
century, with a fine collection of microscopic animalculae; our
descendants may perhaps write as much nonsense as the scientific schools
of the nineteenth century have uttered on this mysterious and perplexing
question.

Agathe Rouget attracted the admiration of everyone by a face destined,
like that of Mary, the mother of our Lord, to continue ever virgin, even
after marriage. Her portrait, still to be seen in the atelier of Bridau,
shows a perfect oval and a clear whiteness of complexion, without the
faintest tinge of color, in spite of her golden hair. More than one
artist, looking at the pure brow, the discreet, composed mouth, the
delicate nose, the small ears, the long lashes, and the dark-blue eyes
filled with tenderness,--in short, at the whole countenance expressive
of placidity,--has asked the great artist, “Is that a copy of a
Raphael?” No man ever acted under a truer inspiration than the
minister’s secretary when he married this young girl. Agathe was an
embodiment of the ideal housekeeper brought up in the provinces and
never parted from her mother. Pious, though far from sanctimonious, she
had no other education than that given to women by the Church. Judged,
by ordinary standards, she was an accomplished wife, yet her ignorance
of life paved the way for great misfortunes. The epitaph on the Roman
matron, “She did needlework and kept the house,” gives a faithful
picture of her simple, pure, and tranquil existence.

Under the Consulate, Bridau attached himself fanatically to Napoleon,
who placed him at the head of a department in the ministry of the
interior in 1804, a year before the death of Doctor Rouget. With a
salary of twelve thousand francs and very handsome emoluments, Bridau
was quite indifferent to the scandalous settlement of the property at
Issoudun, by which Agathe was deprived of her rightful inheritance. Six
months before Doctor Rouget’s death he had sold one-half of his property
to his son, to whom the other half was bequeathed as a gift, and also in
accordance with his rights as heir. An advance of fifty thousand
francs on her inheritance, made to Agathe at the time of her marriage,
represented her share of the property of her father and mother.

Bridau idolized the Emperor, and served him with the devotion of a
Mohammedan for his prophet; striving to carry out the vast conceptions
of the modern demi-god, who, finding the whole fabric of France
destroyed, went to work to reconstruct everything. The new official
never showed fatigue, never cried “Enough.” Projects, reports, notes,
studies, he accepted all, even the hardest labors, happy in the
consciousness of aiding his Emperor. He loved him as a man, he adored
him as a sovereign, and he would never allow the least criticism of his
acts or his purposes.

From 1804 to 1808, the Bridaus lived in a handsome suite of rooms on the
Quai Voltaire, a few steps from the ministry of the interior and close
to the Tuileries. A cook and footman were the only servants of the
household during this period of Madame Bridau’s grandeur. Agathe, early
afoot, went to market with her cook. While the latter did the rooms, she
prepared the breakfast. Bridau never went to the ministry before
eleven o’clock. As long as their union lasted, his wife took the same
unwearying pleasure in preparing for him an exquisite breakfast, the
only meal he really enjoyed. At all seasons and in all weathers, Agathe
watched her husband from the window as he walked toward his office, and
never drew in her head until she had seen him turn the corner of the rue
du Bac. Then she cleared the breakfast-table herself, gave an eye to the
arrangement of the rooms, dressed for the day, played with her children
and took them to walk, or received the visits of friends; all the
while waiting in spirit for Bridau’s return. If her husband brought him
important business that had to be attended to, she would station herself
close to the writing-table in his study, silent as a statue, knitting
while he wrote, sitting up as late as he did, and going to bed only a
few moments before him. Occasionally, the pair went to some theatre,
occupying one of the ministerial boxes. On those days, they dined at
a restaurant, and the gay scenes of that establishment never ceased to
give Madame Bridau the same lively pleasure they afford to provincials
who are new to Paris. Agathe, who was obliged to accept the formal
dinners sometimes given to the head of a department in a ministry, paid
due attention to the luxurious requirements of the then mode of dress,
but she took off the rich apparel with delight when she returned home,
and resumed the simple garb of a provincial. One day in the week,
Thursday, Bridau received his friends, and he also gave a grand ball,
annually, on Shrove Tuesday.

These few words contain the whole history of their conjugal life, which
had but three events; the births of two children, born three years
apart, and the death of Bridau, who died in 1808, killed by overwork
at the very moment when the Emperor was about to appoint him
director-general, count, and councillor of state. At this period of
his reign, Napoleon was particularly absorbed in the affairs of the
interior; he overwhelmed Bridau with work, and finally wrecked the
health of that dauntless bureaucrat. The Emperor, of whom Bridau had
never asked a favor, made inquiries into his habits and fortune. Finding
that this devoted servant literally had nothing but his situation,
Napoleon recognized him as one of the incorruptible natures which raised
the character of his government and gave moral weight to it, and he
wished to surprise him by the gift of some distinguished reward. But the
effort to complete a certain work, involving immense labor, before
the departure of the Emperor for Spain caused the death of the devoted
servant, who was seized with an inflammatory fever. When the Emperor,
who remained in Paris for a few days after his return to prepare for the
campaign of 1809, was told of Bridau’s death he said: “There are men
who can never be replaced.” Struck by the spectacle of a devotion which
could receive none of the brilliant recognitions that reward a soldier,
the Emperor resolved to create an order to requite civil services, just
as he had already created the Legion of honor to reward the military.
The impression he received from the death of Bridau led him to plan
the order of the Reunion. He had not time, however, to mature this
aristocratic scheme, the recollection of which is now so completely
effaced that many of my readers may ask what were its insignia: the
order was worn with a blue ribbon. The Emperor called it the Reunion,
under the idea of uniting the order of the Golden Fleece of Spain with
the order of the Golden Fleece of Austria. “Providence,” said a Prussian
diplomatist, “took care to frustrate the profanation.”

After Bridau’s death the Emperor inquired into the circumstances of his
widow. Her two sons each received a scholarship in the Imperial Lyceum,
and the Emperor paid the whole costs of their education from his
privy purse. He gave Madame Bridau a pension of four thousand francs,
intending, no doubt, to advance the fortune of her sons in future years.

From the time of her marriage to the death of her husband, Agathe had
held no communication with Issoudun. She lost her mother just as she was
on the point of giving birth to her youngest son, and when her father,
who, as she well knew, loved her little, died, the coronation of the
Emperor was at hand, and that event gave Bridau so much additional work
that she was unwilling to leave him. Her brother, Jean-Jacques Rouget,
had not written to her since she left Issoudun. Though grieved by the
tacit repudiation of her family, Agathe had come to think seldom of
those who never thought of her. Once a year she received a letter from
her godmother, Madame Hochon, to whom she replied with commonplaces,
paying no heed to the advice which that pious and excellent woman gave
to her, disguised in cautious words.

Some time before the death of Doctor Rouget, Madame Hochon had written
to her goddaughter warning her that she would get nothing from her
father’s estate unless she gave a power of attorney to Monsieur Hochon.
Agathe was very reluctant to harass her brother. Whether it were that
Bridau thought the spoliation of his wife in accordance with the laws
and customs of Berry, or that, high-minded as he was, he shared the
magnanimity of his wife, certain it is that he would not listen to
Roguin, his notary, who advised him to take advantage of his ministerial
position to contest the deeds by which the father had deprived the
daughter of her legitimate inheritance. Husband and wife thus tacitly
sanctioned what was done at Issoudun. Nevertheless, Roguin had forced
Bridau to reflect upon the future interests of his wife which were thus
compromised. He saw that if he died before her, Agathe would be left
without property, and this led him to look into his own affairs. He
found that between 1793 and 1805 his wife and he had been obliged to use
nearly thirty thousand of the fifty thousand francs in cash which old
Rouget had given to his daughter at the time of her marriage. He at once
invested the remaining twenty thousand in the public funds, then quoted
at forty, and from this source Agathe received about two thousand francs
a year. As a widow, Madame Bridau could live suitably on an income of
six thousand francs. With provincial good sense, she thought of changing
her residence, dismissing the footman, and keeping no servant except a
cook; but her intimate friend, Madame Descoings, who insisted on being
considered her aunt, sold her own establishment and came to live with
Agathe, turning the study of the late Bridau into her bedroom.

The two widows clubbed their revenues, and so were in possession of a
joint income of twelve thousand francs a year. This seems a very
simple and natural proceeding. But nothing in life is more deserving of
attention than the things that are called natural; we are on our guard
against the unnatural and extraordinary. For this reason, you will find
men of experience--lawyers, judges, doctors, and priests--attaching
immense importance to simple matters; and they are often thought
over-scrupulous. But the serpent amid flowers is one of the finest myths
that antiquity has bequeathed for the guidance of our lives. How often
we hear fools, trying to excuse themselves in their own eyes or in the
eyes of others, exclaiming, “It was all so natural that any one would
have been taken in.”

In 1809, Madame Descoings, who never told her age, was sixty-five. In
her heyday she had been popularly called a beauty, and was now one
of those rare women whom time respects. She owed to her excellent
constitution the privilege of preserving her good looks, which, however,
would not bear close examination. She was of medium height, plump, and
fresh, with fine shoulders and a rather rosy complexion. Her blond hair,
bordering on chestnut, showed, in spite of her husband’s catastrophe,
not a tinge of gray. She loved good cheer, and liked to concoct nice
little made dishes; yet, fond as she was of eating, she also adored
the theatre and cherished a vice which she wrapped in impenetrable
mystery--she bought into lotteries. Can that be the abyss of which
mythology warns us under the fable of the Danaides and their cask?
Madame Descoings, like other women who are lucky enough to keep young
for many years, spend rather too much upon her dress; but aside from
these trifling defects she was the pleasantest of women to live with.
Of every one’s opinion, never opposing anybody, her kindly and
communicative gayety gave pleasure to all. She had, moreover, a Parisian
quality which charmed the retired clerks and elderly merchants of her
circle,--she could take and give a jest. If she did not marry a third
time it was no doubt the fault of the times. During the wars of the
Empire, marrying men found rich and handsome girls too easily to trouble
themselves about women of sixty.

Madame Descoings, always anxious to cheer Madame Bridau, often took the
latter to the theatre, or to drive; prepared excellent little dinners
for her delectation, and even tried to marry her to her own son by her
first husband, Bixiou. Alas! to do this, she was forced to reveal a
terrible secret, carefully kept by her, by her late husband, and by
her notary. The young and beautiful Madame Descoings, who passed for
thirty-six years old, had a son who was thirty-five, named Bixiou,
already a widower, a major in the Twenty-Fourth Infantry, who
subsequently perished at Lutzen, leaving behind him an only son. Madame
Descoings, who only saw her grandson secretly, gave out that he was the
son of the first wife of her first husband. The revelation was partly
a prudential act; for this grandson was being educated with Madame
Bridau’s sons at the Imperial Lyceum, where he had a half-scholarship.
The lad, who was clever and shrewd at school, soon after made himself a
great reputation as draughtsman and designer, and also as a wit.

Agathe, who lived only for her children, declined to re-marry, as much
from good sense as from fidelity to her husband. But it is easier for a
woman to be a good wife than to be a good mother. A widow has two
tasks before her, whose duties clash: she is a mother, and yet she must
exercise parental authority. Few women are firm enough to understand and
practise this double duty. Thus it happened that Agathe, notwithstanding
her many virtues, was the innocent cause of great unhappiness. In the
first place, through her lack of intelligence and the blind confidence
to which such noble natures are prone, Agathe fell a victim to Madame
Descoings, who brought a terrible misfortune on the family. That worthy
soul was nursing up a combination of three numbers called a “trey” in a
lottery, and lotteries give no credit to their customers. As manager of
the joint household, she was able to pay up her stakes with the money
intended for their current expenses, and she went deeper and deeper into
debt, with the hope of ultimately enriching her grandson Bixiou, her
dear Agathe, and the little Bridaus. When the debts amounted to ten
thousand francs, she increased her stakes, trusting that her favorite
trey, which had not turned up in nine years, would come at last, and
fill to overflowing the abysmal deficit.

From that moment the debt rolled up rapidly. When it reached twenty
thousand francs, Madame Descoings lost her head, still failing to win
the trey. She tried to mortgage her own property to pay her niece, but
Roguin, who was her notary, showed her the impossibility of carrying out
that honorable intention. The late Doctor Rouget had laid hold of the
property of the brother-in-law after the grocer’s execution, and had,
as it were, disinherited Madame Descoings by securing to her a
life-interest on the property of his own son, Jean-Jacques Rouget. No
money-lender would think of advancing twenty thousand francs to a woman
sixty-six years of age, on an annuity of about four thousand, at a
period when ten per cent could easily be got for an investment. So one
morning Madame Descoings fell at the feet of her niece, and with sobs
confessed the state of things. Madame Bridau did not reproach her; she
sent away the footman and cook, sold all but the bare necessities of her
furniture, sold also three-fourths of her government funds, paid off the
debts, and bade farewell to her _appartement_.




CHAPTER II

One of the worst corners in all Paris is undoubtedly that part of the
rue Mazarin which lies between the rue Guenegard and its junction with
the rue de Seine, behind the palace of the Institute. The high gray
walls of the college and of the library which Cardinal Mazarin presented
to the city of Paris, and which the French Academy was in after days to
inhabit, cast chill shadows over this angle of the street, where the sun
seldom shines, and the north wind blows. The poor ruined widow came to
live on the third floor of a house standing at this damp, dark, cold
corner. Opposite, rose the Institute buildings, in which were the
dens of ferocious animals known to the bourgeoisie under the name of
artists,--under that of tyro, or rapin, in the studios. Into these
dens they enter rapins, but they may come forth prix de Rome. The
transformation does not take place without extraordinary uproar and
disturbance at the time of year when the examinations are going on, and
the competitors are shut up in their cells. To win a prize, they were
obliged, within a given time, to make, if a sculptor, a clay model; if a
painter, a picture such as may be seen at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts; if
a musician, a cantata; if an architect, the plans for a public building.
At the time when we are penning the words, this menagerie has already
been removed from these cold and cheerless buildings, and taken to the
elegant Palais des Beaux-Arts, which stands near by.

From the windows of Madame Bridau’s new abode, a glance could penetrate
the depths of those melancholy barred cages. To the north, the view was
shut in by the dome of the Institute; looking up the street, the only
distraction to the eye was a file of hackney-coaches, which stood at
the upper end of the rue Mazarin. After a while, the widow put boxes of
earth in front of her windows, and cultivated those aerial gardens that
police regulations forbid, though their vegetable products purify the
atmosphere. The house, which backed up against another fronting on the
rue de Seine, was necessarily shallow, and the staircase wound round
upon itself. The third floor was the last. Three windows to three rooms,
namely, a dining-room, a small salon, and a chamber on one side of the
landing; on the other, a little kitchen, and two single rooms; above, an
immense garret without partitions. Madame Bridau chose this lodging for
three reasons: economy, for it cost only four hundred francs a year,
so that she took a lease of it for nine years; proximity to her sons’
school, the Imperial Lyceum being at a short distance; thirdly, because
it was in the quarter to which she was used.

The inside of the _appartement_ was in keeping with the general look of
the house. The dining-room, hung with a yellow paper covered with little
green flowers, and floored with tiles that were not glazed, contained
nothing that was not strictly necessary,--namely, a table, two
sideboards, and six chairs, brought from the other _appartement_. The
salon was adorned with an Aubusson carpet given to Bridau when the
ministry of the interior was refurnished. To the furniture of this
room the widow added one of those commonplace mahogany sofas with the
Egyptian heads that Jacob Desmalter manufactured by the gross in 1806,
covering them with a silken green stuff bearing a design of white
geometric circles. Above this piece of furniture hung a portrait
of Bridau, done in pastel by the hand of an amateur, which at once
attracted the eye. Though art might have something to say against it,
no one could fail to recognize the firmness of the noble and obscure
citizen upon that brow. The serenity of the eyes, gentle, yet proud,
was well given; the sagacious mind, to which the prudent lips bore
testimony, the frank smile, the atmosphere of the man of whom the
Emperor had said, “Justum et tenacem,” had all been caught, if not with
talent, at least with fidelity. Studying that face, an observer could
see that the man had done his duty. His countenance bore signs of
the incorruptibility which we attribute to several men who served the
Republic. On the opposite wall, over a card-table, flashed a picture
of the Emperor in brilliant colors, done by Vernet; Napoleon was riding
rapidly, attended by his escort.

Agathe had bestowed upon herself two large birdcages; one filled with
canaries, the other with Java sparrows. She had given herself up to this
juvenile fancy since the loss of her husband, irreparable to her, as,
in fact, it was to many others. By the end of three months, her widowed
chamber had become what it was destined to remain until the appointed
day when she left it forever,--a litter of confusion which words are
powerless to describe. Cats were domiciled on the sofa. The canaries,
occasionally let loose, left their commas on the furniture. The poor
dear woman scattered little heaps of millet and bits of chickweed about
the room, and put tidbits for the cats in broken saucers. Garments
lay everywhere. The room breathed of the provinces and of constancy.
Everything that once belonged to Bridau was scrupulously preserved.
Even the implements in his desk received the care which the widow of a
paladin might have bestowed upon her husband’s armor. One slight detail
here will serve to bring the tender devotion of this woman before the
reader’s mind. She had wrapped up a pen and sealed the package, on which
she wrote these words, “Last pen used by my dear husband.” The cup from
which he drank his last draught was on the fireplace; caps and false
hair were tossed, at a later period, over the glass globes which covered
these precious relics. After Bridau’s death not a trace of coquetry, not
even a woman’s ordinary care of her person, was left in the young widow
of thirty-five. Parted from the only man she had ever known, esteemed,
and loved, from one who had never caused her the slightest unhappiness,
she was no longer conscious of her womanhood; all things were as nothing
to her; she no longer even thought of her dress. Nothing was ever more
simply done or more complete than this laying down of conjugal happiness
and personal charm. Some human beings obtain through love the power
of transferring their self--their I--to the being of another; and when
death takes that other, no life of their own is possible for them.

Agathe, who now lived only for her children, was infinitely sad at the
thought of the privations this financial ruin would bring upon them.
From the time of her removal to the rue Mazarin a shade of melancholy
came upon her face, which made it very touching. She hoped a little in
the Emperor; but the Emperor at that time could do no more than he was
already doing; he was giving three hundred francs a year to each child
from his privy purse, besides the scholarships.

As for the brilliant Descoings, she occupied an _appartement_ on the
second floor similar to that of her niece above her. She had made
Madame Bridau an assignment of three thousand francs out of her annuity.
Roguin, the notary, attended to this in Madame Bridau’s interest; but it
would take seven years of such slow repayment to make good the loss.
The Descoings, thus reduced to an income of twelve hundred francs,
lived with her niece in a small way. These excellent but timid creatures
employed a woman-of-all-work for the morning hours only. Madame
Descoings, who liked to cook, prepared the dinner. In the evenings a few
old friends, persons employed at the ministry who owed their places to
Bridau, came for a game of cards with the two widows. Madame Descoings
still cherished her trey, which she declared was obstinate about turning
up. She expected, by one grand stroke, to repay the enforced loan she
had made upon her niece. She was fonder of the little Bridaus than she
was of her grandson Bixiou,--partly from a sense of the wrong she had
done them, partly because she felt the kindness of her niece, who, under
her worst deprivations, never uttered a word of reproach. So Philippe
and Joseph were cossetted, and the old gambler in the Imperial Lottery
of France (like others who have a vice or a weakness to atone for)
cooked them nice little dinners with plenty of sweets. Later on,
Philippe and Joseph could extract from her pocket, with the utmost
facility, small sums of money, which the younger used for pencils,
paper, charcoal and prints, the elder to buy tennis-shoes, marbles,
twine, and pocket-knives. Madame Descoings’s passion forced her to be
content with fifty francs a month for her domestic expenses, so as to
gamble with the rest.

