Agathe, who had followed Joseph, did not understand this exclamation; but when her son explained it, she simply stood still, dry-eyed.
“I have but one son!” she said in a weak voice.
“We have always avoided disgracing him before strangers,” replied Joseph. “But we must now tell the porter he is never to be admitted. Henceforth we must carry our keys.—I will finish the portrait from memory, there is little to be done to it.”
“Leave it as it is; it would make me too unhappy,” replied his mother, stricken to the heart, and appalled by such meanness.
Philippe knew what the price of this copy was needed for, knew the gulf of difficulty into which he was flinging his brother, and nothing had deterred him. After this last crime, Agathe would never mention Philippe; her face assumed a look of bitter, deep, and concentrated despair. One thought was killing her.
“Some day,” she said to herself, “we shall see the name of Bridau in the criminal courts.”
Two months after this, just before Agathe entered on her duties at the lottery office, a soldier called one morning to see Madame Bridau, who was at breakfast with Joseph, announcing himself as a friend of Philippe’s on urgent business.
When Giroudeau mentioned his name the mother and son quailed, all the more because the ex-dragoon had a rough, weather-beaten sailor’s countenance that was anything rather than reassuring. His ashy gray eyes, his piebald moustache, the remaining tufts of hair brushed up round his butter-colored bald head, had an indescribably unwholesome and licentious look. He wore an old iron-gray overcoat, with the rosette of an officer of the Legion of Honor; it was buttoned with difficulty over a stomach like a cook’s, quite in keeping with a mouth that opened from ear to ear, and broad shoulders. This frame was carried on a pair of thin legs. His complexion, with the high color on the cheekbones, betrayed a jovial life. The lower part of his cheeks was deeply wrinkled, and overlapped his worn black velvet collar. Among other decorative touches, the ex-dragoon had in his ears an enormous pair of gold earrings.
“What a sot!” said Joseph to himself.
“Madame,” said Finot’s uncle and cashier, “your son is in such an unfortunate predicament that his friends cannot help applying to you to beg you to share the very considerable expenses he involves them in. He can no longer do his work for the paper; and Mademoiselle Florentine of the Porte Saint-Martin has given him a room in a miserable attic in the Rue Vendôme, where she lives. Philippe is dying; if you and his brother cannot pay for the doctor and the medicine, we shall be obliged, for his own sake and cure, to have him taken to the Capucins. But we will keep him ourselves for three hundred francs; he must positively have a nurse; he goes out in the evening while Mademoiselle Florentine is at the theatre, and he takes irritant drinks, bad for his malady, and contrary to rule. And we are attached to him; it really makes us unhappy. The poor fellow has pledged his pension for three years; a substitute has been found for the moment to fill his place, and he gets no pay. But he will kill himself, madame, if we cannot put him in the asylum kept by Doctor Dubois. It is a decent place and the charge is ten francs a day. Florentine and I will pay for half a month’s treatment there, do you pay the rest. … Come, it will not be for more than two months.”
“Indeed, monsieur, as a mother I cannot but be eternally grateful for all you are doing for my son,” replied Agathe. “But that son has cut himself off from my affection; and as for money—I have none. To avoid being a burden on this son, who works night and day, and is killing himself, who deserves all his mother’s love, I am going, the day after tomorrow, into a lottery ticket office as assistant clerk.—At my age!”
“And you, young man?” said the trooper to Joseph. “Come, will not you do as much for your brother as a dancer at the Porte Saint-Martin and an old soldier?”
“Look here!” said Joseph, out of patience. “Would you like me to tell you in the plainest language what was the purpose of your visit? You came to try to fleece us.”
“Well, then, tomorrow your brother will go to the hospital.”
“He will be very well looked after,” said Joseph. “If ever I should be in the same plight, I should go there myself!”
Giroudeau went away, much disappointed, but also very seriously grieved at having to send a man who had been on Napoleon’s staff at the battle of Montereau to the hospital of the Capucins.
Three months after this, one morning towards the end of July, Agathe, on her way to her office, crossing the Pont Neuf to save the toll of a sou on the Pont des Arts, saw a man lounging by the shops of the Quai de École as she walked along by the river parapet. He wore the livery of the second degree of poverty, and she was startled, for she thought he resembled Philippe.
There are, in fact, three degrees of poverty in Paris. First, that of the men who keep up appearances, and who have the future before them; the poverty of young men, artists, men of the world who are down on their luck. The symptoms of this kind of want are visible only to the microscope of the most practised observer. These people constitute the knighthood of poverty; they still ride in a cab. In the second rank are old men, to whom everything is a matter of indifference, who, in the month of June, display the Cross of the Legion of Honor on an alpaca coat.
