The first Sunday when Philippe was to sit, Agathe took care to provide an excellent breakfast. She placed everything on the table, not forgetting a flask of brandy, not more than half full. She then hid herself behind a screen, in which she made a small hole. The ex-dragoon had sent his uniform the day before, and she could not refrain from hugging it. When Philippe mounted, in full dress, on one of the stuffed horses kept by saddlers, which Joseph had hired, Agathe, not to betray herself, was obliged to hide the slight noise of her weeping under the voices of the two brothers as they talked.
Philippe sat for two hours before and two hours after breakfast. At three in the afternoon he put on his ordinary dress, and, while smoking a cigar, again invited his brother to dine with him at the Palais Royal. He jingled the gold in his pockets.
“No,” said Joseph. “You frighten me when I see you with gold about you.”
“By Heaven! Then you still have a bad opinion of me here?” roared the Lieutenant-Colonel in a voice of thunder. “Do you think a man can never save?”
“No, no,” said Agathe, coming out of her hiding-place, and kissing her son “We will go and dine with him, Joseph.”
Joseph dared not scold his mother; he dressed, and Philippe took them to the Rue Montorgueuil, where, at the Rocher de Cancale, he gave them a splendid dinner, for which the bill ran up to a hundred francs.
“The Devil!” said Joseph uneasily. “With a salary of eleven hundred francs a year you manage, like Ponchard in the Dame Blanche, to save enough to purchase an estate!”
“Pooh, I am in luck,” said the dragoon, who had drunk an enormous quantity of wine.
On hearing this speech, made on the doorstep just as they were getting into a hackney coach to go to the play—for Philippe had proposed to take his mother to the Circus, the only entertainment of the kind allowed her by her director—Joseph tightened his hand on his mother’s arm. Agathe at once said she felt unwell, and declined to go to the theatre, so Philippe took her and his brother to the Rue Mazarine. When she found herself alone with Joseph in their attic, she sat long lost in thought.
On the next Sunday Philippe came again to sit. This time his mother sat in the room with the brothers. She brought in the breakfast, and could ask the trooper various questions. She then learnt that the nephew of her mother’s old friend, Madame Hochon, figured in a small way in literature. Philippe and his ally Giroudeau lived in the society of journalists, actresses, and publishers, and, as cashiers, met with some respect. Philippe, who always took drams of kirsch while sitting after breakfast, talked freely. He boasted of becoming a person of importance again ere long. But at a question from Joseph as to his pecuniary means he kept silence.
As it happened, the next day was a great holiday, and the paper was not to come out, so Philippe, to get the thing done with, proposed to come and sit again on the morrow. Joseph explained to him that the Salon would open before long, that he had not money enough to buy frames for his pictures, and could only earn it by finishing a copy of a Rubens required by a picture-dealer named Magus. The original belonged to a rich Swiss banker, who had lent it only for ten days. Next day would be the last; it was therefore absolutely necessary to put off the sitting till the following Sunday.
“And that is it?” said Philippe, looking at a painting by Rubens that stood on an easel.
“Yes,” said Joseph. “That is worth twenty thousand francs. That is what genius can do. There are such squares of canvas that are worth a hundred thousand francs.”
“Well, I like your copy best,” said the dragoon.
“It is fresher,” said Joseph, laughing; “but my copy is only worth one thousand francs. I must have tomorrow to give the old tone and look of the original, that they may be indistinguishable.”
“Goodbye, mother,” said Philippe, embracing Agathe, “till next Sunday.”
On the following day Élie Magus was to come for his copy. A friend of Joseph’s, who often worked for the dealer, Pierre Grassou, wished to see the copy finished. To play him a trick, Joseph put his copy, glazed with a particular varnish, in the place of the original, which he set up on his easel. Pierre Grassou de Fougères was completely taken in, and amazed at the extraordinary imitation.
“Will you take in old Magus?” said Pierre Grassou.
“That remains to be seen,” said Joseph.
But the dealer did not come, and it was late. Agathe was to dine with Madame Desroches, who had just lost her husband; so Joseph proposed to Grassou to come and dine at his table d’hôte. On going out he left the key of the studio, as he always did, with the woman who kept the house door.
“I am going to sit to my brother this evening,” said Philippe to this woman an hour later. “He will be in presently, and I will wait for him in the studio.”
The woman gave him the key. Philippe went up, took the copy, thinking it was the original, came down, gave back the key, explaining that he had forgotten something, and went off with the Rubens to sell it for three thousand francs. He had taken the precaution of telling Élie Magus, from his brother, not to call till the next day. At night, when Joseph came in after fetching his mother from Madame Desroches’, the porter told him of Philippe’s vagaries, coming away almost as soon as he had gone in.
“If he has not had the good taste to take the copy, I am a ruined man!” exclaimed the painter, at once guessing the theft. He flew