On the other hand, Madame Bridau, motherly love, kept her expenses down
to the same sum. By way of penance for her former over-confidence, she
heroically cut off her own little enjoyments. As with other timid souls
of limited intelligence, one shock to her feelings rousing her distrust
led her to exaggerate a defect in her character until it assumed the
consistency of a virtue. The Emperor, she said to herself, might forget
them; he might die in battle; her pension, at any rate, ceased with her
life. She shuddered at the risk her children ran of being left alone in
the world without means. Quite incapable of understanding Roguin when he
explained to her that in seven years Madame Descoings’s assignment
would replace the money she had sold out of the Funds, she persisted in
trusting neither the notary nor her aunt, nor even the government; she
believed in nothing but herself and the privations she was practising.
By laying aside three thousand francs every year from her pension, she
would have thirty thousand francs at the end of ten years; which would
give fifteen hundred a year to her children. At thirty-six, she might
expect to live twenty years longer; and if she kept to the same system
of economy she might leave to each child enough for the bare necessaries
of life.

Thus the two widows passed from hollow opulence to voluntary
poverty,--one under the pressure of a vice, the other through the
promptings of the purest virtue. None of these petty details are useless
in teaching the lesson which ought to be learned from this present
history, drawn as it is from the most commonplace interests of life, but
whose bearings are, it may be, only the more widespread. The view from
the windows into the student dens; the tumult of the rapins below; the
necessity of looking up at the sky to escape the miserable sights of the
damp angle of the street; the presence of that portrait, full of soul
and grandeur despite the workmanship of an amateur painter; the sight of
the rich colors, now old and harmonious, in that calm and placid home;
the preference of the mother for her eldest child; her opposition to
the tastes of the younger; in short, the whole body of facts and
circumstances which make the preamble of this history are perhaps the
generating causes to which we owe Joseph Bridau, one of the greatest
painters of the modern French school of art.

Philippe, the elder of the two sons, was strikingly like his mother.
Though a blond lad, with blue eyes, he had the daring look which is
readily taken for intrepidity and courage. Old Claparon, who entered the
ministry of the interior at the same time as Bridau, and was one of the
faithful friends who played whist every night with the two widows, used
to say of Philippe two or three times a month, giving him a tap on the
cheek, “Here’s a young rascal who’ll stand to his guns!” The boy, thus
stimulated, naturally and out of bravado, assumed a resolute manner.
That turn once given to his character, he became very adroit at all
bodily exercises; his fights at the Lyceum taught him the endurance and
contempt for pain which lays the foundation of military valor. He also
acquired, very naturally, a distaste for study; public education being
unable to solve the difficult problem of developing “pari passu” the
body and the mind.

Agathe believed that the purely physical resemblance which Philippe bore
to her carried with it a moral likeness; and she confidently expected
him to show at a future day her own delicacy of feeling, heightened by
the vigor of manhood. Philippe was fifteen years old when his mother
moved into the melancholy _appartement_ in the rue Mazarin; and the
winning ways of a lad of that age went far to confirm the maternal
beliefs. Joseph, three years younger, was like his father, but only on
the defective side. In the first place, his thick black hair was always
in disorder, no matter what pains were taken with it; while Philippe’s,
notwithstanding his vivacity, was invariably neat. Then, by some
mysterious fatality, Joseph could not keep his clothes clean; dress him
in new clothes, and he immediately made them look like old ones. The
elder, on the other hand, took care of his things out of mere vanity.
Unconsciously, the mother acquired a habit of scolding Joseph and
holding up his brother as an example to him. Agathe did not treat the
two children alike; when she went to fetch them from school, the thought
in her mind as to Joseph always was, “What sort of state shall I
find him in?” These trifles drove her heart into the gulf of maternal
preference.

No one among the very ordinary persons who made the society of the two
widows--neither old Du Bruel nor old Claparon, nor Desroches the father,
nor even the Abbe Loraux, Agathe’s confessor--noticed Joseph’s faculty
for observation. Absorbed in the line of his own tastes, the future
colorist paid no attention to anything that concerned himself. During
his childhood this disposition was so like torpor that his father grew
uneasy about him. The remarkable size of the head and the width of the
brow roused a fear that the child might be liable to water on the brain.
His distressful face, whose originality was thought ugliness by those
who had no eye for the moral value of a countenance, wore rather a
sullen expression during his childhood. The features, which developed
later in life, were pinched, and the close attention the child paid to
what went on about him still further contracted them. Philippe flattered
his mother’s vanity, but Joseph won no compliments. Philippe sparkled
with the clever sayings and lively answers that lead parents to believe
their boys will turn out remarkable men; Joseph was taciturn, and a
dreamer. The mother hoped great things of Philippe, and expected nothing
of Joseph.

Joseph’s predilection for art was developed by a very commonplace
incident. During the Easter holidays of 1812, as he was coming home from
a walk in the Tuileries with his brother and Madame Descoings, he saw
a pupil drawing a caricature of some professor on the wall of the
Institute, and stopped short with admiration at the charcoal sketch,
which was full of satire. The next day the child stood at the window
watching the pupils as they entered the building by the door on the
rue Mazarin; then he ran downstairs and slipped furtively into the
long courtyard of the Institute, full of statues, busts, half-finished
marbles, plasters, and baked clays; at all of which he gazed feverishly,
for his instinct was awakened, and his vocation stirred within him. He
entered a room on the ground-floor, the door of which was half open; and
there he saw a dozen young men drawing from a statue, who at once began
to make fun of him.

“Hi! little one,” cried the first to see him, taking the crumbs of his
bread and scattering them at the child.

“Whose child is he?”

“Goodness, how ugly!”

For a quarter of an hour Joseph stood still and bore the brunt of
much teasing in the atelier of the great sculptor, Chaudet. But after
laughing at him for a time, the pupils were struck with his persistency
and with the expression of his face. They asked him what he wanted.
Joseph answered that he wished to know how to draw; thereupon they all
encouraged him. Won by such friendliness, the child told them he was
Madame Bridau’s son.

“Oh! if you are Madame Bridau’s son,” they cried, from all parts of the
room, “you will certainly be a great man. Long live the son of Madame
Bridau! Is your mother pretty? If you are a sample of her, she must be
stylish!”

“Ha! you want to be an artist?” said the eldest pupil, coming up to
Joseph, “but don’t you know that that requires pluck; you’ll have to
bear all sorts of trials,--yes, trials,--enough to break your legs and
arms and soul and body. All the fellows you see here have gone through
regular ordeals. That one, for instance, he went seven days without
eating! Let me see, now, if you can be an artist.”

He took one of the child’s arms and stretched it straight up in the air;
then he placed the other arm as if Joseph were in the act of delivering
a blow with his fist.

“Now that’s what we call the telegraph trial,” said the pupil. “If you
can stand like that, without lowering or changing the position of your
arms for a quarter of an hour, then you’ll have proved yourself a plucky
one.”

“Courage, little one, courage!” cried all the rest. “You must suffer if
you want to be an artist.”

Joseph, with the good faith of his thirteen years, stood motionless for
five minutes, all the pupils gazing solemnly at him.

“There! you are moving,” cried one.

“Steady, steady, confound you!” cried another.

“The Emperor Napoleon stood a whole month as you see him there,” said a
third, pointing to the fine statue by Chaudet, which was in the room.

That statue, which represents the Emperor standing with the Imperial
sceptre in his hand, was torn down in 1814 from the column it surmounted
so well.

At the end of ten minutes the sweat stood in drops on Joseph’s forehead.
At that moment a bald-headed little man, pale and sickly in appearance,
entered the atelier, where respectful silence reigned at once.

“What you are about, you urchins?” he exclaimed, as he looked at the
youthful martyr.

“That is a good little fellow, who is posing,” said the tall pupil who
had placed Joseph.

“Are you not ashamed to torture a poor child in that way?” said Chaudet,
lowering Joseph’s arms. “How long have you been standing there?” he
asked the boy, giving him a friendly little pat on the cheek.

“A quarter of an hour.”

“What brought you here?”

“I want to be an artist.”

“Where do you belong? where do you come from?”

“From mamma’s house.”

“Oh! mamma!” cried the pupils.

“Silence at the easels!” cried Chaudet. “Who is your mamma?”

“She is Madame Bridau. My papa, who is dead, was a friend of the
Emperor; and if you will teach me to draw, the Emperor will pay all you
ask for it.”

“His father was head of a department at the ministry of the Interior,”
 exclaimed Chaudet, struck by a recollection. “So you want to be an
artist, at your age?”

“Yes, monsieur.”

“Well, come here just as much as you like; we’ll amuse you. Give him a
board, and paper, and chalks, and let him alone. You are to know, you
young scamps, that his father did me a service. Here, Corde-a-puits,
go and get some cakes and sugar-plums,” he said to the pupil who had
tortured Joseph, giving him some small change. “We’ll see if you are to
be artist by the way you gobble up the dainties,” added the sculptor,
chucking Joseph under the chin.

Then he went round examining the pupils’ works, followed by the child,
who looked and listened, and tried to understand him. The sweets were
brought, Chaudet, himself, the child, and the whole studio all had
their teeth in them; and Joseph was petted quite as much as he had
been teased. The whole scene, in which the rough play and real heart of
artists were revealed, and which the boy instinctively understood, made
a great impression on his mind. The apparition of the sculptor,--for
whom the Emperor’s protection opened a way to future glory, closed soon
after by his premature death,--was like a vision to little Joseph. The
child said nothing to his mother about this adventure, but he spent two
hours every Sunday and every Thursday in Chaudet’s atelier. From
that time forth, Madame Descoings, who humored the fancies of the two
cherubim, kept Joseph supplied with pencils and red chalks, prints and
drawing-paper. At school, the future colorist sketched his masters,
drew his comrades, charcoaled the dormitories, and showed surprising
assiduity in the drawing-class. Lemire, the drawing-master, struck not
only with the lad’s inclination but also with his actual progress,
came to tell Madame Bridau of her son’s faculty. Agathe, like a
true provincial, who knows as little of art as she knows much of
housekeeping, was terrified. When Lemire left her, she burst into tears.

“Ah!” she cried, when Madame Descoings went to ask what was the matter.
“What is to become of me! Joseph, whom I meant to make a government
clerk, whose career was all marked out for him at the ministry of the
interior, where, protected by his father’s memory, he might have risen
to be chief of a division before he was twenty-five, he, my boy, he
wants to be a painter,--a vagabond! I always knew that child would give
me nothing but trouble.”

Madame Descoings confessed that for several months past she had
encouraged Joseph’s passion, aiding and abetting his Sunday and Thursday
visits to the Institute. At the Salon, to which she had taken him, the
little fellow had shown an interest in the pictures, which was, she
declared, nothing short of miraculous.

“If he understands painting at thirteen, my dear,” she said, “your
Joseph will be a man of genius.”

“Yes; and see what genius did for his father,--killed him with overwork
at forty!”

At the close of autumn, just as Joseph was entering his fourteenth year,
Agathe, contrary to Madame Descoings’s entreaties, went to see Chaudet,
and requested that he would cease to debauch her son. She found the
sculptor in a blue smock, modelling his last statue; he received the
widow of the man who formerly had served him at a critical moment,
rather roughly; but, already at death’s door, he was struggling
with passionate ardor to do in a few hours work he could hardly have
accomplished in several months. As Madame Bridau entered, he had just
found an effect long sought for, and was handling his tools and clay
with spasmodic jerks and movements that seemed to the ignorant Agathe
like those of a maniac. At any other time Chaudet would have laughed;
but now, as he heard the mother bewailing the destiny he had opened to
her child, abusing art, and insisting that Joseph should no longer be
allowed to enter the atelier, he burst into a holy wrath.

“I was under obligations to your deceased husband, I wished to help his
son, to watch his first steps in the noblest of all careers,” he cried.
“Yes, madame, learn, if you do not know it, that a great artist is a
king, and more than a king; he is happier, he is independent, he lives
as he likes, he reigns in the world of fancy. Your son has a glorious
future before him. Faculties like his are rare; they are only disclosed
at his age in such beings as the Giottos, Raphaels, Titians, Rubens,
Murillos,--for, in my opinion, he will make a better painter than
sculptor. God of heaven! if I had such a son, I should be as happy as
the Emperor is to have given himself the King of Rome. Well, you are
mistress of your child’s fate. Go your own way, madame; make him a fool,
a miserable quill-driver, tie him to a desk, and you’ve murdered him!
But I hope, in spite if all your efforts, that he will stay an artist. A
true vocation is stronger than all the obstacles that can be opposed to
it. Vocation! why the very word means a call; ay, the election of God
himself! You will make your child unhappy, that’s all.” He flung the
clay he no longer needed violently into a tub, and said to his model,
“That will do for to-day.”

Agathe raised her eyes and saw, in a corner of the atelier where her
glance had not before penetrated, a nude woman sitting on a stool, the
sight of whom drove her away horrified.

“You are not to have the little Bridau here any more,” said Chaudet to
his pupils, “it annoys his mother.”

“Eugh!” they all cried, as Agathe closed the door.

No sooner did the students of sculpture and painting find out that
Madame Bridau did not wish her son to be an artist, than their whole
happiness centred on getting Joseph among them. In spite of a promise
not to go to the Institute which his mother exacted from him, the
child often slipped into Regnauld the painter’s studio, where he was
encouraged to daub canvas. When the widow complained that the bargain
was not kept, Chaudet’s pupils assured her that Regnauld was not
Chaudet, and they hadn’t the bringing up of her son, with other
impertinences; and the atrocious young scamps composed a song with a
hundred and thirty-seven couplets on Madame Bridau.

On the evening of that sad day Agathe refused to play at cards, and sat
on her sofa plunged in such grief that the tears stood in her handsome
eyes.

“What is the matter, Madame Bridau?” asked old Claparon.

“She thinks her boy will have to beg his bread because he has got the
bump of painting,” said Madame Descoings; “but, for my part, I am not
the least uneasy about the future of my step-son, little Bixiou, who has
a passion for drawing. Men are born to get on.”

“You are right,” said the hard and severe Desroches, who, in spite of
his talents, had never himself got on in the position of assistant-head
of a department. “Happily I have only one son; otherwise, with my
eighteen hundred francs a year, and a wife who makes barely twelve
hundred out of her stamped-paper office, I don’t know what would become
of me. I have just placed my boy as under-clerk to a lawyer; he gets
twenty-five francs a month and his breakfast. I give him as much more,
and he dines and sleeps at home. That’s all he gets; he must manage for
himself, but he’ll make his way. I keep the fellow harder at work than
if he were at school, and some day he will be a barrister. When I give
him money to go to the theatre, he is as happy as a king and kisses me.
Oh, I keep a tight hand on him, and he renders me an account of all he
spends. You are too good to your children, Madame Bridau; if your son
wants to go through hardships and privations, let him; they’ll make a
man of him.”

“As for my boy,” said Du Bruel, a former chief of a division, who had
just retired on a pension, “he is only sixteen; his mother dotes on him;
but I shouldn’t listen to his choosing a profession at his age,--a mere
fancy, a notion that may pass off. In my opinion, boys should be guided
and controlled.”

“Ah, monsieur! you are rich, you are a man, and you have but one son,”
 said Agathe.

“Faith!” said Claparon, “children do tyrannize over us--over our hearts,
I mean. Mine makes me furious; he has nearly ruined me, and now I won’t
have anything to do with him--it’s a sort of independence. Well, he is
the happier for it, and so am I. That fellow was partly the cause of
his mother’s death. He chose to be a commercial traveller; and the trade
just suited him, for he was no sooner in the house than he wanted to
be out of it; he couldn’t keep in one place, and he wouldn’t learn
anything. All I ask of God is that I may die before he dishonors my
name. Those who have no children lose many pleasures, but they escape
great sufferings.”

“And these men are fathers!” thought Agathe, weeping anew.

“What I am trying to show you, my dear Madame Bridau, is that you had
better let your boy be a painter; if not, you will only waste your
time.”

“If you were able to coerce him,” said the sour Desroches, “I should
advise you to oppose his tastes; but weak as I see you are, you had
better let him daub if he likes.”

“Console yourself, Agathe,” said Madame Descoings, “Joseph will turn out
a great man.”

After this discussion, which was like all discussions, the widow’s
friends united in giving her one and the same advice; which advice did
not in the least relieve her anxieties. They advised her to let Joseph
follow his bent.

“If he doesn’t turn out a genius,” said Du Bruel, who always tried to
please Agathe, “you can then get him into some government office.”

When Madame Descoings accompanied the old clerks to the door she assured
them, at the head of the stairs, that they were “Grecian sages.”

“Madame Bridau ought to be glad her son is willing to do anything,” said
Claparon.

“Besides,” said Desroches, “if God preserves the Emperor, Joseph will
always be looked after. Why should she worry?”

“She is timid about everything that concerns her children,” answered
Madame Descoings. “Well, my good girl,” she said, returning to Agathe,
“you see they are unanimous; why are you still crying?”

“If it was Philippe, I should have no anxiety. But you don’t know what
goes on in that atelier; they have naked women!”

“I hope they keep good fires,” said Madame Descoings.

A few days after this, the disasters of the retreat from Moscow became
known. Napoleon returned to Paris to organize fresh troops, and to ask
further sacrifices from the country. The poor mother was then plunged
into very different anxieties. Philippe, who was tired of school, wanted
to serve under the Emperor; he saw a review at the Tuileries,--the
last Napoleon ever held,--and he became infatuated with the idea of a
soldier’s life. In those days military splendor, the show of uniforms,
the authority of epaulets, offered irresistible seductions to a certain
style of youth. Philippe thought he had the same vocation for the army
that his brother Joseph showed for art. Without his mother’s knowledge,
he wrote a petition to the Emperor, which read as follows:--

  Sire,--I am the son of your Bridau; eighteen years of age, five
  feet six inches; I have good legs, a good constitution, and wish
  to be one of your soldiers. I ask you to let me enter the army,
  etc.

Within twenty-four hours, the Emperor had sent Philippe to the Imperial
Lyceum at Saint-Cyr, and six months later, in November, 1813, he
appointed him sub-lieutenant in a regiment of cavalry. Philippe spent
the greater part of that winter in cantonments, but as soon as he knew
how to ride a horse he was dispatched to the front, and went eagerly.
During the campaign in France he was made a lieutenant, after an affair
at the outposts where his bravery had saved his colonel’s life. The
Emperor named him captain at the battle of La Fere-Champenoise, and took
him on his staff. Inspired by such promotion, Philippe won the cross at
Montereau. He witnessed Napoleon’s farewell at Fontainebleau, raved at
the sight, and refused to serve the Bourbons. When he returned to his
mother, in July, 1814, he found her ruined.

