“Will you keep a promise made to a dying woman?” asked the old woman, feeling that her mind was going.
“Yes, aunt.”
“Then swear to me to hand over your money to that young Desroches for an annuity. You will miss my little income, and from all I hear you say I know you will let that wretch squeeze you to the last sou—”
“Aunt, I swear it.”
The old woman died on the 31st of December, five days after the fatal blow so innocently dealt her by the elder Desroches. The five hundred francs, all the money there was in the house, barely sufficed to pay the expenses of her funeral. She left a very little plate and furniture, of which Madame Bridau paid the value to her grandson.
Reduced now to eight hundred francs a year, the annuity paid her by the younger Desroches—who concluded the purchase of a business, at present without clients, and took her twelve thousand francs as capital—Agathe gave up her rooms on the third floor and sold all but the most necessary furniture. When, at the end of a month, Philippe was convalescent, his mother coldly explained to him that the expenses of his illness had absorbed all her ready money; henceforth she must work for her living, and she entreated him in the most affectionate manner to rejoin the army and provide for himself.
“You might have saved yourself your sermon,” said Philippe, looking at his mother with eyes cold from utter indifference. “I have very clearly seen that neither you nor my brother love me in the least. I am alone in the world now! Well, I prefer it so.”
“Prove yourself worthy to be loved,” replied the poor mother, wounded to the quick, “and we shall love you again.”
“Fiddlesticks!” said he, interrupting her.
He took his old hat, all worn at the edges, and his stick, stuck the hat over his ear, and went downstairs whistling.
“Philippe! where are you off to without any money?” cried his mother, who could not restrain her tears. “Here—”
She held out a hundred francs done up in paper. Philippe came up the steps he had gone down and took the money.
“And you do not kiss me?” said she, melting into tears.
He clasped her to his breast, without any of the effusive feeling which alone gives value to a kiss.
“And where are you going?” said Agathe.
“To Florentine, Giroudeau’s mistress. They really are friends!” he replied coarsely.
He went. Agathe returned to her room, her knees quaking, her eyes dim, her heart in a vise. She fell on her knees, besought God to protect her unnatural son, and abdicated the burden of motherhood.
In February 1822 Madame Bridau had established herself in the bedroom formerly occupied by Philippe, over the kitchen of her third-floor rooms. The painter’s bedroom and studio were on the opposite side of the landing. Seeing his mother reduced so low, Joseph was determined that she should be as comfortable as possible. After his brother had left he took the arrangement of the attic in hand, and gave it an artistic stamp. He put in a carpet; the bed, very simply arranged, but with exquisite taste, had a character of monastic simplicity. The walls, hung with cheap chintz, judiciously chosen of a color to harmonize with the furniture, which was cleaned to look like new, made the little room look neat and elegant. He had a door made to shut in the landing, and hung it with a curtain. The window was screened by a blind that subdued the light. Thus, though the poor mother’s life was restricted to the simplest expression which a woman’s life in Paris can be reduced to, Agathe was at any rate better off than anybody in a similar position, thanks to her son.
To spare his mother the worst fatigues of housekeeping, Joseph took her to dine every day at a table d’hôte in the Rue de Beaune frequented by ladies of respectability, deputies, and men of title, where the charge for each person was ninety francs a month. Agathe, having only the breakfast to provide, fell into the same habits for her son as she had kept up for his father. In spite of Joseph’s pious fibs, she somehow found out that her dinner cost about a hundred francs a month. Horrified by this enormous expenditure, and never supposing that her son could earn much by “painting naked women,” by the influence of her director, the Abbé Loraux, she obtained the promise of a place with seven hundred francs a year, in a lottery-ticket office granted by Government to the Comtesse de Bauvan, the widow of a Chouan leader.
These lottery offices, bestowed on widows who had friends at Court, not unfrequently were the whole support of a family who managed the business of it. But, under the Restoration, the difficulty of finding rewards in the gift of a constitutional Government for all the services that had been done, led to the practice of giving to impoverished ladies of rank not one, but two such lottery-ticket offices, of which the emoluments might be from six to ten thousand francs. In such cases the widow of a general or a nobleman did not keep the ticket-office herself; she had managers with a sort of partnership. When these managers were unmarried men they could not help having a clerk under them, for the office always had to be kept open till midnight, and the accounts required by the Minister of Finance were very elaborate.
The Comtesse de Bauvan, to whom the Abbé Loraux explained Madame Bridau’s position, promised that if her present manager should leave, Agathe should have the reversion; meanwhile she bargained for a salary of six hundred francs for the widow. Compelled to be at her work by ten in the morning, poor Agathe had scarcely time to dine; she returned to her office at seven in the evening, and never stirred out again
