“He is going it; he is going it! the old rogue!” said Joseph to his mother. “At the same time he might send us something better than the mud in our faces.”
“He is in such a splendid position, so far above us, that we must not owe him a grudge if he forgets us,” said Madame Bridau. “To climb so steep a hill, he must have so many obligations to fulfil, so many sacrifices to make, that he may well be unable to come to see us even while thinking of us.”
“My dear fellow,” said the Duc de Maufrigneuse one evening to the new Comte de Brambourg. “I am sure that your proposal will be taken in good part; but to marry Mademoiselle Amélie de Soulanges you must be a free man. What have you done with your wife?”
“My wife?” said Philippe, with a gesture, a look, an accent such as Frédérick Lemaître afterwards conceived of in one of his most terrible parts. “Alas! I have the melancholy certainty of losing her. She has not a week to live. Ah! my dear Duke, you do not know what it is to have married beneath you! A woman who had been a cook, who has the tastes of a cook, and who brings dishonor on me—I am much to be pitied. But I have had the honor of explaining the situation to Madame the Dauphiness; the necessity arose some time since for saving a million of francs, which my uncle had left by will to this creature. Happily, my wife has taken to drams; at her death I become the possessor of a million in the hands of Messrs. Mongenod; I have more than thirty thousand francs in the five percents; and my estate—entailed—which brings in forty thousand francs a year. If, as everything leads us to suppose, Monsieur de Soulanges receives a Marshal’s baton, I, with the title of Comte de Brambourg, am in a position to become general and a peer of France. It will be a fitting retirement for an aide-de-camp to the Dauphin.”
After the Salon of 1823 the painter to the King, one of the kindest-hearted men of his day, had obtained for Joseph’s mother a lottery-ticket office in the neighborhood of the Halle. Subsequently Agathe was fortunate enough to be able to exchange, without paying any premium, with the holder of a similar office in the Rue de Seine, in a house where Joseph took a studio. The widow now, in her turn, employed a clerk, and cost her son nothing. Still, in 1828, though at the head of a very good lottery office, which she owed to Joseph’s fame, Madame Bridau did not yet believe in his glory—which, indeed, was hotly disputed, as all true glory is. The great painter, always struggling with his passions, wanted much; he could not earn enough to keep up the luxury required by his position in society, and by his distinguished eminence in the younger school. Though he had warm adherents in his friends of the Art Society, and in Mademoiselle des Touches, he did not appeal to the Philistine. This Creature, in whose hands the money lies nowadays, never loosens his purse-strings for talent that can be questioned; and Joseph saw the classicists and the Institute arrayed against him, with critics who waited on these two powers. Besides, the Comte de Brambourg affected amazement when anyone spoke to him of Joseph. So the courageous artist, though upheld by Gros and Gérard, who secured him the Cross during the Salon of 1827, had few commissions. If the Minister of the Interior and the Royal Establishments were little inclined to purchase his large pictures, the dealers and wealthy foreigners still less cared to be burdened with them. Besides, as we know, Joseph allows himself to be rather too much led away by fancy, and the result is an inequality of work, of which his enemies take advantage to dispute his talent.
“Painting on the heroic scale is in a bad way,” said his friend Pierre Grassou, as he turned out daubs to the taste of the Philistines, whose rooms were ill suited to large canvases.
“What you want is a cathedral to decorate,” Schinner would say, “then you would reduce criticism to silence by some great work.”
All these speeches, which frightened good Agathe, confirmed her first opinion of Joseph and Philippe. Facts were on the side of the woman, who was still so entirely provincial; was not Philippe, her favorite child, at last the great man of the family? She looked on the sins of the boy’s youth as the aberrations of genius. Joseph, whose efforts left her unmoved—for she saw too much of them in their early state to admire them when finished—seemed to her no further forward in 1828 than in 1816. Poor Joseph owed money; he was crushed under the weight of debt; he had taken up a thankless calling that brought no returns. In short, Agathe could not imagine why an Order should have been bestowed on Joseph.
Philippe, with strength enough never to go to the gaming table, and invited to Madame’s entertainments, the splendid Colonel, who at reviews and in processions rode past in gorgeous uniform, gaudy with two red ribbons, realized Agathe’s maternal dreams. One day at a public ceremony Philippe had wiped out the odious picture of his poverty on the Quai de l’École, by passing his mother on the same spot preceding the Dauphin, with his aigrette, and his shako, and his pelisse splendid with gold-lace and fur. While to the artist she had become a sort of devoted Grey Sister, Agathe no longer felt herself a mother excepting to the dashing aide-de-camp to His Royal Highness Monseigneur the Dauphin. In her pride of Philippe she could have believed that she owed her easier means to him, forgetting that the lottery office had come to her through Joseph.
One day Agathe saw her poor artist