Joseph’s scholarship was withdrawn after the holidays, and Madame
Bridau, whose pension came from the Emperor’s privy purse, vainly
entreated that it might be inscribed on the rolls of the ministry of the
interior. Joseph, more of a painter than ever, was delighted with the
turn of events, and entreated his mother to let him go to Monsieur
Regnauld, promising to earn his own living. He declared he was quite
sufficiently advanced in the second class to get on without rhetoric.
Philippe, a captain at nineteen and decorated, who had, moreover, served
the Emperor as an aide-de-camp in two battles, flattered the mother’s
vanity immensely. Coarse, blustering, and without real merit beyond the
vulgar bravery of a cavalry officer, he was to her mind a man of genius;
whereas Joseph, puny and sickly, with unkempt hair and absent mind,
seeking peace, loving quiet, and dreaming of an artist’s glory, would
only bring her, she thought, worries and anxieties.

The winter of 1814-1815 was a lucky one for Joseph. Secretly encouraged
by Madame Descoings and Bixiou, a pupil of Gros, he went to work in
the celebrated atelier of that painter, whence a vast variety of
talent issued in its day, and there he formed the closest intimacy with
Schinner. The return from Elba came; Captain Bridau joined the Emperor
at Lyons, accompanied him to the Tuileries, and was appointed to the
command of a squadron in the dragoons of the Guard. After the battle of
Waterloo--in which he was slightly wounded, and where he won the cross
of an officer of the Legion of honor--he happened to be near Marshal
Davoust at Saint-Denis, and was not with the army of the Loire. In
consequence of this, and through Davoust’s intercession, his cross and
his rank were secured to him, but he was placed on half-pay.

Joseph, anxious about his future, studied all through this period
with an ardor which several times made him ill in the midst of these
tumultuous events.

“It is the smell of the paints,” Agathe said to Madame Descoings. “He
ought to give up a business so injurious to his health.”

However, all Agathe’s anxieties were at this time for her son the
lieutenant-colonel. When she saw him again in 1816, reduced from the
salary of nine thousand francs (paid to a commander in the dragoons of
the Imperial Guard) to a half-pay of three hundred francs a month, she
fitted up her attic rooms for him, and spent her savings in doing so.
Philippe was one of the faithful Bonapartes of the cafe Lemblin, that
constitutional Boeotia; he acquired the habits, manners, style, and life
of a half-pay officer; indeed, like any other young man of twenty-one,
he exaggerated them, vowed in good earnest a mortal enmity to the
Bourbons, never reported himself at the War department, and even refused
opportunities which were offered to him for employment in the infantry
with his rank of lieutenant-colonel. In his mother’s eyes, Philippe
seemed in all this to be displaying a noble character.

“The father himself could have done no more,” she said.

Philippe’s half-pay sufficed him; he cost nothing at home, whereas
all Joseph’s expenses were paid by the two widows. From that moment,
Agathe’s preference for Philippe was openly shown. Up to that time it
had been secret; but the persecution of this faithful servant of the
Emperor, the recollection of the wound received by her cherished son,
his courage in adversity, which, voluntary though it were, seemed to
her a glorious adversity, drew forth all Agathe’s tenderness. The one
sentence, “He is unfortunate,” explained and justified everything.
Joseph himself,--with the innate simplicity which superabounds in the
artist-soul in its opening years, and who was, moreover, brought up to
admire his big brother,--so far from being hurt by the preference of
their mother, encouraged it by sharing her worship of the hero who
had carried Napoleon’s orders on two battlefields, and was wounded at
Waterloo. How could he doubt the superiority of the grand brother,
whom he had beheld in the green and gold uniform of the dragoons of the
Guard, commanding his squadron on the Champ de Mars?

Agathe, notwithstanding this preference, was an excellent mother. She
loved Joseph, though not blindly; she simply was unable to understand
him. Joseph adored his mother; Philippe let his mother adore him.
Towards her, the dragoon softened his military brutality; but he never
concealed the contempt he felt for Joseph,--expressing it, however, in
a friendly way. When he looked at his brother, weak and sickly as he
was at seventeen years of age, shrunken with determined toil, and
over-weighted with his powerful head, he nicknamed him “Cub.” Philippe’s
patronizing manners would have wounded any one less carelessly
indifferent than the artist, who had, moreover, a firm belief in the
goodness of heart which soldiers hid, he thought, beneath a brutal
exterior. Joseph did not yet know, poor boy, that soldiers of genius are
as gentle and courteous in manner as other superior men in any walk of
life. All genius is alike, wherever found.

“Poor boy!” said Philippe to his mother, “we mustn’t plague him; let him
do as he likes.”

To his mother’s eyes the colonel’s contempt was a mark of fraternal
affection.

“Philippe will always love and protect his brother,” she thought to
herself.




CHAPTER III

In 1816, Joseph obtained his mother’s permission to convert the garret
which adjoined his attic room into an atelier, and Madame Descoings gave
him a little money for the indispensable requirements of the painter’s
trade;--in the minds of the two widows, the art of painting was nothing
but a trade. With the feeling and ardor of his vocation, the lad himself
arranged his humble atelier. Madame Descoings persuaded the owner of the
house to put a skylight in the roof. The garret was turned into a vast
hall painted in chocolate-color by Joseph himself. On the walls he hung
a few sketches. Agathe contributed, not without reluctance, an iron
stove; so that her son might be able to work at home, without, however,
abandoning the studio of Gros, nor that of Schinner.

The constitutional party, supported chiefly by officers on half-pay
and the Bonapartists, were at this time inciting “emeutes” around the
Chamber of Deputies, on behalf of the Charter, though no one actually
wanted it. Several conspiracies were brewing. Philippe, who dabbled
in them, was arrested, and then released for want of proof; but the
minister of war cut short his half-pay by putting him on the active
list,--a step which might be called a form of discipline. France was no
longer safe; Philippe was liable to fall into some trap laid for him by
spies,--provocative agents, as they were called, being much talked of in
those days.

While Philippe played billiards in disaffected cafes, losing his time
and acquiring the habit of wetting his whistle with “little glasses” of
all sorts of liquors. Agathe lived in mortal terror for the safety of
the great man of the family. The Grecian sages were too much accustomed
to wend their nightly way up Madame Bridau’s staircase, finding the two
widows ready and waiting, and hearing from them all the news of their
day, ever to break up the habit of coming to the green salon for their
game of cards. The ministry of the interior, though purged of its former
_employes_ in 1816, had retained Claparon, one of those cautious men,
who whisper the news of the “Moniteur,” adding invariably, “Don’t quote
me.” Desroches, who had retired from active service some time after old
Du Bruel, was still battling for his pension. The three friends, who
were witnesses of Agathe’s distress, advised her to send the colonel to
travel in foreign countries.

“They talk about conspiracies, and your son, with his disposition,
will be certain to fall a victim in some of them; there is plenty of
treachery in these days.”

“Philippe is cut from the wood the Emperor made into marshals,” said
Du Bruel, in a low voice, looking cautiously about him; “and he mustn’t
give up his profession. Let him serve in the East, in India--”

“Think of his health,” said Agathe.

“Why doesn’t he get some place, or business?” said old Desroches; “there
are plenty of private offices to be had. I am going as head of a bureau
in an insurance company, as soon as I have got my pension.”

“Philippe is a soldier; he would not like to be any thing else,” said
the warlike Agathe.

“Then he ought to have the sense to ask for employment--”

“And serve _these others_!” cried the widow. “Oh! I will never give him
that advice.”

“You are wrong,” said Du Bruel. “My son has just got an appointment
through the Duc de Navarreins. The Bourbons are very good to those
who are sincere in rallying to them. Your son could be appointed
lieutenant-colonel to a regiment.”

“They only appoint nobles in the cavalry. Philippe would never rise to
be a colonel,” said Madame Descoings.

Agathe, much alarmed, entreated Philippe to travel abroad, and put
himself at the service of some foreign power who, she thought, would
gladly welcome a staff officer of the Emperor.

“Serve a foreign nation!” cried Philippe, with horror.

Agathe kissed her son with enthusiasm.

“His father all over!” she exclaimed.

“He is right,” said Joseph. “France is too proud of her heroes to let
them be heroic elsewhere. Napoleon may return once more.”

However, to satisfy his mother, Philippe took up the dazzling idea of
joining General Lallemand in the United States, and helping him to found
what was called the Champ d’Asile, one of the most disastrous swindles
that ever appeared under the name of national subscription. Agathe gave
ten thousand francs to start her son, and she went to Havre to see him
off. By the end of 1817, she had accustomed herself to live on the six
hundred francs a year which remained to her from her property in the
Funds; then, by a lucky chance, she made a good investment of the ten
thousand francs she still kept of her savings, from which she obtained
an interest of seven per cent. Joseph wished to emulate his mother’s
devotion. He dressed like a bailiff; wore the commonest shoes and blue
stockings; denied himself gloves, and burned charcoal; he lived on bread
and milk and Brie cheese. The poor lad got no sympathy, except from
Madame Descoings, and from Bixiou, his student-friend and comrade, who
was then making those admirable caricatures of his, and filling a small
office in the ministry.

“With what joy I welcomed the summer of 1818!” said Joseph Bridau
in after-years, relating his troubles; “the sun saved me the cost of
charcoal.”

As good a colorist by this time as Gros himself, Joseph now went to his
master for consultation only. He was already meditating a tilt against
classical traditions, and Grecian conventionalities, in short, against
the leading-strings which held down an art to which Nature _as she is_
belongs, in the omnipotence of her creations and her imagery. Joseph
made ready for a struggle which, from the day when he first exhibited in
the Salon, has never ceased. It was a terrible year. Roguin, the notary
of Madame Descoings and Madame Bridau, absconded with the moneys held
back for seven years from Madame Descoings’s annuity, which by that
time were producing two thousand francs a year. Three days after this
disaster, a bill of exchange for a thousand francs, drawn by Philippe
upon his mother, arrived from New York. The poor fellow, misled like
so many others, had lost his all in the Champ d’Asile. A letter, which
accompanied the bill, drove Agathe, Joseph, and the Descoings to
tears, and told of debts contracted in New York, where his comrades in
misfortunes had indorsed for him.

“It was I who made him go!” cried the poor mother, eager to divert the
blame from Philippe.

“I advise you not to send him on many such journeys,” said the old
Descoings to her niece.

Madame Descoings was heroic. She continued to give the three thousand
francs a year to Madame Bridau, but she still paid the dues on her trey
which had never turned up since the year 1799. About this time, she
began to doubt the honesty of the government, and declared it was
capable of keeping the three numbers in the urn, so as to excite the
shareholders to put in enormous stakes. After a rapid survey of all
their resources, it seemed to the two women impossible to raise the
thousand francs without selling out the little that remained in the
Funds. They talked of pawning their silver and part of the linen,
and even the needless pieces of furniture. Joseph, alarmed at these
suggestions, went to see Gerard and told him their circumstances. The
great painter obtained an order from the household of the king for
two copies of a portrait of Louis XVIII., at five hundred francs
each. Though not naturally generous, Gros took his pupil to an
artist-furnishing house and fitted him out with the necessary materials.
But the thousand francs could not be had till the copies were delivered,
so Joseph painted four panels in ten days, sold them to the dealers and
brought his mother the thousand francs with which to meet the bill of
exchange when it fell due. Eight days later, came a letter from the
colonel, informing his mother that he was about to return to France
on board a packet from New York, whose captain had trusted him for
the passage-money. Philippe announced that he should need at least a
thousand francs on his arrival at Havre.

“Good,” said Joseph to his mother, “I shall have finished my copies by
that time, and you can carry him the money.”

“Dear Joseph!” cried Agathe in tears, kissing her son, “God will bless
you. You do love him, then, poor persecuted fellow? He is indeed our
glory and our hope for the future. So young, so brave, so unfortunate!
everything is against him; we three must always stand by him.”

“You see now that painting is good for something,” cried Joseph,
overjoyed to have won his mother’s permission to be a great artist.

Madame Bridau rushed to meet her beloved son, Colonel Philippe, at
Havre. Once there, she walked every day beyond the round tower built by
Francois I., to look out for the American packet, enduring the keenest
anxieties. Mothers alone know how such sufferings quicken maternal love.
The vessel arrived on a fine morning in October, 1819, without delay,
and having met with no mishap. The sight of a mother and the air of
one’s native land produces a certain affect on the coarsest nature,
especially after the miseries of a sea-voyage. Philippe gave way to a
rush of feeling, which made Agathe think to herself, “Ah! how he loves
me!” Alas, the hero loved but one person in the world, and that person
was Colonel Philippe. His misfortunes in Texas, his stay in New York,--a
place where speculation and individualism are carried to the highest
pitch, where the brutality of self-interest attains to cynicism, where
man, essentially isolated, is compelled to push his way for himself and
by himself, where politeness does not exist,--in fact, even the minor
events of Philippe’s journey had developed in him the worst traits of an
old campaigner: he had grown brutal, selfish, rude; he drank and smoked
to excess; physical hardships and poverty had depraved him. Moreover,
he considered himself persecuted; and the effect of that idea is to
make persons who are unintelligent persecutors and bigots themselves. To
Philippe’s conception of life, the universe began at his head and ended
at his feet, and the sun shone for him alone. The things he had seen
in New York, interpreted by his practical nature, carried away his last
scruples on the score of morality. For such beings, there are but two
ways of existence. Either they believe, or they do not believe; they
have the virtues of honest men, or they give themselves up to the
demands of necessity; in which case they proceed to turn their slightest
interests and each passing impulse of their passions into necessities.

Such a system of life carries a man a long way. It was only in
appearance that Colonel Philippe retained the frankness, plain-dealing,
and easy-going freedom of a soldier. This made him, in reality, very
dangerous; he seemed as guileless as a child, but, thinking only of
himself, he never did anything without reflecting what he had better
do,--like a wily lawyer planning some trick “a la Maitre Gonin”; words
cost him nothing, and he said as many as he could to get people to
believe. If, unfortunately, some one refused to accept the explanations
with which he justified the contradictions between his conduct and his
professions, the colonel, who was a good shot and could defy the most
adroit fencing-master, and possessed the coolness of one to whom life is
indifferent, was quite ready to demand satisfaction for the first sharp
word; and when a man shows himself prepared for violence there is little
more to be said. His imposing stature had taken on a certain rotundity,
his face was bronzed from exposure in Texas, he was still succinct in
speech, and had acquired the decisive tone of a man obliged to make
himself feared among the populations of a new world. Thus developed,
plainly dressed, his body trained to endurance by his recent hardships,
Philippe in the eyes of his mother was a hero; in point of fact, he had
simply become what people (not to mince matters) call a blackguard.

Shocked at the destitution of her cherished son, Madame Bridau bought
him a complete outfit of clothes at Havre. After listening to the tale
of his woes, she had not the heart to stop his drinking and eating and
amusing himself as a man just returned from the Champ d’Asile was
likely to eat and drink and divert himself. It was certainly a fine
conception,--that of conquering Texas with the remains of the imperial
army. The failure was less in the idea than in the men who conceived
it; for Texas is to-day a republic, with a future full of promise. This
scheme of Liberalism under the Restoration distinctly proves that the
interests of the party were purely selfish and not national, seeking
power and nothing else. Neither men, nor occasion, nor cause,
nor devotion were lacking; only the money and the support of the
hypocritical party at home who dispensed enormous sums, but gave nothing
when it came to recovering empire. Household managers like Agathe have
a plain common-sense which enables them to perceive such political
chicane: the poor woman saw the truth through the lines of her son’s
tale; for she had read, in the exile’s interests, all the pompous
editorials of the constitutional journals, and watched the management
of the famous subscription, which produced barely one hundred and fifty
thousand francs when it ought to have yielded five or six millions. The
Liberal leaders soon found out that they were playing into the hands of
Louis XVIII. by exporting the glorious remnants of our grand army, and
they promptly abandoned to their fate the most devoted, the most ardent,
the most enthusiastic of its heroes,--those, in short, who had gone in
the advance. Agathe was never able, however, to make her son see that
he was more duped than persecuted. With blind belief in her idol, she
supposed herself ignorant, and deplored, as Philippe did, the evil times
which had done him such wrong. Up to this time he was, to her mind,
throughout his misfortunes, less faulty than victimized by his noble
nature, his energy, the fall of the Emperor, the duplicity of the
Liberals, and the rancor of the Bourbons against the Bonapartists.
During the week at Havre, a week which was horribly costly, she dared
not ask him to make terms with the royal government and apply to the
minister of war. She had hard work to get him away from Havre, where
living is very expensive, and to bring him back to Paris before her
money gave out. Madame Descoings and Joseph, who were awaiting their
arrival in the courtyard of the coach-office of the Messageries Royales,
were struck with the change in Agathe’s face.

“Your mother has aged ten years in two months,” whispered the Descoings
to Joseph, as they all embraced, and the two trunks were being handed
down.

“How do you do, mere Descoings?” was the cool greeting the colonel
bestowed on the old woman whom Joseph was in the habit of calling “maman
Descoings.”

“I have no money to pay for a hackney-coach,” said Agathe, in a sad
voice.

“I have,” replied the young painter. “What a splendid color Philippe has
turned!” he cried, looking at his brother.

“Yes, I’ve browned like a pipe,” said Philippe. “But as for you, you’re
not a bit changed, little man.”

Joseph, who was now twenty-one, and much thought of by the friends who
had stood by him in his days of trial, felt his own strength and was
aware of his talent; he represented the art of painting in a circle of
young men whose lives were devoted to science, letters, politics, and
philosophy. Consequently, he was wounded by his brother’s contempt,
which Philippe still further emphasized with a gesture, pulling his ears
as if he were still a child. Agathe noticed the coolness which succeeded
the first glow of tenderness on the part of Joseph and Madame Descoings;
but she hastened to tell them of Philippe’s sufferings in exile, and so
lessened it. Madame Descoings, wishing to make a festival of the return
of the prodigal, as she called him under her breath, had prepared one
of her good dinners, to which old Claparon and the elder Desroches
were invited. All the family friends were to come, and did come, in the
evening. Joseph had invited Leon Giraud, d’Arthez, Michel Chrestien,
Fulgence Ridal, and Horace Bianchon, his friends of the fraternity.
Madame Descoings had promised Bixiou, her so-called step-son, that the
young people should play at ecarte. Desroches the younger, who had now
taken, under his father’s stern rule, his degree at law, was also of
the party. Du Bruel, Claparon, Desroches, and the Abbe Loraux carefully
observed the returned exile, whose manners and coarse features, and
voice roughened by the abuse of liquors, together with his vulgar glance
and phraseology, alarmed them not a little. While Joseph was placing the
card-tables, the more intimate of the family friends surrounded Agathe
and asked,--

“What do you intend to make of Philippe?”

“I don’t know,” she answered, “but he is determined not to serve the
Bourbons.”

“Then it will be very difficult for you to find him a place in France.
If he won’t re-enter the army, he can’t be readily got into government
employ,” said old Du Bruel. “And you have only to listen to him to see
he could never, like my son, make his fortune by writing plays.”

The motion of Agathe’s eyes, with which alone she replied to this
speech, showed how anxious Philippe’s future made her; they all kept
silence. The exile himself, Bixiou, and the younger Desroches were
playing at ecarte, a game which was then the rage.

“Maman Descoings, my brother has no money to play with,” whispered
Joseph in the good woman’s ear.

The devotee of the Royal Lottery fetched twenty francs and gave them to
the artist, who slipped them secretly into his brother’s hand. All the
company were now assembled. There were two tables of boston; and the
party grew lively. Philippe proved a bad player: after winning for
awhile, he began to lose; and by eleven o’clock he owed fifty francs to
young Desroches and to Bixiou. The racket and the disputes at the ecarte
table resounded more than once in the ears of the more peaceful boston
players, who were watching Philippe surreptitiously. The exile showed
such signs of bad temper that in his final dispute with the younger
Desroches, who was none too amiable himself, the elder Desroches joined
in, and though his son was decidedly in the right, he declared he was
in the wrong, and forbade him to play any more. Madame Descoings did the
same with her grandson, who was beginning to let fly certain witticisms;
and although Philippe, so far, had not understood him, there was always
a chance that one of the barbed arrows might piece the colonel’s thick
skull and put the sharp jester in peril.

“You must be tired,” whispered Agathe in Philippe’s ear; “come to bed.”

“Travel educates youth,” said Bixiou, grinning, when Madame Bridau and
the colonel had disappeared.

Joseph, who got up at dawn and went to bed early, did not see the end of
the party. The next morning Agathe and Madame Descoings, while preparing
breakfast, could not help remarking that soires would be terribly
expensive if Philippe were to go on playing that sort of game, as the
Descoings phrased it. The worthy old woman, then seventy-six years of
age, proposed to sell her furniture, give up her _appartement_ on the
second floor (which the owner was only too glad to occupy), and take
Agathe’s parlor for her chamber, making the other room a sitting-room
and dining-room for the family. In this way they could save seven
hundred francs a year; which would enable them to give Philippe fifty
francs a month until he could find something to do. Agathe accepted the
sacrifice. When the colonel came down and his mother had asked how he
liked his little bedroom, the two widows explained to him the situation
of the family. Madame Descoings and Agathe possessed, by putting all
their resources together, an income of five thousand three hundred
francs, four thousand of which belonged to Madame Descoings and were
merely a life annuity. The Descoings made an allowance of six hundred
a year to Bixiou, whom she had acknowledged as her grandson during the
last few months, also six hundred to Joseph; the rest of her income,
together with that of Agathe, was spent for the household wants. All
their savings were by this time eaten up.

“Make yourselves easy,” said the lieutenant-colonel. “I’ll find a
situation and put you to no expense; all I need for the present is board
and lodging.”

Agathe kissed her son, and Madame Descoings slipped a hundred francs
into his hand to pay for his losses of the night before. In ten days
the furniture was sold, the _appartement_ given up, and the change in
Agathe’s domestic arrangements accomplished with a celerity seldom seen
outside of Paris. During those ten days, Philippe regularly decamped
after breakfast, came back for dinner, was off again for the evening,
and only got home about midnight to go to bed. He contracted certain
habits half mechanically, and they soon became rooted in him; he got his
boots blacked on the Pont Neuf for the two sous it would have cost
him to go by the Pont des Arts to the Palais-Royal, where he consumed
regularly two glasses of brandy while reading the newspapers,--an
occupation which employed him till midday; after that he sauntered along
the rue Vivienne to the cafe Minerve, where the Liberals congregated,
and where he played at billiards with a number of old comrades. While
winning and losing, Philippe swallowed four or five more glasses of
divers liquors, and smoked ten or a dozen cigars in going and coming,
and idling along the streets. In the evening, after consuming a
few pipes at the Hollandais smoking-rooms, he would go to some
gambling-place towards ten o’clock at night. The waiter handed him a
card and a pin; he always inquired of certain well-seasoned players
about the chances of the red or the black, and staked ten francs when
the lucky moment seemed to come; never playing more than three times,
win or lose. If he won, which usually happened, he drank a tumbler
of punch and went home to his garret; but by that time he talked of
smashing the ultras and the Bourbon body-guard, and trolled out, as he
mounted the staircase, “We watch to save the Empire!” His poor mother,
hearing him, used to think “How gay Philippe is to-night!” and then she
would creep up and kiss him, without complaining of the fetid odors of
the punch, and the brandy, and the pipes.

“You ought to be satisfied with me, my dear mother,” he said, towards
the end of January; “I lead the most regular of lives.”

The colonel had dined five times at a restaurant with some of his army
comrades. These old soldiers were quite frank with each other on the
state of their own affairs, all the while talking of certain hopes which
they based on the building of a submarine vessel, expected to bring
about the deliverance of the Emperor. Among these former comrades,
Philippe particularly liked an old captain of the dragoons of the Guard,
named Giroudeau, in whose company he had seen his first service. This
friendship with the late dragoon led Philippe into completing what
Rabelais called “the devil’s equipage”; and he added to his drams, and
his tobacco, and his play, a “fourth wheel.”

One evening at the beginning of February, Giroudeau took Philippe after
dinner to the Gaite, occupying a free box sent to a theatrical journal
belonging to his nephew Finot, in whose office Giroudeau was cashier
and secretary. Both were dressed after the fashion of the Bonapartist
officers who now belonged to the Constitutional Opposition; they wore
ample overcoats with square collars, buttoned to the chin and coming
down to their heels, and decorated with the rosette of the Legion of
honor; and they carried malacca canes with loaded knobs, which they held
by strings of braided leather. The late troopers had just (to use one of
their own expressions) “made a bout of it,” and were mutually unbosoming
their hearts as they entered the box. Through the fumes of a certain
number of bottles and various glasses of various liquors, Giroudeau
pointed out to Philippe a plump and agile little ballet-girl whom he
called Florentine, whose good graces and affection, together with the
box, belonged to him as the representative of an all-powerful journal.

“But,” said Philippe, “I should like to know how far her good graces go
for such an iron-gray old trooper as you.”

“Thank God,” replied Giroudeau, “I’ve stuck to the traditions of our
glorious uniform. I have never wasted a farthing upon a woman in my
life.”

“What’s that?” said Philippe, putting a finger on his left eye.

“That is so,” answered Giroudeau. “But, between ourselves, the newspaper
counts for a good deal. To-morrow, in a couple of lines, we shall advise
the managers to let Mademoiselle Florentine dance a particular step, and
so forth. Faith, my dear boy, I’m uncommonly lucky!”

“Well!” thought Philippe; “if this worthy Giroudeau, with a skull as
polished as my knee, forty-eight years, a big stomach, a face like a
ploughman, and a nose like a potato, can get a ballet-girl, I ought to
be the lover of the first actress in Paris. Where does one find such
luck?” he said aloud.

“I’ll show you Florentine’s place to-night. My Dulcinea only earns
fifty francs a month at the theatre,” added Giroudeau, “but she is very
prettily set up, thanks to an old silk dealer named Cardot, who gives
her five hundred francs a month.”

“Well, but--?” exclaimed the jealous Philippe.

“Bah!” said Giroudeau; “true love is blind.”

When the play was over Giroudeau took Philippe to Mademoiselle
Florentine’s _appartement_, which was close to the theatre, in the rue
de Crussol.

“We must behave ourselves,” said Giroudeau. “Florentine’s mother is
here. You see, I haven’t the means to pay for one, so the worthy woman
is really her own mother. She used to be a concierge, but she’s not
without intelligence. Call her Madame; she makes a point of it.”

Florentine happened that night to have a friend with her,--a certain
Marie Godeschal, beautiful as an angel, cold as a danseuse, and a
pupil of Vestris, who foretold for her a great choregraphic destiny.
Mademoiselle Godeschal, anxious to make her first appearance at the
Panorama-Dramatique under the name of Mariette, based her hopes on the
protection and influence of a first gentleman of the bedchamber, to whom
Vestris had promised to introduce her. Vestris, still green himself at
this period, did not think his pupil sufficiently trained to risk the
introduction. The ambitious girl did, in the end, make her pseudonym of
Mariette famous; and the motive of her ambition, it must be said, was
praiseworthy. She had a brother, a clerk in Derville’s law office. Left
orphans and very poor, and devoted to each other, the brother and sister
had seen life such as it is in Paris. The one wished to be a lawyer that
he might support his sister, and he lived on ten sous a day; the other
had coldly resolved to be a dancer, and to profit by her beauty as much
as by her legs that she might buy a practice for her brother. Outside
of their feeling for each other, and of their mutual life and interests,
everything was to them, as it once was to the Romans and the Hebrews,
barbaric, outlandish, and hostile. This generous affection, which
nothing ever lessened, explained Mariette to those who knew her
intimately.

The brother and sister were living at this time on the eighth floor of a
house in the Vieille rue du Temple. Mariette had begun her studies
when she was ten years old; she was now just sixteen. Alas! for want of
becoming clothes, her beauty, hidden under a coarse shawl, dressed
in calico, and ill-kept, could only be guessed by those Parisians
who devote themselves to hunting grisettes and the quest of beauty in
misfortune, as she trotted past them with mincing step, mounted on iron
pattens. Philippe fell in love with Mariette. To Mariette, Philippe was
commander of the dragoons of the Guard, a staff-officer of the Emperor,
a young man of twenty-seven, and above all, the means of proving herself
superior to Florentine by the evident superiority of Philippe over
Giroudeau. Florentine and Giroudeau, the one to promote his comrade’s
happiness, the other to get a protector for her friend, pushed Philippe
and Mariette into a “mariage en detrempe,”--a Parisian term which is
equivalent to “morganatic marriage,” as applied to royal personages.
Philippe when they left the house revealed his poverty to Giroudeau, but
the old roue reassured him.

“I’ll speak to my nephew Finot,” he said. “You see, Philippe, the reign
of phrases and quill-drivers is upon us; we may as well submit. To-day,
scribblers are paramount. Ink has ousted gunpowder, and talk takes the
place of shot. After all, these little toads of editors are pretty good
fellows, and very clever. Come and see me to-morrow at the newspaper
office; by that time I shall have said a word for you to my nephew.
Before long you’ll have a place on some journal or other. Mariette,
who is taking you at this moment (don’t deceive yourself) because she
literally has nothing, no engagement, no chance of appearing on the
stage, and I have told her that you are going on a newspaper like
myself,--Mariette will try to make you believe she is loving you for
yourself; and you will believe her! Do as I do,--keep her as long as you
can. I was so much in love with Florentine that I begged Finot to write
her up and help her to a debut; but my nephew replied, ‘You say she has
talent; well, the day after her first appearance she will turn her back
on you.’ Oh, that’s Finot all over! You’ll find him a knowing one.”

The next day, about four o’clock, Philippe went to the rue de Sentier,
where he found Giroudeau in the entresol,--caged like a wild beast in
a sort of hen-coop with a sliding panel; in which was a little stove,
a little table, two little chairs, and some little logs of wood. This
establishment bore the magic words, SUBSCRIPTION OFFICE, painted on
the door in black letters, and the word “Cashier,” written by hand and
fastened to the grating of the cage. Along the wall that lay opposite
to the cage, was a bench, where, at this moment, a one-armed man was
breakfasting, who was called Coloquinte by Giroudeau, doubtless from the
Egyptian colors of his skin.

“A pretty hole!” exclaimed Philippe, looking round the room. “In the
name of thunder! what are you doing here, you who charged with poor
Colonel Chabert at Eylau? You--a gallant officer!”

“Well, yes! broum! broum!--a gallant officer keeping the accounts of a
little newspaper,” said Giroudeau, settling his black silk skull-cap.
“Moreover, I’m the working editor of all that rubbish,” he added,
pointing to the newspaper itself.

“And I, who went to Egypt, I’m obliged to stamp it,” said the one-armed
man.

“Hold your tongue, Coloquinte,” said Giroudeau. “You are in presence of
a hero who carried the Emperor’s orders at the battle of Montereau.”

Coloquinte saluted. “That’s were I lost my missing arm!” he said.

“Coloquinte, look after the den. I’m going up to see my nephew.”

The two soldiers mounted to the fourth floor, where, in an attic room
at the end of a passage, they found a young man with a cold light eye,
lying on a dirty sofa. The representative of the press did not stir,
though he offered cigars to his uncle and his uncle’s friend.

“My good fellow,” said Giroudeau in a soothing and humble tone, “this
is the gallant cavalry officer of the Imperial Guard of whom I spoke to
you.”

“Eh! well?” said Finot, eyeing Philippe, who, like Giroudeau, lost all
his assurance before the diplomatist of the press.

“My dear boy,” said Giroudeau, trying to pose as an uncle, “the colonel
has just returned from Texas.”

“Ah! you were taken in by that affair of the Champ d’Asile, were you?
Seems to me you were rather young to turn into a Soldier-laborer.”

The bitterness of this jest will only be understood by those who
remember the deluge of engravings, screens, clocks, bronzes, and
plaster-casts produced by the idea of the Soldier-laborer, a splendid
image of Napoleon and his heroes, which afterwards made its appearance
on the stage in vaudevilles. That idea, however, obtained a national
subscription; and we still find, in the depths of the provinces, old
wall-papers which bear the effigy of the Soldier-laborer. If this young
man had not been Giroudeau’s nephew, Philippe would have boxed his ears.

“Yes, I was taken in by it; I lost my time, and twelve thousand francs
to boot,” answered Philippe, trying to force a grin.

“You are still fond of the Emperor?” asked Finot.

“He is my god,” answered Philippe Bridau.

“You are a Liberal?”

“I shall always belong to the Constitutional Opposition. Oh Foy!
oh Manuel! oh Laffitte! what men they are! They’ll rid us of these
others,--these wretches, who came back to France at the heels of the
enemy.”

“Well,” said Finot coldly, “you ought to make something out of your
misfortunes; for you are the victim of the Liberals, my good fellow.
Stay a Liberal, if you really value your opinions, but threaten the
party with the follies in Texas which you are ready to show up. You
never got a farthing of the national subscription, did you? Well, then
you hold a fine position: demand an account of that subscription. I’ll
tell you how you can do it. A new Opposition journal is just starting,
under the auspices of the deputies of the Left; you shall be the
cashier, with a salary of three thousand francs. A permanent place. All
you want is some one to go security for you in twenty thousand francs;
find that, and you shall be installed within a week. I’ll advise
the Liberals to silence you by giving you the place. Meantime, talk,
threaten,--threaten loudly.”

Giroudeau let Philippe, who was profuse in his thanks, go down a few
steps before him, and then he turned back to say to his nephew, “Well,
you are a queer fellow! you keep me here on twelve hundred francs--”

“That journal won’t live a year,” said Finot. “I’ve got something better
for you.”

“Thunder!” cried Philippe to Giroudeau. “He’s no fool, that nephew of
yours. I never once thought of making something, as he calls it, out of
my position.”

That night at the cafe Lemblin and the cafe Minerve Colonel Philippe
fulminated against the Liberal party, which had raised subscriptions,
sent heroes to Texas, talked hypocritically of Soldier-laborers, and
left them to starve, after taking the money they had put into it, and
keeping them in exile for two years.

“I am going to demand an account of the moneys collected by the
subscription for the Champ d’Asile,” he said to one of the frequenters
of the cafe, who repeated it to the journalists of the Left.

Philippe did not go back to the rue Mazarin; he went to Mariette and
told her of his forthcoming appointment on a newspaper with ten thousand
subscribers, in which her choregraphic claims should be warmly advanced.

Agathe and Madame Descoings waited up for Philippe in fear and
trembling, for the Duc de Berry had just been assassinated. The colonel
came home a few minutes after breakfast; and when his mother showed her
uneasiness at his absence, he grew angry and asked if he were not of
age.

“In the name of thunder, what’s all this! here have I brought you some
good news, and you both look like tombstones. The Duc de Berry is dead,
is he?--well, so much the better! that’s one the less, at any rate.
As for me, I am to be cashier of a newspaper, with a salary of three
thousand francs, and there you are, out of all your anxieties on my
account.”

“Is it possible?” cried Agathe.

“Yes; provided you can go security for me in twenty thousand francs; you
need only deposit your shares in the Funds, you will draw the interest
all the same.”

The two widows, who for nearly two months had been desperately anxious
to find out what Philippe was about, and how he could be provided for,
were so overjoyed at this prospect that they gave no thought to their
other catastrophes. That evening, the Grecian sages, old Du Bruel,
Claparon, whose health was failing, and the inflexible Desroches were
unanimous; they all advised Madame Bridau to go security for her son.
The new journal, which fortunately was started before the assassination
of the Duc de Berry, just escaped the blow which Monsieur Decazes then
launched at the press. Madame Bridau’s shares in the Funds, representing
thirteen hundred francs’ interest, were transferred as security for
Philippe, who was then appointed cashier. That good son at once promised
to pay one hundred francs every month to the two widows, for his board
and lodging, and was declared by both to be the best of sons. Those who
had thought ill of him now congratulated Agathe.

“We were unjust to him,” they said.

Poor Joseph, not to be behind his brother in generosity, resolved to pay
for his own support, and succeeded.




CHAPTER IV

Three months later, the colonel, who ate and drank enough for four men,
finding fault with the food and compelling the poor widows, on the score
of his payments, to spend much money on their table, had not yet paid
down a single penny. His mother and Madame Descoings were unwilling, out
of delicacy, to remind him of his promise. The year went by without one
of those coins which Leon Gozlan so vigorously called “tigers with five
claws” finding its way from Philippe’s pocket to the household purse. It
is true that the colonel quieted his conscience on this score by seldom
dining at home.

“Well, he is happy,” said his mother; “he is easy in mind; he has a
place.”

Through the influence of a feuilleton, edited by Vernou, a friend of
Bixiou, Finot, and Giroudeau, Mariette made her appearance, not at the
Panorama-Dramatique but at the Porte-Saint-Martin, where she triumphed
beside the famous Begrand. Among the directors of the theatre was a rich
and luxurious general officer, in love with an actress, for whose sake
he had made himself an impresario. In Paris, we frequently meet with men
so fascinated with actresses, singers, or ballet-dancers, that they are
willing to become directors of a theatre out of love. This officer knew
Philippe and Giroudeau. Mariette’s first appearance, heralded already
by Finot’s journal and also by Philippe’s, was promptly arranged by the
three officers; for there seems to be solidarity among the passions in a
matter of folly.

The mischievous Bixiou was not long in revealing to his grandmother and
the devoted Agathe that Philippe, the cashier, the hero of heroes,
was in love with Mariette, the celebrated ballet-dancer at the
Porte-Saint-Martin. The news was a thunder-clap to the two widows;
Agathe’s religious principles taught her to think that all women on
the stage were brands in the burning; moreover, she thought, and so did
Madame Descoings, that women of that kind dined off gold, drank pearls,
and wasted fortunes.

“Now do you suppose,” said Joseph to his mother, “that my brother is
such a fool as to spend his money on Mariette? Such women only ruin rich
men.”

“They talk of engaging Mariette at the Opera,” said Bixiou. “Don’t
be worried, Madame Bridau; the diplomatic body often comes to the
Porte-Saint-Martin, and that handsome girl won’t stay long with your
son. I did hear that an ambassador was madly in love with her. By the
bye, another piece of news! Old Claparon is dead, and his son, who has
become a banker, has ordered the cheapest kind of funeral for him. That
fellow has no education; they wouldn’t behave like that in China.”

Philippe, prompted by mercenary motives, proposed to Mariette that she
should marry him; but she, knowing herself on the eve of an engagement
at the Grand Opera, refused the offer, either because she guessed the
colonel’s motive, or because she saw how important her independence
would be to her future fortune. For the remainder of this year, Philippe
never came more than twice a month to see his mother. Where was he?
Either at his office, or the theatre, or with Mariette. No light
whatever as to his conduct reached the household of the rue Mazarin.
Giroudeau, Finot, Bixiou, Vernou, Lousteau, saw him leading a life of
pleasure. Philippe shared the gay amusements of Tullia, a leading
singer at the Opera, of Florentine, who took Mariette’s place at the
Porte-Saint-Martin, of Florine and Matifat, Coralie and Camusot.
After four o’clock, when he left his office, until midnight, he amused
himself; some party of pleasure had usually been arranged the night
before,--a good dinner, a card-party, a supper by some one or other of
the set. Philippe was in his element.

This carnival, which lasted eighteen months, was not altogether without
its troubles. The beautiful Mariette no sooner appeared at the Opera, in
January, 1821, than she captured one of the most distinguished dukes of
the court of Louis XVIII. Philippe tried to make head against the
peer, and by the month of April he was compelled by his passion,
notwithstanding some luck at cards, to dip into the funds of which he
was cashier. By May he had taken eleven hundred francs. In that fatal
month Mariette started for London, to see what could be done with
the lords while the temporary opera house in the Hotel Choiseul, rue
Lepelletier, was being prepared. The luckless Philippe had ended,
as often happens, in loving Mariette notwithstanding her flagrant
infidelities; she herself had never thought him anything but a
dull-minded, brutal soldier, the first rung of a ladder on which she
had never intended to remain long. So, foreseeing the time when Philippe
would have spent all his money, she captured other journalistic support
which released her from the necessity of depending on him; nevertheless,
she did feel the peculiar gratitude that class of women acknowledge
towards the first man who smooths their way, as it were, among the
difficulties and horrors of a theatrical career.

Forced to let his terrible mistress go to London without him, Philippe
went into winter quarters, as he called it,--that is, he returned to
his attic room in his mother’s _appartement_. He made some gloomy
reflections as he went to bed that night, and when he got up again. He
was conscious within himself of the inability to live otherwise than as
he had been living the last year. The luxury that surrounded Mariette,
the dinners, the suppers, the evenings in the side-scenes, the animation
of wits and journalists, the sort of racket that went on around him,
the delights that tickled both his senses and his vanity,--such a life,
found only in Paris, and offering daily the charm of some new thing, was
now more than habit,--it had become to Philippe as much a necessity as
his tobacco or his brandy. He saw plainly that he could not live without
these continual enjoyments. The idea of suicide came into his head; not
on account of the deficit which must soon be discovered in his accounts,
but because he could no longer live with Mariette in the atmosphere
of pleasure in which he had disported himself for over a year. Full
of these gloomy thoughts, he entered for the first time his brother’s
painting-room, where he found the painter in a blue blouse, copying a
picture for a dealer.

“So that’s how pictures are made,” said Philippe, by way of opening the
conversation.

“No,” said Joseph, “that is how they are copied.”

“How much do they pay you for that?”

“Eh! never enough; two hundred and fifty francs. But I study the manner
of the masters and learn a great deal; I found out the secrets of their
method. There’s one of my own pictures,” he added, pointing with the end
of his brush to a sketch with the colors still moist.

“How much do you pocket in a year?”

“Unfortunately, I am known only to painters. Schinner backs me; and
he has got me some work at the Chateau de Presles, where I am going in
October to do some arabesques, panels, and other decorations, for which
the Comte de Serizy, no doubt, will pay well. With such trifles and with
orders from the dealers, I may manage to earn eighteen hundred to two
thousand francs a year over and above the working expenses. I shall send
that picture to the next exhibition; if it hits the public taste, my
fortune is made. My friends think well of it.”

“I don’t know anything about such things,” said Philippe, in a subdued
voice which caused Joseph to turn and look at him.

“What is the matter?” said the artist, seeing that his brother was very
pale.

“I should like to know how long it would take you to paint my portrait?”

“If I worked steadily, and the weather were clear, I could finish it in
three or four days.”

“That’s too long; I have only one day to give you. My poor mother loves
me so much that I wished to leave her my likeness. We will say no more
about it.”

“Why! are you going away again?”

“I am going never to return,” replied Philippe with an air of forced
gayety.

“Look here, Philippe, what is the matter? If it is anything serious,
I am a man and not a ninny. I am accustomed to hard struggles, and if
discretion is needed, I have it.”

“Are you sure?”

“On my honor.”

“You will tell no one, no matter who?”

“No one.”

“Well, I am going to blow my brains out.”

“You!--are you going to fight a duel?”

“I am going to kill myself.”

“Why?”

“I have taken eleven hundred francs from the funds in my hands; I have
got to send in my accounts to-morrow morning. Half my security is lost;
our poor mother will be reduced to six hundred francs a year. That would
be nothing! I could make a fortune for her later; but I am dishonored! I
cannot live under dishonor--”

“You will not be dishonored if it is paid back. To be sure, you will
lose your place, and you will only have the five hundred francs a year
from your cross; but you can live on five hundred francs.”

“Farewell!” said Philippe, running rapidly downstairs, and not waiting
to hear another word.

Joseph left his studio and went down to breakfast with his mother;
but Philippe’s confession had taken away his appetite. He took Madame
Descoings aside and told her the terrible news. The old woman made a
frightened exclamation, let fall the saucepan of milk she had in
her hand, and flung herself into a chair. Agathe rushed in; from one
exclamation to another the mother gathered the fatal truth.

“He! to fail in honor! the son of Bridau to take the money that was
trusted to him!”

The widow trembled in every limb; her eyes dilated and then grew fixed;
she sat down and burst into tears.

“Where is he?” she cried amid the sobs. “Perhaps he has flung himself
into the Seine.”

“You must not give up all hope,” said Madame Descoings, “because a poor
lad has met with a bad woman who has led him to do wrong. Dear me! we
see that every day. Philippe has had such misfortunes! he has had so
little chance to be happy and loved that we ought not to be surprised at
his passion for that creature. All passions lead to excess. My own life
is not without reproach of that kind, and yet I call myself an honest
woman. A single fault is not vice; and after all, it is only those who
do nothing that are never deceived.”

Agathe’s despair overcame her so much that Joseph and the Descoings
were obliged to lessen Philippe’s wrong-doings by assuring her that such
things happened in all families.

“But he is twenty-eight years old,” cried Agathe, “he is no longer a
child.”

Terrible revelation of the inward thought of the poor woman on the
conduct of her son.

“Mother, I assure you he thought only of your sufferings and of the
wrong he had done you,” said Joseph.

“Oh, my God! let him come back to me, let him live, and I will forgive
all,” cried the poor mother, to whose mind a horrible vision of Philippe
dragged dead out of the river presented itself.

Gloomy silence reigned for a short time. The day went by with cruel
alternations of hope and fear; all three ran to the window at the least
sound, and gave way to every sort of conjecture. While the family were
thus grieving, Philippe was quietly getting matters in order at his
office. He had the audacity to give in his accounts with a statement
that, fearing some accident, he had retained eleven hundred francs at
his own house for safe keeping. The scoundrel left the office at five
o’clock, taking five hundred francs more from the desk, and coolly went
to a gambling-house, which he had not entered since his connection with
the paper, for he knew very well that a cashier must not be seen to
frequent such a place. The fellow was not wanting in acumen. His past
conduct proved that he derived more from his grandfather Rouget than
from his virtuous sire, Bridau. Perhaps he might have made a good
general; but in private life, he was one of those utter scoundrels who
shelter their schemes and their evil actions behind a screen of strict
legality, and the privacy of the family roof.

At this conjuncture Philippe maintained his coolness. He won at first,
and gained as much as six thousand francs; but he let himself be dazzled
by the idea of getting out of his difficulties at one stroke. He left
the trente-et-quarante, hearing that the black had come up sixteen times
at the roulette table, and was about to put five thousand francs on the
red, when the black came up for the seventeenth time. The colonel then
put a thousand francs on the black and won. In spite of this remarkable
piece of luck, his head grew weary; he felt it, though he continued to
play. But that divining sense which leads a gambler, and which comes in
flashes, was already failing him. Intermittent perceptions, so fatal to
all gamblers, set in. Lucidity of mind, like the rays of the sun, can
have no effect except by the continuity of a direct line; it can divine
only on condition of not breaking that line; the curvettings of chance
bemuddle it. Philippe lost all. After such a strain, the careless mind
as well as the bravest weakens. When Philippe went home that night
he was not thinking of suicide, for he had never really meant to kill
himself; he no longer thought of his lost place, nor of the sacrificed
security, nor of his mother, nor of Mariette, the cause of his ruin; he
walked along mechanically. When he got home, his mother in tears, Madame
Descoings, and Joseph, all fell on his neck and kissed him and brought
him joyfully to a seat by the fire.

“Bless me!” thought he, “the threat has worked.”

The brute at once assumed an air suitable to the occasion; all the more
easily, because his ill-luck at cards had deeply depressed him. Seeing
her atrocious Benjamin so pale and woe-begone, the poor mother knelt
beside him, kissed his hands, pressed them to her heart, and gazed at
him for a long time with eyes swimming in tears.

“Philippe,” she said, in a choking voice, “promise not to kill yourself,
and all shall be forgotten.”

Philippe looked at his sorrowing brother and at Madame Descoings,
whose eyes were full of tears, and thought to himself, “They are good
creatures.” Then he took his mother in his arms, raised her and put her
on his knee, pressed her to his heart and whispered as he kissed her,
“For the second time, you give me life.”

The Descoings managed to serve an excellent dinner, and to add two
bottles of old wine with a little “liqueur des iles,” a treasure left
over from her former business.

“Agathe,” she said at dessert, “we must let him smoke his cigars,” and
she offered some to Philippe.

These two poor creatures fancied that if they let the fellow take his
ease, he would like his home and stay in it; both, therefore, tried to
endure his tobacco-smoke, though each loathed it. That sacrifice was not
so much as noticed by Philippe.

On the morrow, Agathe looked ten years older. Her terrors calmed,
reflection came back to her, and the poor woman had not closed an eye
throughout that horrible night. She was now reduced to six hundred
francs a year. Madame Descoings, like all fat women fond of good eating,
was growing heavy; her step on the staircase sounded like the chopping
of logs; she might die at any moment; with her life, four thousand
francs would disappear. What folly to rely on that resource! What should
she do? What would become of them? With her mind made up to become a
sick-nurse rather than be supported by her children, Agathe did not
think of herself. But Philippe? what would he do if reduced to live on
the five hundred francs of an officer of the Legion of honor? During the
past eleven years, Madame Descoings, by giving up three thousand
francs a year, had paid her debt twice over, but she still continued to
sacrifice her grandson’s interests to those of the Bridau family.
Though all Agathe’s honorable and upright feelings were shocked by this
terrible disaster, she said to herself: “Poor boy! is it his fault? He
is faithful to his oath. I have done wrong not to marry him. If I had
found him a wife, he would not have got entangled with this danseuse. He
has such a vigorous constitution--”

Madame Descoings had likewise reflected during the night as to the best
way of saving the honor of the family. At daybreak, she got out of bed
and went to her friend’s room.

“Neither you nor Philippe should manage this delicate matter,” she
urged. “Our two old friends Du Bruel and Claparon are dead, but we still
have Desroches, who is very sagacious. I’ll go and see him this morning.
He can tell the newspaper people that Philippe trusted a friend and has
been made a victim; that his weakness in such respects makes him unfit
to be a cashier; what has now happened may happen again, and that
Philippe prefers to resign. That will prevent his being turned off.”

Agathe, seeing that this business lie would save the honor of her son,
at any rate in the eyes of strangers, kissed Madame Descoings, who went
out early to make an end of the dreadful affair.

Philippe, meanwhile, had slept the sleep of the just. “She is sly, that
old woman,” he remarked, when his mother explained to him why breakfast
was late.

Old Desroches, the last remaining friend of these two poor women, who,
in spite of his harsh nature, never forgot that Bridau had obtained
for him his place, fulfilled like an accomplished diplomat the delicate
mission Madame Descoings had confided to him. He came to dine that
evening with the family, and notified Agathe that she must go the
next day to the Treasury, rue Vivienne, sign the transfer of the funds
involved, and obtain a coupon for the six hundred francs a year which
still remained to her. The old clerk did not leave the afflicted
household that night without obliging Philippe to sign a petition to
the minister of war, asking for his reinstatement in the active army.
Desroches promised the two women to follow up the petition at the war
office, and to profit by the triumph of a certain duke over Philippe in
the matter of the danseuse, and so obtain that nobleman’s influence.

“Philippe will be lieutenant-colonel in the Duc de Maufrigneuse’s
regiment within three months,” he declared, “and you will be rid of
him.”

Desroches went away, smothered with blessings from the two poor widows
and Joseph. As to the newspaper, it ceased to exist at the end of two
months, just as Finot had predicted. Philippe’s crime had, therefore,
so far as the world knew, no consequences. 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. Mariette was the sole object of the fellow’s love, and her
treachery had greatly hardened his heart. When he happened to win more
than usual, or if he supped with his old comrade, Giroudeau, he followed
some Venus of the slums, with brutal contempt for the whole sex.
Otherwise regular in his habits, he breakfasted and dined at home and
came in every night about one o’clock. Three months of this horrible
life restored Agathe to some degree of confidence.

As for Joseph, who was working at the splendid picture to which
he afterwards owed his reputation, he lived in his atelier. On the
prediction of her grandson Bixiou, Madame Descoings believed in Joseph’s
future glory, and she showed him every sort of motherly kindness; she
took his breakfast to him, she did his errands, she blacked his boots.
The painter was never seen till dinner-time, and his evenings were spent
at the Cenacle among his friends. He read a great deal, and gave himself
that deep and serious education which only comes through the mind
itself, and which all men of talent strive after between the ages of
twenty and thirty. Agathe, seeing very little of Joseph, and feeling
no uneasiness about him, lived only for Philippe, who gave her the
alternations of fears excited and terrors allayed, which seem the life,
as it were, of sentiment, and to be as necessary to maternity as to
love. Desroches, who came once a week to see the widow of his patron
and friend, gave her hopes. The Duc de Maufrigneuse had asked to have
Philippe in his regiment; the minister of war had ordered an inquiry;
and as the name of Bridau did not appear on any police list, nor an any
record at the Palais de Justice, Philippe would be reinstated in the
army early in the coming year.

To arrive at this result, Desroches set all the powers that he could
influence in motion. At the prefecture of police he learned that
Philippe spent his evenings in the gambling-house; and he thought it
best to tell this fact privately to Madame Descoings, exhorting her keep
an eye on the lieutenant-colonel, for one outbreak would imperil all; as
it was, the minister of war was not likely to inquire whether Philippe
gambled. Once restored to his rank under the flag of his country, he
would perhaps abandon a vice only taken up from idleness. Agathe, who
no longer received her friends in the evening, sat in the chimney-corner
reading her prayers, while Madame Descoings consulted the cards,
interpreted her dreams, and applied the rules of the “cabala” to her
lottery ventures. This jovial fanatic never missed a single drawing; she
still pursued her trey,--which never turned up. It was nearly twenty-one
years old, just approaching its majority; on this ridiculous idea the
old woman now pinned her faith. One of its three numbers had stayed at
the bottom of all the wheels ever since the institution of the lottery.
Accordingly, Madame Descoings laid heavy stakes on that particular
number, as well as on all the combinations of the three numbers. The
last mattress remaining to her bed was the place where she stored her
savings; she unsewed the ticking, put in from time to time the bit of
gold saved from her needs, wrapped carefully in wool, and then sewed the
mattress up again. She intended, at the last drawing, to risk all her
savings on the different combinations of her treasured trey.

This passion, so universally condemned, has never been fairly studied.
No one has understood this opium of poverty. The lottery, all-powerful
fairy of the poor, bestowed the gift of magic hopes. The turn of the
wheel which opens to the gambler a vista of gold and happiness, lasts
no longer than a flash of lightning, but the lottery gave five days’
existence to that magnificent flash. What social power can to-day, for
the sum of five sous, give us five days’ happiness and launch us ideally
into all the joys of civilization? Tobacco, a craving far more immoral
than play, destroys the body, attacks the mind, and stupefies a nation;
while the lottery did nothing of the kind. This passion, moreover, was
forced to keep within limits by the long periods that occurred
between the drawings, and by the choice of wheels which each investor
individually clung to. Madame Descoings never staked on any but the
“wheel of Paris.” Full of confidence that the trey cherished for
twenty-one years was about to triumph, she now imposed upon herself
enormous privations, that she might stake a large amount of savings upon
the last drawing of the year. When she dreamed her cabalistic visions
(for all dreams did not correspond with the numbers of the lottery), she
went and told them to Joseph, who was the sole being who would listen,
and not only not scold her, but give her the kindly words with which an
artist knows how to soothe the follies of the mind. All great talents
respect and understand a real passion; they explain it to themselves
by finding the roots of it in their own hearts or minds. Joseph’s ideas
was, that his brother loved tobacco and liquors, Maman Descoings loved
her trey, his mother loved God, Desroches the younger loved lawsuits,
Desroches the elder loved angling,--in short, all the world, he said,
loved something. He himself loved the “beau ideal” in all things; he
loved the poetry of Lord Byron, the painting of Gericault, the music of
Rossini, the novels of Walter Scott. “Every one to his taste, maman,” he
would say; “but your trey does hang fire terribly.”

“It will turn up, and you will be rich, and my little Bixiou as well.”

“Give it all to your grandson,” cried Joseph; “at any rate, do what you
like best with it.”

“Hey! when it turns up I shall have enough for everybody. In the first
place, you shall have a fine atelier; you sha’n’t deprive yourself of
going to the opera so as to pay for your models and your colors. Do you
know, my dear boy, you make me play a pretty shabby part in that picture
of yours?”

By way of economy, Joseph had made the Descoings pose for his
magnificent painting of a young courtesan taken by an old woman to
a Doge of Venice. This picture, one of the masterpieces of modern
painting, was mistaken by Gros himself for a Titian, and it paved the
way for the recognition which the younger artists gave to Joseph’s
talent in the Salon of 1823.

“Those who know you know very well what you are,” he answered gayly.
“Why need you trouble yourself about those who don’t know you?”

For the last ten years Madame Descoings had taken on the ripe tints of a
russet apple at Easter. Wrinkles had formed in her superabundant flesh,
now grown pallid and flabby. Her eyes, full of life, were bright with
thoughts that were still young and vivacious, and might be considered
grasping; for there is always something of that spirit in a gambler.
Her fat face bore traces of dissimulation and of the mental reservations
hidden in the depths of her heart. Her vice necessitated secrecy. There
were also indications of gluttony in the motion of her lips. And thus,
although she was, as we have seen, an excellent and upright woman, the
eye might be misled by her appearance. She was an admirable model
for the old woman Joseph wished to paint. Coralie, a young actress of
exquisite beauty who died in the flower of her youth, the mistress of
Lucien de Rubempre, one of Joseph’s friends, had given him the idea of
the picture. This noble painting has been called a plagiarism of
other pictures, while in fact it was a splendid arrangement of three
portraits. Michel Chrestien, one of his companions at the Cenacle, lent
his republican head for the senator, to which Joseph added a few mature
tints, just as he exaggerated the expression of Madame Descoings’s
features. This fine picture, which was destined to make a great noise
and bring the artist much hatred, jealousy, and admiration, was just
sketched out; but, compelled as he was to work for a living, he laid
it aside to make copies of the old masters for the dealers; thus he
penetrated the secrets of their processes, and his brush is therefore
one of the best trained of the modern school. The shrewd sense of an
artist led him to conceal the profits he was beginning to lay by
from his mother and Madame Descoings, aware that each had her road to
ruin,--the one in Philippe, the other in the lottery. This astuteness is
seldom wanting among painters; busy for days together in the solitude of
their studios, engaged in work which, up to a certain point, leaves the
mind free, they are in some respects like women,--their thoughts turn
about the little events of life, and they contrive to get at their
hidden meaning.

Joseph had bought one of those magnificent chests or coffers of a past
age, then ignored by fashion, with which he decorated a corner of his
studio, where the light danced upon the bas-reliefs and gave full lustre
to a masterpiece of the sixteenth century artisans. He saw the necessity
for a hiding-place, and in this coffer he had begun to accumulate a
little store of money. With an artist’s carelessness, he was in the
habit of putting the sum he allowed for his monthly expenses in a skull,
which stood on one of the compartments of the coffer. Since his brother
had returned to live at home, he found a constant discrepancy between
the amount he spent and the sum in this receptacle. The hundred francs
a month disappeared with incredible celerity. Finding nothing one day,
when he had only spent forty or fifty francs, he remarked for the
first time: “My money must have got wings.” The next month he paid more
attention to his accounts; but add as he might, like Robert Macaire,
sixteen and five are twenty-three, he could make nothing of them. When,
for the third time, he found a still more important discrepancy, he
communicated the painful fact to Madame Descoings, who loved him, he
knew, with that maternal, tender, confiding, credulous, enthusiastic
love that he had never had from his own mother, good as she was,--a love
as necessary to the early life of an artist as the care of the hen is
to her unfledged chickens. To her alone could he confide his horrible
suspicions. He was as sure of his friends as he was of himself; and the
Descoings, he knew, would take nothing to put in her lottery. At
the idea which then suggested itself the poor woman wrung her hands.
Philippe alone could have committed this domestic theft.

“Why didn’t he ask me, if he wanted it?” cried Joseph, taking a dab
of color on his palette and stirring it into the other colors without
seeing what he did. “Is it likely I should refuse him?”

“It is robbing a child!” cried the Descoings, her face expressing the
deepest disgust.

“No,” replied Joseph, “he is my brother; my purse is his: but he ought
to have asked me.”

“Put in a special sum, in silver, this morning, and don’t take anything
out,” said Madame Descoings. “I shall know who goes into the studio; and
if he is the only one, you will be certain it is he.”

The next day Joseph had proof of his brother’s forced loans upon him.
Philippe came to the studio when his brother was out and took the little
sum he wanted. The artist trembled for his savings.

“I’ll catch him at it, the scamp!” he said, laughing, to Madame
Descoings.

“And you’ll do right: we ought to break him of it. I, too, I have missed
little sums out of my purse. Poor boy! he wants tobacco; he’s accustomed
to it.”

“Poor boy! poor boy!” cried the artist. “I’m rather of Fulgence and
Bixiou’s opinion: Philippe is a dead-weight on us. He runs his head into
riots and has to be shipped to America, and that costs the mother twelve
thousand francs; he can’t find anything to do in the forests of the New
World, and so he comes back again, and that costs twelve thousand more.
Under pretence of having carried two words of Napoleon to a general,
he thinks himself a great soldier and makes faces at the Bourbons;
meantime, what does he do? amuse himself, travel about, see foreign
countries! As for me, I’m not duped by his misfortunes; he doesn’t look
like a man who fails to get the best of things! Somebody finds him a
good place, and there he is, leading the life of a Sardanapalus with
a ballet-girl, and guzzling the funds of his journal; that costs the
mother another twelve thousand francs! I don’t care two straws for
myself, but Philippe will bring that poor woman to beggary. He thinks
I’m of no account because I was never in the dragoons of the Guard; but
perhaps I shall be the one to support that poor dear mother in her old
age, while he, if he goes on as he does, will end I don’t know how.
Bixiou often says to me, ‘He is a downright rogue, that brother of
yours.’ Your grandson is right. Philippe will be up to some mischief
that will compromise the honor of the family, and then we shall have to
scrape up another ten or twelve thousand francs! He gambles every night;
when he comes home, drunk as a templar, he drops on the staircase the
pricked cards on which he marks the turns of the red and black. Old
Desroches is trying to get him back into the army, and, on my word
on honor, I believe he would hate to serve again. Would you ever have
believed that a boy with such heavenly blue eyes and the look of Bayard
could turn out such a scoundrel?”




CHAPTER V

In spite of the coolness and discretion with which Philippe played his
trifling game every night, it happened every now and then that he was
what gamblers call “cleaned out.” Driven by the irresistible necessity
of having his evening stake of ten francs, he plundered the household,
and laid hands on his brother’s money and on all that Madame Descoings
or Agathe left about. Already the poor mother had had a dreadful vision
in her first sleep: Philippe entered the room and took from the pockets
of her gown all the money he could find. Agathe pretended to sleep, but
she passed the rest of the night in tears. She saw the truth only too
clearly. “One wrong act is not a vice,” Madame Descoings had declared;
but after so many repetitions, vice was unmistakable. Agathe could doubt
no longer; her best-beloved son had neither delicacy nor honor.

On the morrow of that frightful vision, before Philippe left the house
after breakfast, she drew him into her chamber and begged him, in a
tone of entreaty, to ask her for what money he needed. After that, the
applications were so numerous that in two weeks Agathe was drained of
all her savings. She was literally without a penny, and began to think
of finding work. The means of earning money had been discussed in the
evenings between herself and Madame Descoings, and she had already taken
patterns of worsted work to fill in, from a shop called the “Pere
de Famille,”--an employment which pays about twenty sous a day.
Notwithstanding Agathe’s silence on the subject, Madame Descoings had
guessed the motive of this desire to earn money by women’s-work. The
change in her appearance was eloquent: her fresh face had withered, the
skin clung to the temples and the cheek-bones, and the forehead showed
deep lines; her eyes lost their clearness; an inward fire was evidently
consuming her; she wept the greater part of the night. A chief cause
of these outward ravages was the necessity of hiding her anguish, her
sufferings, her apprehensions. She never went to sleep until Philippe
came in; she listened for his step, she had learned the inflections of
his voice, the variations of his walk, the very language of his cane
as it touched the pavement. Nothing escaped her. She knew the degree of
drunkenness he had reached, she trembled as she heard him stumble on the
stairs; one night she picked up some pieces of gold at the spot where he
had fallen. When he had drunk and won, his voice was gruff and his cane
dragged; but when he had lost, his step had something sharp, short and
angry about it; he hummed in a clear voice, and carried his cane in the
air as if presenting arms. At breakfast, if he had won, his behavior was
gay and even affectionate; he joked roughly, but still he joked, with
Madame Descoings, with Joseph, and with his mother; gloomy, on the
contrary, when he had lost, his brusque, rough speech, his hard glance,
and his depression, frightened them. A life of debauch and the abuse of
liquors debased, day by day, a countenance that was once so handsome.
The veins of the face were swollen with blood, the features became
coarse, the eyes lost their lashes and grew hard and dry. No longer
careful of his person, Philippe exhaled the miasmas of a tavern and
the smell of muddy boots, which, to an observer, stamped him with
debauchery.

“You ought,” said Madame Descoings to Philippe during the last days of
December, “you ought to get yourself new-clothed from head to foot.”

“And who is to pay for it?” he answered sharply. “My poor mother hasn’t
a sou; and I have five hundred francs a year. It would take my whole
year’s pension to pay for the clothes; besides I have mortgaged it for
three years--”

“What for?” asked Joseph.

“A debt of honor. Giroudeau borrowed a thousand francs from Florentine
to lend me. I am not gorgeous, that’s a fact; but when one thinks that
Napoleon is at Saint Helena, and has sold his plate for the means of
living, his faithful soldiers can manage to walk on their bare feet,” he
said, showing his boots without heels, as he marched away.

“He is not bad,” said Agathe, “he has good feelings.”

“You can love the Emperor and yet dress yourself properly,” said Joseph.
“If he would take any care of himself and his clothes, he wouldn’t look
so like a vagabond.”

“Joseph! you ought to have some indulgence for your brother,” cried
Agathe. “You do the things you like, while he is certainly not in his
right place.”

“What did he leave it for?” demanded Joseph. “What can it matter to him
whether Louis the Eighteenth’s bugs or Napoleon’s cuckoos are on the
flag, if it is the flag of his country? France is France! For my part,
I’d paint for the devil. A soldier ought to fight, if he is a soldier,
for the love of his art. If he had stayed quietly in the army, he would
have been a general by this time.”

“You are unjust to him,” said Agathe, “your father, who adored the
Emperor, would have approved of his conduct. However, he has consented
to re-enter the army. God knows the grief it has caused your brother to
do a thing he considers treachery.”

Joseph rose to return to his studio, but his mother took his hand and
said:--

“Be good to your brother; he is so unfortunate.”

When the artist got back to his painting-room, followed by Madame
Descoings, who begged him to humor his mother’s feelings, and pointed
out to him how changed she was, and what inward suffering the change
revealed, they found Philippe there, to their great amazement.

“Joseph, my boy,” he said, in an off-hand way, “I want some money.
Confound it! I owe thirty francs for cigars at my tobacconist’s, and I
dare not pass the cursed shop till I’ve paid it. I’ve promised to pay it
a dozen times.”

“Well, I like your present way best,” said Joseph; “take what you want
out of the skull.”

“I took all there was last night, after dinner.”

“There was forty-five francs.”

“Yes, that’s what I made it,” replied Philippe. “I took them; is there
any objection?”

“No, my friend, no,” said Joseph. “If you were rich, I should do the
same by you; only, before taking what I wanted, I should ask you if it
were convenient.”

“It is very humiliating to ask,” remarked Philippe; “I would rather see
you taking as I do, without a word; it shows more confidence. In the
army, if a comrade dies, and has a good pair of boots, and you have a
bad pair, you change, that’s all.”

“Yes, but you don’t take them while he is living.”

“Oh, what meanness!” said Philippe, shrugging his shoulders. “Well, so
you haven’t got any money?”

“No,” said Joseph, who was determined not to show his hiding-place.

“In a few days we shall be rich,” said Madame Descoings.

“Yes, you; you think your trey is going to turn up on the 25th at the
Paris drawing. You must have put in a fine stake if you think you can
make us all rich.”

“A paid-up trey of two hundred francs will give three millions, without
counting the couplets and the singles.”

“At fifteen thousand times the stake--yes, you are right; it is just two
hundred you must pay up!” cried Philippe.

Madame Descoings bit her lips; she knew she had spoken imprudently. In
fact, Philippe was asking himself as he went downstairs:--

“That old witch! where does she keep her money? It is as good as lost;
I can make a better use of it. With four pools at fifty francs each, I
could win two hundred thousand francs, and that’s much surer than the
turning up of a trey.”

He tried to think where the old woman was likely to have hid the money.
On the days preceding festivals, Agathe went to church and stayed there
a long time; no doubt she confessed and prepared for the communion. It
was now the day before Christmas; Madame Descoings would certainly go
out to buy some dainties for the “reveillon,” the midnight meal; and
she might also take occasion to pay up her stake. The lottery was drawn
every five days in different localities, at Bordeaux, Lyons, Lille,
Strasburg, and Paris. The Paris lottery was drawn on the twenty-fifth
of each month, and the lists closed on the twenty-fourth, at midnight.
Philippe studied all these points and set himself to watch. He came
home at midday; the Descoings had gone out, and had taken the key of the
_appartement_. But that was no difficulty. Philippe pretended to have
forgotten something, and asked the concierge to go herself and get a
locksmith, who lived close by, and who came at once and opened the door.
The villain’s first thought was the bed; he uncovered it, passed his
hands over the mattress before he examined the bedstead, and at the
lower end felt the pieces wrapped up in paper. He at once ripped the
ticking, picked out twenty napoleons, and then, without taking time
to sew up the mattress, re-made the bed neatly enough, so that Madame
Descoings could suspect nothing.

The gambler stole off with a light foot, resolving to play at three
different times, three hours apart, and each time for only ten minutes.
Thorough-going players, ever since 1786, the time at which public
gaming-houses were established,--the true players whom the government
dreaded, and who ate up, to use a gambling term, the money of the
bank,--never played in any other way. But before attaining this measure
of experience they lost fortunes. The whole science of gambling-houses
and their gains rests upon three things: the impassibility of the bank;
the even results called “drawn games,” when half the money goes to
the bank; and the notorious bad faith authorized by the government,
in refusing to hold or pay the player’s stakes except optionally. In
a word, the gambling-house, which refuses the game of a rich and cool
player, devours the fortune of the foolish and obstinate one, who is
carried away by the rapid movement of the machinery of the game. The
croupiers at “trente et quarante” move nearly as fast as the ball.

Philippe had ended by acquiring the sang-froid of a commanding general,
which enables him to keep his eye clear and his mind prompt in the midst
of tumult. He had reached that statesmanship of gambling which in Paris,
let us say in passing, is the livelihood of thousands who are strong
enough to look every night into an abyss without getting a vertigo. With
his four hundred francs, Philippe resolved to make his fortune that day.
He put aside, in his boots, two hundred francs, and kept the other two
hundred in his pocket. At three o’clock he went to the gambling-house
(which is now turned into the theatre of the Palais-Royal), where the
bank accepted the largest sums. He came out half an hour later with
seven thousand francs in his pocket. Then he went to see Florentine,
paid the five hundred francs which he owed to her, and proposed a supper
at the Rocher de Cancale after the theatre. Returning to his game, along
the rue de Sentier, he stopped at Giroudeau’s newspaper-office to notify
him of the gala. By six o’clock Philippe had won twenty-five thousand
francs, and stopped playing at the end of ten minutes as he had promised
himself to do. That night, by ten o’clock, he had won seventy-five
thousand francs. After the supper, which was magnificent, Philippe, by
that time drunk and confident, went back to his play at midnight. In
defiance of the rule he had imposed upon himself, he played for an
hour and doubled his fortune. The bankers, from whom, by his system of
playing, he had extracted one hundred and fifty thousand francs, looked
at him with curiosity.

“Will he go away now, or will he stay?” they said to each other by a
glance. “If he stays he is lost.”

Philippe thought he had struck a vein of luck, and stayed. Towards three
in the morning, the hundred and fifty thousand francs had gone back to
the bank. The colonel, who had imbibed a considerable quantity of grog
while playing, left the place in a drunken state, which the cold of the
outer air only increased. A waiter from the gambling-house followed him,
picked him up, and took him to one of those horrible houses at the door
of which, on a hanging lamp, are the words: “Lodgings for the night.”
 The waiter paid for the ruined gambler, who was put to bed, where he
remained till Christmas night. The managers of gambling-houses have some
consideration for their customers, especially for high players. Philippe
awoke about seven o’clock in the evening, his mouth parched, his face
swollen, and he himself in the grip of a nervous fever. The strength
of his constitution enabled him to get home on foot, where meanwhile
he had, without willing it, brought mourning, desolation, poverty, and
death.

The evening before, when dinner was ready, Madame Descoings and Agathe
expected Philippe. They waited dinner till seven o’clock. Agathe always
went to bed at ten; but as, on this occasion, she wished to be present
at the midnight mass, she went to lie down as soon as dinner was over.
Madame Descoings and Joseph remained alone by the fire in the little
salon, which served for all, and the old woman asked the painter to add
up the amount of her great stake, her monstrous stake, on the famous
trey, which she was to pay that evening at the Lottery office. She
wished to put in for the doubles and singles as well, so as to seize all
chances. After feasting on the poetry of her hopes, and pouring the two
horns of plenty at the feet of her adopted son, and relating to him her
dreams which demonstrated the certainty of success, she felt no other
uneasiness than the difficulty of bearing such joy, and waiting from
mid-night until ten o’clock of the morrow, when the winning numbers were
declared. Joseph, who saw nothing of the four hundred francs necessary
to pay up the stakes, asked about them. The old woman smiled, and led
him into the former salon, which was now her bed-chamber.

“You shall see,” she said.

Madame Descoings hastily unmade the bed, and searched for her scissors
to rip the mattress; she put on her spectacles, looked at the ticking,
saw the hole, and let fall the mattress. Hearing a sigh from the depths
of the old woman’s breast, as though she were strangled by a rush of
blood to the heart, Joseph instinctively held out his arms to catch the
poor creature, and placed her fainting in a chair, calling to his mother
to come to them. Agathe rose, slipped on her dressing-gown,
and ran in. By the light of a candle, she applied the ordinary
remedies,--eau-de-cologne to the temples, cold water to the forehead, a
burnt feather under the nose,--and presently her aunt revived.

“They were there is morning; HE has taken them, the monster!” she said.

“Taken what?” asked Joseph.

“I had twenty louis in my mattress; my savings for two years; no one but
Philippe could have taken them.”

“But when?” cried the poor mother, overwhelmed, “he has not been in
since breakfast.”

“I wish I might be mistaken,” said the old woman. “But this morning
in Joseph’s studio, when I spoke before Philippe of my stakes, I had a
presentiment. I did wrong not to go down and take my little all and pay
for my stakes at once. I meant to, and I don’t know what prevented me.
Oh, yes!--my God! I went out to buy him some cigars.”

“But,” said Joseph, “you left the door locked. Besides, it is so
infamous. I can’t believe it. Philippe couldn’t have watched you, cut
open the mattress, done it deliberately,--no, no!”

“I felt them this morning, when I made my bed after breakfast,” repeated
Madame Descoings.

Agathe, horrified, went down stairs and asked if Philippe had come in
during the day. The concierge related the tale of his return and the
locksmith. The mother, heart-stricken, went back a changed woman. White
as the linen of her chemise, she walked as we might fancy a spectre
walks, slowly, noiselessly, moved by some superhuman power, and yet
mechanically. She held a candle in her hand, whose light fell full upon
her face and showed her eyes, fixed with horror. Unconsciously, her
hands by a desperate movement had dishevelled the hair about her brow;
and this made her so beautiful with anguish that Joseph stood rooted
in awe at the apparition of that remorse, the vision of that statue of
terror and despair.

“My aunt,” she said, “take my silver forks and spoons. I have enough
to make up the sum; I took your money for Philippe’s sake; I thought I
could put it back before you missed it. Oh! I have suffered much.”

She sat down. Her dry, fixed eyes wandered a little.

“It was he who did it,” whispered the old woman to Joseph.

“No, no,” cried Agathe; “take my silver plate, sell it; it is useless to
me; we can eat with yours.”

She went to her room, took the box which contained the plate, felt its
light weight, opened it, and saw a pawnbroker’s ticket. The poor mother
uttered a dreadful cry. Joseph and the Descoings ran to her, saw the
empty box, and her noble falsehood was of no avail. All three were
silent, and avoided looking at each other; but the next moment, by an
almost frantic gesture, Agathe laid her finger on her lips as if to
entreat a secrecy no one desired to break. They returned to the salon,
and sat beside the fire.

“Ah! my children,” cried Madame Descoings, “I am stabbed to the heart:
my trey will turn up, I am certain of it. I am not thinking of myself,
but of you two. Philippe is a monster,” she continued, addressing her
niece; “he does not love you after all that you have done for him. If
you do not protect yourself against him he will bring you to beggary.
Promise me to sell out your Funds and buy a life-annuity. Joseph has a
good profession and he can live. If you will do this, dear Agathe, you
will never be an expense to Joseph. Monsieur Desroches has just started
his son as a notary; he would take your twelve thousand francs and pay
you an annuity.”

Joseph seized his mother’s candlestick, rushed up to his studio, and
came down with three hundred francs.

“Here, Madame Descoings!” he cried, giving her his little store, “it
is no business of ours what you do with your money; we owe you what you
have lost, and here it is, almost in full.”

“Take your poor little all?--the fruit of those privations that have
made me so unhappy! are you mad, Joseph?” cried the old woman, visibly
torn between her dogged faith in the coming trey, and the sacrilege of
accepting such a sacrifice.

“Oh! take it if you like,” said Agathe, who was moved to tears by this
action of her true son.

Madame Descoings took Joseph by the head, and kissed him on the
forehead:--

“My child,” she said, “don’t tempt me. I might only lose it. The
lottery, you see, is all folly.”

No more heroic words were ever uttered in the hidden dramas of domestic
life. It was, indeed, affection triumphant over inveterate vice. At this
instant, the clocks struck midnight.

“It is too late now,” said Madame Descoings.

“Oh!” cried Joseph, “here are your cabalistic numbers.”

The artist sprang at the paper, and rushed headlong down the staircase
to pay the stakes. When he was no longer present, Agathe and Madame
Descoings burst into tears.

“He has gone, the dear love,” cried the old gambler; “but it shall all
be his; he pays his own money.”

Unhappily, Joseph did not know the way to any of the lottery-offices,
which in those days were as well known to most people as the cigarshops
to a smoker in ours. The painter ran along, reading the street
names upon the lamps. When he asked the passers-by to show him a
lottery-office, he was told they were all closed, except the one under
the portico of the Palais-Royal which was sometimes kept open a little
later. He flew to the Palais-Royal: the office was shut.

“Two minutes earlier, and you might have paid your stake,” said one
of the vendors of tickets, whose beat was under the portico, where he
vociferated this singular cry: “Twelve hundred francs for forty sous,”
 and offered tickets all paid up.

By the glimmer of the street lamp and the lights of the cafe de la
Rotonde, Joseph examined these tickets to see if, by chance, any of them
bore the Descoings’s numbers. He found none, and returned home grieved
at having done his best in vain for the old woman, to whom he related
his ill-luck. Agathe and her aunt went together to the midnight mass at
Saint-Germain-des-Pres. Joseph went to bed. The collation did not take
place. Madame Descoings had lost her head; and in Agathe’s heart was
eternal mourning.

The two rose late on Christmas morning. Ten o’clock had struck before
Madame Descoings began to bestir herself about the breakfast, which
was only ready at half-past eleven. At that hour, the oblong frames
containing the winning numbers are hung over the doors of the
lottery-offices. If Madame Descoings had paid her stake and held her
ticket, she would have gone by half-past nine o’clock to learn her
fate at a building close to the ministry of Finance, in the rue
Neuve-des-Petits Champs, a situation now occupied by the Theatre
Ventadour in the place of the same name. On the days when the drawings
took place, an observer might watch with curiosity the crowd of old
women, cooks, and old men assembled about the door of this building; a
sight as remarkable as the cue of people about the Treasury on the days
when the dividends are paid.

“Well, here you are, rolling in wealth!” said old Desroches, coming into
the room just as the Descoings was swallowing her last drop of coffee.

“What do you mean?” cried poor Agathe.

“Her trey has turned up,” he said, producing the list of numbers written
on a bit of paper, such as the officials of the lottery put by hundreds
into little wooden bowls on their counters.

Joseph read the list. Agathe read the list. The Descoings read nothing;
she was struck down as by a thunderbolt. At the change in her face,
at the cry she gave, old Desroches and Joseph carried her to her bed.
Agathe went for a doctor. The poor woman was seized with apoplexy, and
she only recovered consciousness at four in the afternoon; old Haudry,
her doctor, then said that, in spite of this improvement, she ought to
settle her worldly affairs and think of her salvation. She herself only
uttered two words:--

“Three millions!”

Old Desroches, informed by Joseph, with due reservations, of the state
of things, related many instances where lottery-players had seen a
fortune escape them on the very day when, by some fatality, they had
forgotten to pay their stakes; but he thoroughly understood that such a
blow might be fatal when it came after twenty years’ perseverance. About
five o’clock, as a deep silence reigned in the little _appartement_, and
the sick woman, watched by Joseph and his mother, the one sitting at
the foot, the other at the head of her bed, was expecting her grandson
Bixiou, whom Desroches had gone to fetch, the sound of Philippe’s step
and cane resounded on the staircase.

“There he is! there he is!” cried the Descoings, sitting up in bed and
suddenly able to use her paralyzed tongue.

Agathe and Joseph were deeply impressed by this powerful effect of the
horror which violently agitated the old woman. Their painful suspense
was soon ended by the sight of Philippe’s convulsed and purple face, his
staggering walk, and the horrible state of his eyes, which were deeply
sunken, dull, and yet haggard; he had a strong chill upon him, and his
teeth chattered.

“Starvation in Prussia!” he cried, looking about him. “Nothing to eat
or drink?--and my throat on fire! Well, what’s the matter? The devil is
always meddling in our affairs. There’s my old Descoings in bed, looking
at me with her eyes as big as saucers.”

“Be silent, monsieur!” said Agathe, rising. “At least, respect the
sorrows you have caused.”

“_Monsieur_, indeed!” he cried, looking at his mother. “My dear little
mother, that won’t do. Have you ceased to love your son?”

“Are you worthy of love? Have you forgotten what you did yesterday?
Go and find yourself another home; you cannot live with us any
longer,--that is, after to-morrow,” she added; “for in the state you are
in now it is difficult--”

“To turn me out,--is that it?” he interrupted. “Ha! are you going to
play the melodrama of ‘The Banished Son’? Well done! is that how you
take things? You are all a pretty set! What harm have I done? I’ve
cleaned out the old woman’s mattress. What the devil is the good of
money kept in wool? Do you call that a crime? Didn’t she take twenty
thousand francs from you? We are her creditors, and I’ve paid myself as
much as I could get,--that’s all.”

“My God! my God!” cried the dying woman, clasping her hands and praying.

“Be silent!” exclaimed Joseph, springing at his brother and putting his
hand before his mouth.

“To the right about, march! brat of a painter!” retorted Philippe,
laying his strong hand on Joseph’s head, and twirling him round, as he
flung him on a sofa. “Don’t dare to touch the moustache of a commander
of a squadron of the dragoons of the Guard!”

“She has paid me back all that she owed me,” cried Agathe, rising and
turning an angry face to her son; “and besides, that is my affair. You
have killed her. Go away, my son,” she added, with a gesture that took
all her remaining strength, “and never let me see you again. You are a
monster.”

“I kill her?”

“Her trey has turned up,” cried Joseph, “and you stole the money for her
stake.”

“Well, if she is dying of a lost trey, it isn’t I who have killed her,”
 said the drunkard.

“Go, go!” said Agathe. “You fill me with horror; you have every vice. My
God! is this my son?”

A hollow rattle sounded in Madame Descoings’s throat, increasing
Agathe’s anger.

“I love you still, my mother,--you who are the cause of all my
misfortunes,” said Philippe. “You turn me out of doors on Christmas-day.
What did you do to grandpa Rouget, to your father, that he should drive
you away and disinherit you? If you had not displeased him, we should
all be rich now, and I should not be reduced to misery. What did you do
to your father,--you who are a good woman? You see by your own self, I
may be a good fellow and yet be turned out of house and home,--I, the
glory of the family--”

“The disgrace of it!” cried the Descoings.

“You shall leave this room, or you shall kill me!” cried Joseph,
springing on his brother with the fury of a lion.

“My God! my God!” cried Agathe, trying to separate the brothers.

At this moment Bixiou and Haudry the doctor entered. Joseph had just
knocked his brother over and stretched him on the ground.

“He is a regular wild beast,” he cried. “Don’t speak another word, or
I’ll--”

“I’ll pay you for this!” roared Philippe.

“A family explanation,” remarked Bixiou.

“Lift him up,” said the doctor, looking at him. “He is as ill as Madame
Descoings; undress him and put him to bed; get off his boots.”

“That’s easy to say,” cried Bixiou, “but they must be cut off; his legs
are swollen.”

Agathe took a pair of scissors. When she had cut down the boots, which
in those days were worn outside the clinging trousers, ten pieces of
gold rolled on the floor.

“There it is,--her money,” murmured Philippe. “Cursed fool that I was, I
forgot it. I too have missed a fortune.”

He was seized with a horrible delirium of fever, and began to rave.
Joseph, assisted by old Desroches, who had come back, and by Bixiou,
carried him to his room. Doctor Haudry was obliged to write a line
to the Hopital de la Charite and borrow a strait-waistcoat; for the
delirium ran so high as to make him fear that Philippe might kill
himself,--he was raving. At nine o’clock calm was restored. The Abbe
Loraux and Desroches endeavored to comfort Agathe, who never ceased
to weep at her aunt’s bedside. She listened to them in silence, and
obstinately shook her head; Joseph and the Descoings alone knew the
extent and depth of her inward wound.

“He will learn to do better, mother,” said Joseph, when Desroches and
Bixiou had left.

“Oh!” cried the widow, “Philippe is right,--my father cursed me: I have
no right to--Here, here is your money,” she said to Madame Descoings,
adding Joseph’s three hundred francs to the two hundred found on
Philippe. “Go and see if your brother does not need something,” she said
to Joseph.

“Will you keep a promise made to a dying woman?” asked Madame Descoings,
who felt that her mind was failing her.

“Yes, aunt.”

“Then swear to me to give your property to young Desroches for a life
annuity. My income ceases at my death; and from what you have just said,
I know you will let that wretch wring the last farthing out of you.”

“I swear it, aunt.”

The old woman died on the 31st of December, five days after the terrible
blow which old Desroches had so innocently given her. The five hundred
francs--the only money in the household--were barely enough to pay for
her funeral. She left a small amount of silver and some furniture, the
value of which Madame Bixiou paid over to her grandson Bixiou. Reduced
to eight hundred francs’ annuity paid to her by young Desroches, who
had bought a business without clients, and himself took the capital of
twelve thousand francs, Agathe gave up her _appartement_ on the third
floor, and sold all her superfluous furniture. When, at the end of a
month, Philippe seemed to be convalescent, his mother coldly explained
to him that the costs of his illness had taken all her ready money, that
she should be obliged in future to work for her living, and she urged
him, with the utmost kindness, to re-enter the army and support himself.

“You might have spared me that sermon,” said Philippe, looking at his
mother with an eye that was cold from utter indifference. “I have seen
all along that neither you nor my brother love me. I am alone in the
world; I like it best!”

“Make yourself worthy of our affection,” answered the poor mother,
struck to the very heart, “and we will give it back to you--”

“Nonsense!” he cried, interrupting her.

He took his old hat, rubbed white at the edges, stuck it over one ear,
and went downstairs, whistling.

“Philippe! where are you going without any money?” cried his mother, who
could not repress her tears. “Here, take this--”

She held out to him a hundred francs in gold, wrapped up in paper.
Philippe came up the stairs he had just descended, and took the money.

“Well; won’t you kiss me?” she said, bursting into tears.

He pressed his mother in his arms, but without the warmth of feeling
which was all that could give value to the embrace.

“Where shall you go?” asked Agathe.

“To Florentine, Girodeau’s mistress. Ah! they are real friends!” he
answered brutally.

He went away. Agathe turned back with trembling limbs, and failing
eyes, and aching heart. She fell upon her knees, prayed God to take
her unnatural child into His own keeping, and abdicated her woeful
motherhood.




CHAPTER VI

By February, 1822, Madame Bridau had settled into the attic room
recently occupied by Philippe, which was over the kitchen of her former
_appartement_. The painter’s studio and bedroom was opposite, on the
other side of the staircase. When Joseph saw his mother thus reduced,
he was determined to make her as comfortable as possible. After his
brother’s departure he assisted in the re-arrangement of the garret
room, to which he gave an artist’s touch. He added a rug; the bed,
simple in character but exquisite in taste, had something monastic about
it; the walls, hung with a cheap glazed cotton selected with taste, of
a color which harmonized with the furniture and was newly covered, gave
the room an air of elegance and nicety. In the hallway he added a double
door, with a “portiere” to the inner one. The window was shaded by a
blind which gave soft tones to the light. If the poor mother’s life was
reduced to the plainest circumstances that the life of any woman could
have in Paris, Agathe was at least better off than all others in a like
case, thanks to her son.

To save his mother from the cruel cares of such reduced housekeeping,
Joseph took her every day to dine at a table-d’hote in the rue de
Beaune, frequented by well-bred women, deputies, and titled people,
where each person’s dinner cost ninety francs a month. Having nothing
but the breakfast to provide, Agathe took up for her son the old habits
she had formerly had with the father. But in spite of Joseph’s pious
lies, she discovered the fact that her dinner was costing him nearly
a hundred francs a month. Alarmed at such enormous expense, and not
imaging that her son could earn much money by painting naked women, she
obtained, thanks to her confessor, the Abbe Loraux, a place worth seven
hundred francs a year in a lottery-office belonging to the Comtesse
de Bauvan, the widow of a Chouan leader. The lottery-offices of the
government, the lot, as one might say, of privileged widows, ordinarily
sufficed for the support of the family of each person who managed them.
But after the Restoration the difficulty of rewarding, within the limits
of constitutional government, all the services rendered to the cause,
led to the custom of giving to reduced women of title not only one but
two lottery-offices, worth, usually, from six to ten thousand a year. In
such cases, the widow of a general or nobleman thus “protected” did not
keep the lottery-office herself; she employed a paid manager. When these
managers were young men they were obliged to employ an assistant;
for, according to law, the offices had to be kept open till midnight;
moreover, the reports required by the minister of finance involved
considerable writing. The Comtesse de Bauvan, to whom the Abbe Loraux
explained the circumstances of the widow Bridau, promised, in case
her manager should leave, to give the place to Agathe; meantime she
stipulated that the widow should be taken as assistant, and receive a
salary of six hundred francs. Poor Agathe, who was obliged to be at the
office by ten in the morning, had scarcely time to get her dinner.
She returned to her work at seven in the evening, remaining there till
midnight. Joseph never, for two years, failed to fetch his mother at
night, and bring her back to the rue Mazarin; and often he went to take
her to dinner; his friends frequently saw him leave the opera or some
brilliant salon to be punctually at midnight at the office in the rue
Vivienne.

Agathe soon acquired the monotonous regularity of life which becomes
a stay and a support to those who have endured the shock of violent
sorrows. In the morning, after doing up her room, in which there were no
longer cats and little birds, she prepared the breakfast at her own fire
and carried it into the studio, where she ate it with her son. She then
arranged Joseph’s bedroom, put out the fire in her own chamber, and
brought her sewing to the studio, where she sat by the little iron
stove, leaving the room if a comrade or a model entered it. Though she
understood nothing whatever of art, the silence of the studio suited
her. In the matter of art she made not the slightest progress; she
attempted no hypocrisy; she was utterly amazed at the importance they
all attached to color, composition, drawing. When the Cenacle friends
or some brother-painter, like Schinner, Pierre Grassou, Leon de Lora,--a
very youthful “rapin” who was called at that time Mistigris,--discussed
a picture, she would come back afterwards, examine it attentively, and
discover nothing to justify their fine words and their hot disputes. She
made her son’s shirts, she mended his stockings, she even cleaned his
palette, supplied him with rags to wipe his brushes, and kept things in
order in the studio. Seeing how much thought his mother gave to these
little details, Joseph heaped attentions upon her in return. If mother
and son had no sympathies in the matter of art, they were at least bound
together by signs of tenderness. The mother had a purpose. One morning
as she was petting Joseph while he was sketching a large picture
(finished in after years and never understood), she said, as it were,
casually and aloud,--

“My God! what is he doing?”

“Doing? who?”

“Philippe.”

“Oh, ah! he’s sowing his wild oats; that fellow will make something of
himself by and by.”

“But he has gone through the lesson of poverty; perhaps it was poverty
which changed him to what he is. If he were prosperous he would be
good--”

“You think, my dear mother, that he suffered during that journey of his.
You are mistaken; he kept carnival in New York just as he does here--”

“But if he is suffering at this moment, near to us, would it not be
horrible?”

“Yes,” replied Joseph. “For my part, I will gladly give him some money;
but I don’t want to see him; he killed our poor Descoings.”

“So,” resumed Agathe, “you would not be willing to paint his portrait?”

“For you, dear mother, I’d suffer martyrdom. I can make myself remember
nothing except that he is my brother.”

“His portrait as a captain of dragoons on horseback?”

“Yes, I’ve a copy of a fine horse by Gros and I haven’t any use for it.”

“Well, then, go and see that friend of his and find out what has become
of him.”

“I’ll go!”

Agathe rose; her scissors and work fell at her feet; she went and kissed
Joseph’s head, and dropped two tears on his hair.

“He is your passion, that fellow,” said the painter. “We all have our
hopeless passions.”

That afternoon, about four o’clock, Joseph went to the rue du Sentier
and found his brother, who had taken Giroudeau’s place. The old dragoon
had been promoted to be cashier of a weekly journal established by his
nephew. Although Finot was still proprietor of the other newspaper,
which he had divided into shares, holding all the shares himself, the
proprietor and editor “de visu” was one of his friends, named Lousteau,
the son of that very sub-delegate of Issoudun on whom the Bridaus’
grandfather, Doctor Rouget, had vowed vengeance; consequently he was the
nephew of Madame Hochon. To make himself agreeable to his uncle, Finot
gave Philippe the place Giroudeau was quitting; cutting off, however,
half the salary. Moreover, daily, at five o’clock, Giroudeau audited the
accounts and carried away the receipts. Coloquinte, the old veteran,
who was the office boy and did errands, also kept an eye on the slippery
Philippe; who was, however, behaving properly. A salary of six hundred
francs, and the five hundred of his cross sufficed him to live, all the
more because, living in a warm office all day and at the theatre on a
free pass every evening, he had only to provide himself with food and a
place to sleep in. Coloquinte was departing with the stamped papers on
his head, and Philippe was brushing his false sleeves of green linen,
when Joseph entered.

“Bless me, here’s the cub!” cried Philippe. “Well, we’ll go and dine
together. You shall go to the opera; Florine and Florentine have got
a box. I’m going with Giroudeau; you shall be of the party, and I’ll
introduce you to Nathan.”

He took his leaded cane, and moistened a cigar.

“I can’t accept your invitation; I am to take our mother to dine at a
table d’hote.”

“Ah! how is she, the poor, dear woman?”

“She is pretty well,” answered the painter, “I have just repainted our
father’s portrait, and aunt Descoings’s. I have also painted my own, and
I should like to give our mother yours, in the uniform of the dragoons
of the Imperial Guard.”

“Very good.”

“You will have to come and sit.”

“I’m obliged to be in this hen-coop from nine o’clock till five.”

“Two Sundays will be enough.”

“So be it, little man,” said Napoleon’s staff officer, lighting his
cigar at the porter’s lamp.

When Joseph related Philippe’s position to his mother, on their way to
dinner in the rue de Beaune, he felt her arm tremble in his, and joy
lighted up her worn face; the poor soul breathed like one relieved of
a heavy weight. The next day, inspired by joy and gratitude, she paid
Joseph a number of little attentions; she decorated his studio with
flowers, and bought him two stands of plants. On the first Sunday when
Philippe was to sit, Agathe arranged a charming breakfast in the studio.
She laid it all out on the table; not forgetting a flask of brandy,
which, however, was only half full. She herself stayed behind a screen,
in which she made a little hole. The ex-dragoon sent his uniform the
night before, and she had not refrained from kissing it. When Philippe
was placed, in full dress, on one of those straw horses, all saddled,
which Joseph had hired for the occasion, Agathe, fearing to betray her
presence, mingled the soft sound of her tears with the conversation
of the two brothers. Philippe posed for two hours before and two hours
after breakfast. At three o’clock in the afternoon, he put on his
ordinary clothes and, as he lighted a cigar, he proposed to his brother
to go and dine together in the Palais-Royal, jingling gold in his pocket
as he spoke.

“No,” said Joseph, “it frightens me to see gold about you.”

“Ah! you’ll always have a bad opinion of me in this house,” cried the
colonel in a thundering voice. “Can’t I save my money, too?”

“Yes, yes!” cried Agathe, coming out of her hiding-place, and kissing
her son. “Let us go and dine with him, Joseph!”

Joseph dared not scold his mother. He went and dressed himself; and
Philippe took them to the Rocher de Cancale, where he gave them a
splendid dinner, the bill for which amounted to a hundred francs.

“The devil!” muttered Joseph uneasily; “with an income of eleven hundred
francs you manage, like Ponchard in the ‘Dame Blance,’ to save enough to
buy estates.”

“Bah, I’m on a run of luck,” answered the dragoon, who had drunk
enormously.

Hearing this speech just as they were on the steps of the cafe, and
before they got into the carriage to go to the theatre,--for Philippe
was to take his mother to the Cirque-Olympique (the only theatre her
confessor allowed her to visit),--Joseph pinched his mother’s arm.
She at once pretended to feel unwell, and refused to go the theatre;
Philippe accordingly took them back to the rue Mazarin, where, as soon
as she was alone with Joseph in her garret, Agathe fell into a gloomy
silence.

The following Sunday Philippe came again. This time his mother was
visibly present at the sitting. She served the breakfast, and put
several questions to the dragoon. She then learned that the nephew of
old Madame Hochon, the friend of her mother, played a considerable part
in literature. Philippe and his friend Giroudeau lived among a circle of
journalists, actresses, and booksellers, where they were regarded in the
light of cashiers. Philippe, who had been drinking kirsch before posing,
was loquacious. He boasted that he was about to become a great man. But
when Joseph asked a question as to his pecuniary resources he was dumb.
It so happened that there was no newspaper on the following day, it
being a fete, and to finish the picture Philippe proposed to sit again
on the morrow. Joseph told him that the Salon was close at hand, and as
he did not have the money to buy two frames for the pictures he wished
to exhibit, he was forced to procure it by finishing a copy of a Rubens
which had been ordered by Elie Magus, the picture-dealer. The original
belonged to a wealthy Swiss banker, who had only lent it for ten days,
and the next day was the last; the sitting must therefore be put off
till the following Sunday.

“Is that it?” asked Philippe, pointing to a picture by Rubens on an
easel.

“Yes,” replied Joseph; “it is worth twenty thousand francs. That’s what
genius can do. It will take me all to-morrow to get the tones of the
original and make the copy look so old it can’t be distinguished from
it.”

“Adieu, mother,” said Philippe, kissing Agathe. “Next Sunday, then.”

The next day Elie Magus was to come for his copy. Joseph’s friend,
Pierre Grassou, who was working for the same dealer, wanted to see it
when finished. To play him a trick, Joseph, when he heard his knock, put
the copy, which was varnished with a special glaze of his own, in place
of the original, and put the original on his easel. Pierre Grassou was
completely taken in; and then amazed and delighted at Joseph’s success.

“Do you think it will deceive old Magus?” he said to Joseph.

“We shall see,” answered the latter.

The dealer did not come as he had promised. It was getting late; Agathe
dined that day with Madame Desroches, who had lately lost her husband,
and Joseph proposed to Pierre Grassou to dine at his table d’hote. As he
went out he left the key of his studio with the concierge.

An hour later Philippe appeared and said to the concierge,--

“I am to sit this evening; Joseph will be in soon, and I will wait for
him in the studio.”

The woman gave him the key; Philippe went upstairs, took the copy,
thinking it was the original, and went down again; returned the key
to the concierge with the excuse that he had forgotten something, and
hurried off to sell his Rubens for three thousand francs. He had taken
the precaution to convey a message from his brother to Elie Magus,
asking him not to call till the following day.

That evening when Joseph returned, bringing his mother from Madame
Desroches’s, the concierge told him of Philippe’s freak,--how he had
called intending to wait, and gone away again immediately.

“I am ruined--unless he has had the delicacy to take the copy,” cried
the painter, instantly suspecting the theft. He ran rapidly up the three
flights and rushed into his studio. “God be praised!” he ejaculated. “He
is, what he always has been, a vile scoundrel.”

Agathe, who had followed Joseph, did not understand what he was saying;
but when her son explained what had happened, she stood still, with the
tears in her eyes.

“Have I but one son?” she said in a broken voice.

“We have never yet degraded him to the eyes of strangers,” said Joseph;
“but we must now warn the concierge. In future we shall have to keep the
keys ourselves. I’ll finish his blackguard face from memory; there’s not
much to do to it.”

“Leave it as it is; it will pain me too much ever to look at it,”
 answered the mother, heart-stricken and stupefied at such wickedness.

Philippe had been told how the money for this copy was to be expended;
moreover he knew the abyss into which he would plunge his brother
through the loss of the Rubens; but nothing restrained him. After this
last crime Agathe never mentioned him; her face acquired an expression
of cold and concentrated and bitter despair; one thought took possession
of her mind.

“Some day,” she said to herself, “we shall hear of a Bridau in the
police courts.”

Two months later, as Agathe was about to start for her office, an
old officer, who announced himself as a friend of Philippe on urgent
business, called on Madame Bridau, who happened to be in Joseph’s
studio.

When Giroudeau gave his name, mother and son trembled, and none the less
because the ex-dragoon had the face of a tough old sailor of the worst
type. His fishy gray eyes, his piebald moustache, the remains of his
shaggy hair fringing a skull that was the color of fresh butter,
all gave an indescribably debauched and libidinous expression to his
appearance. He wore an old iron-gray overcoat decorated with the red
ribbon of an officer of the Legion of honor, which met with difficulty
over a gastronomic stomach in keeping with a mouth that stretched from
ear to ear, and a pair of powerful shoulders. The torso was supported
by a spindling pair of legs, while the rubicund tints on the cheek-bones
bore testimony to a rollicking life. The lower part of the cheeks, which
were deeply wrinkled, overhung a coat-collar of velvet the worse for
wear. Among other adornments, the ex-dragoon wore enormous gold rings in
his ears.

“What a ‘noceur’!” thought Joseph, using a popular expression, meaning a
“loose fish,” which had lately passed into the ateliers.

“Madame,” said Finot’s uncle and cashier, “your son is in so unfortunate
a position that his friends find it absolutely necessary to ask you to
share the somewhat heavy expense which he is to them. He can no
longer do his work at the office; and Mademoiselle Florentine, of the
Porte-Saint-Martin, has taken him to lodge with her, in a miserable
attic in the rue de Vendome. Philippe is dying; and if you and his
brother are not able to pay for the doctor and medicines, we shall be
obliged, for the sake of curing him, to have him taken to the hospital
of the Capuchins. For three hundred francs we would keep him where he
is. But he must have a nurse; for at night, when Mademoiselle Florentine
is at the theatre, he persists in going out, and takes things that are
irritating and injurious to his malady and its treatment. As we are fond
of him, this makes us really very unhappy. The poor fellow has pledged
the pension of his cross for the next three years; he is temporarily
displaced from his office, and he has literally nothing. He will kill
himself, madame, unless we can put him into the private asylum of Doctor
Dubois. It is a decent hospital, where they will take him for ten francs
a day. Florentine and I will pay half, if you will pay the rest; it
won’t be for more than two months.”

“Monsieur, it is difficult for a mother not to be eternally grateful
to you for your kindness to her son,” replied Agathe; “but this son
is banished from my heart, and as for money, I have none. Not to be a
burden on my son whom you see here, who works day and night and
deserves all the love his mother can give him, I am the assistant in a
lottery-office--at my age!”

“And you, young man,” said the old dragoon to Joseph; “can’t you do as
much for your brother as a poor dancer at the Porte-Saint-Martin and an
old soldier?”

“Look here!” said Joseph, out of patience; “do you want me to tell you
in artist language what I think of your visit? Well, you have come to
swindle us on false pretences.”

“To-morrow your brother shall go to the hospital.”

“And he will do very well there,” answered Joseph. “If I were in like
case, I should go there too.”

Giroudeau withdrew, much disappointed, and also really mortified at
being obliged to send to a hospital a man who had carried the Emperor’s
orders at the battle of Montereau. Three months later, at the end of
July, as Agathe one morning was crossing the Pont Neuf to avoid paying a
sou at the Pont des Arts, she saw, coming along by the shops of the Quai
de l’Ecole, a man bearing all the signs of second-class poverty, who,
she thought, resembled Philippe. In Paris, there are three distinct
classes of poverty. First, the poverty of the man who preserves
appearances, and to whom a future still belongs; this is the poverty
of young men, artists, men of the world, momentarily unfortunate.
The outward signs of their distress are not visible, except under the
microscope of a close observer. These persons are the equestrian order
of poverty; they continue to drive about in cabriolets. In the second
order we find old men who have become indifferent to everything, and, in
June, put the cross of the Legion of honor on alpaca overcoats; that is
the poverty of small incomes,--of old clerks, who live at Sainte-Perine
and care no longer about their outward man. Then comes, in the third
place, poverty in rags, the poverty of the people, the poverty that
is poetic; which Callot, Hogarth, Murillo, Charlet, Raffet, Gavarni,
Meissonier, Art itself adores and cultivates, especially during the
carnival. The man in whom poor Agathe thought she recognized her son was
astride the last two classes of poverty. She saw the ragged neck-cloth,
the scurfy hat, the broken and patched boots, the threadbare coat, whose
buttons had shed their mould, leaving the empty shrivelled pod dangling
in congruity with the torn pockets and the dirty collar. Scraps of flue
were in the creases of the coat, which showed plainly the dust that
filled it. The man drew from the pockets of his seam-rent iron-gray
trousers a pair of hands as black as those of a mechanic. A knitted
woollen waistcoat, discolored by use, showed below the sleeves of his
coat, and above the trousers, and no doubt served instead of a shirt.
Philippe wore a green silk shade with a wire edge over his eyes; his
head, which was nearly bald, the tints of his skin, and his sunken face
too plainly revealed that he was just leaving the terrible Hopital du
Midi. His blue overcoat, whitened at the seams, was still decorated
with the ribbon of his cross; and the passers-by looked at the
hero, doubtless some victim of the government, with curiosity and
commiseration; the rosette attracted notice, and the fiercest “ultra”
 was jealous for the honor of the Legion. In those days, however much the
government endeavored to bring the Order into disrepute by bestowing
its cross right and left, there were not fifty-three thousand persons
decorated.

Agathe trembled through her whole being. If it were impossible to love
this son any longer, she could still suffer for him. Quivering with this
last expression of motherhood, she wept as she saw the brilliant staff
officer of the Emperor turn to enter tobacconist’s and pause on the
threshold; he had felt in his pocket and found nothing. Agathe left the
bridge, crossed the quai rapidly, took out her purse, thrust it into
Philippe’s hand, and fled away as if she had committed a crime. After
that, she ate nothing for two days; before her was the horrible vision
of her son dying of hunger in the streets of Paris.

“When he has spent all the money in my purse, who will give him any?”
 she thought. “Giroudeau did not deceive us; Philippe is just out of that
hospital.”

She no longer saw the assassin of her poor aunt, the scourge of the
family, the domestic thief, the gambler, the drunkard, the low liver of
a bad life; she saw only the man recovering from illness, yet doomed to
die of starvation, the smoker deprived of his tobacco. At forty-seven
years of age she grew to look like a woman of seventy. Her eyes were
dimmed with tears and prayers. Yet it was not the last grief this son
was to bring upon her; her worst apprehensions were destined to be
realized. A conspiracy of officers was discovered at the heart of the
army, and articles from the “Moniteur” giving details of the arrests
were hawked about the streets.

In the depths of her cage in the lottery-office of the rue Vivienne,
Agathe heard the name of Philippe Bridau. She fainted, and the manager,
understanding her trouble and the necessity of taking certain steps,
gave her leave of absence for two weeks.

“Ah! my friend,” she said to Joseph, as she went to bed that night, “it
is our severity which drove him to it.”

“I’ll go and see Desroches,” answered Joseph.

While the artist was confiding his brother’s affairs to the younger
Desroches,--who by this time had the reputation of being one of the
keenest and most astute lawyers in Paris, and who, moreover, did sundry
services for personages of distinction, among others for des Lupeaulx,
then secretary of a ministry,--Giroudeau called upon the widow. This
time, Agathe believed him.

“Madame,” he said, “if you can produce twelve thousand francs your son
will be set at liberty for want of proof. It is necessary to buy the
silence of two witnesses.”

“I will get the money,” said the poor mother, without knowing how or
where.

Inspired by this danger, she wrote to her godmother, old Madame Hochon,
begging her to ask Jean-Jacques Rouget to send her the twelve thousand
francs and save his nephew Philippe. If Rouget refused, she entreated
Madame Hochon to lend them to her, promising to return them in two
years. By return of courier, she received the following letter:--

  My dear girl: Though your brother has an income of not less than
  forty thousand francs a year, without counting the sums he has
  laid by for the last seventeen years, and which Monsieur Hochon
  estimates at more than six hundred thousand francs, he will not
  give one penny to nephews whom he has never seen. As for me, you
  know I cannot dispose of a farthing while my husband lives. Hochon
  is the greatest miser in Issoudun. I do not know what he does with
  his money; he does not give twenty francs a year to his
  grandchildren. As for borrowing the money, I should have to get
  his signature, and he would refuse it. I have not even attempted
  to speak to your brother, who lives with a concubine, to whom he
  is a slave. It is pitiable to see how the poor man is treated in
  his own home, when he might have a sister and nephews to take care
  of him.

  I have hinted to you several times that your presence at Issoudun
  might save your brother, and rescue a fortune of forty, perhaps
  sixty, thousand francs a year from the claws of that slut; but you
  either do not answer me, or you seem never to understand my
  meaning. So to-day I am obliged to write without epistolary
  circumlocution. I feel for the misfortune which has overtaken you,
  but, my dearest, I can do no more than pity you. And this is why:
  Hochon, at eighty-five years of age, takes four meals a day, eats
  a salad with hard-boiled eggs every night, and frisks about like a
  rabbit. I shall have spent my whole life--for he will live to
  write my epitaph--without ever having had twenty francs in my
  purse. If you will come to Issoudun and counteract the influence
  of that concubine over your brother, you must stay with me, for
  there are reasons why Rouget cannot receive you in his own house;
  but even then, I shall have hard work to get my husband to let me
  have you here. However, you can safely come; I can make him mind
  me as to that. I know a way to get what I want out of him; I have
  only to speak of making my will. It seems such a horrid thing to
  do that I do not often have recourse to it; but for you, dear
  Agathe, I will do the impossible.

  I hope your Philippe will get out of his trouble; and I beg you to
  employ a good lawyer. In any case, come to Issoudun as soon as you
  can. Remember that your imbecile of a brother at fifty-seven is an
  older and weaker man than Monsieur Hochon. So it is a pressing
  matter. People are talking already of a will that cuts off your
  inheritance; but Monsieur Hochon says there is still time to get
  it revoked.

  Adieu, my little Agathe; may God help you! Believe in the love of
  your godmother,

  Maximilienne Hochon, nee Lousteau.

  P.S. Has my nephew, Etienne, who writes in the newspapers and is
  intimate, they tell me, with your son Philippe, been to pay his
  respects to you? But come at once to Issoudun, and we will talk
  over things.


This letter made a great impression on Agathe, who showed it, of course,
to Joseph, to whom she had been forced to mention Giroudeau’s proposal.
The artist, who grew wary when it concerned his brother, pointed out to
her that she ought to tell everything to Desroches.

Conscious of the wisdom of that advice, Agathe went with her son the
next morning, at six o’clock, to find Desroches at his house in the rue
de Bussy. The lawyer, as cold and stern as his late father, with a sharp
voice, a rough skin, implacable eyes, and the visage of a fox as he
licks his lips of the blood of chickens, bounded like a tiger when he
heard of Giroudeau’s visit and proposal.

“And pray, mere Bridau,” he cried, in his little cracked voice, “how
long are you going to be duped by your cursed brigand of a son? Don’t
give him a farthing. Make yourself easy, I’ll answer for Philippe. I
should like to see him brought before the Court of Peers; it might
save his future. You are afraid he will be condemned; but I say, may it
please God his lawyer lets him be convicted. Go to Issoudun, secure the
property for your children. If you don’t succeed, if your brother
has made a will in favor of that woman, and you can’t make him
revoke it,--well then, at least get all the evidence you can of undue
influence, and I’ll institute proceedings for you. But you are too
honest a woman to know how to get at the bottom facts of such a matter.
I’ll go myself to Issoudun in the holidays,--if I can.”

That “go myself” made Joseph tremble in his skin. Desroches winked at
him to let his mother go downstairs first, and then the lawyer detained
the young man for a single moment.

“Your brother is a great scoundrel; he is the cause of the discovery of
this conspiracy,--intentionally or not, I can’t say, for the rascal
is so sly no one can find out the exact truth as to that. Fool or
traitor,--take your choice. He will be put under the surveillance of the
police, nothing more. You needn’t be uneasy; no one knows this secret
but myself. Go to Issoudun with your mother. You have good sense; try to
save the property.”

“Come, my poor mother, Desroches is right,” said Joseph, rejoining
Agathe on the staircase. “I have sold my two pictures, let us start for
Berry; you have two weeks’ leave of absence.”

After writing to her godmother to announce their arrival, Agathe and
Joseph started the next evening for their trip to Issoudun, leaving
Philippe to his fate. The diligence rolled through the rue d’Enfer
toward the Orleans highroad. When Agathe saw the Luxembourg, to which
Philippe had been transferred, she could not refrain from saying,--

“If it were not for the Allies he would never be there!”

Many sons would have made an impatient gesture and smiled with pity; but
the artist, who was alone with his mother in the coupe, caught her in
his arms and pressed her to his heart, exclaiming:--

“Oh, mother! you are a mother just as Raphael was a painter. And you
will always be a fool of a mother!”

Madame Bridau’s mind, diverted before long from her griefs by the
distractions of the journey, began to dwell on the purpose of it. She
re-read the letter of Madame Hochon, which had so stirred up the lawyer
Desroches. Struck with the words “concubine” and “slut,” which the
pen of a septuagenarian as pious as she was respectable had used to
designate the woman now in process of getting hold of Jean-Jacques
Rouget’s property, struck also with the word “imbecile” applied to
Rouget himself, she began to ask herself how, by her presence at
Issoudun, she was to save the inheritance. Joseph, poor disinterested
artist that he was, knew little enough about the Code, and his mother’s
last remark absorbed his mind.

“Before our friend Desroches sent us off to protect our rights, he ought
to have explained to us the means of doing so,” he exclaimed.

“So far as my poor head, which whirls at the thought of Philippe in
prison,--without tobacco, perhaps, and about to appear before the Court
of Peers!--leaves me any distinct memory,” returned Agathe, “I think
young Desroches said we were to get evidence of undue influence, in cas

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