He rang the bell; a footman came in, to whom he said:
“My friend will breakfast with me. Send up something elegant.”
“But the fashionable world would not see you in your mother’s room,” retorted Bixiou. “What would it cost you to pretend to love the poor woman for a few hours?”
“All my eye!” said Philippe, with a wink. “They have sent you. I am an old bird, and not to be caught with chaff. My mother wants to conjure me with her last breath to fork out something for Joseph! Thank you for nothing.”
When Bixiou repeated this scene to Joseph, the poor painter felt chilled to the very soul.
“Does Philippe know that I am ill?” said Agathe in a lamentable voice the evening of the very day when Bixiou had given an account of his errand.
Joseph left the room choked with tears. The Abbé Loraux, who was at the patient’s side, took her hand and pressed it as he replied, “Alas! my child, you have never had but one son.”
On hearing these words, which she understood, Agathe had an attack that was the beginning of the end. She died twenty hours after. In the wanderings of her mind before death the words escaped her, “Who does Philippe take after?”
Joseph alone followed his mother to the grave. Philippe had gone to Orléans on regimental business, scared from Paris by the following letter, addressed to him by Joseph as their mother breathed her last:
Wretch—My poor mother is dead of the shock your letter caused. Put on mourning. But pretend to be ill; I will not have her murderer to stand at my side by her coffin.
The painter, who had lost all heart for his painting, though his deep grief perhaps needed the sort of mechanical diversion that work brings with it, was surrounded by friends, who agreed among themselves not to leave him to solitude. Thus Bixiou, who loved Joseph as truly as a scoffer can love anyone, was one of a group of friends in Joseph’s studio one day, a fortnight after the funeral. At this moment the maid bustled in, and handed to Joseph a letter, brought, as she said, by an old woman who would wait for the answer in the porter’s lodge:
Monsieur—Whom I do not venture to call my brother, I must apply to you, were it only by reason of the name I bear—
Joseph turned the page, and looked at the signature at the end. These words, “Comtesse Flore de Brambourg,” made his blood run chill, for he foresaw some fresh abomination of his brother’s doing.
“That wretch,” said he, “would outdevil the Devil! And that is a man of honor—that can hang a peck of tinsel on its breast—that spreads its tail at Court instead of being flogged at the cart’s tail!—And this precious scoundrel is Monsieur le Comte!”
“There are many like him,” said Bixiou.
“And besides that, this Rabouilleuse deserves nothing from me,” Joseph went on. “She is not worth a curse; she would have left me to have my head chopped off like a fowl without ever saying ‘He is innocent.’ ”
As Joseph tossed away the letter, Bixiou nimbly caught it, and read it aloud:—
“—Is it becoming that Madame la Comtesse de Brambourg, whatever her faults may be, should be sent to die in a hospital? If that is to be my fate, if that is the Count’s wish and yours, so be it; but then, as you are a friend of Doctor Bianchon’s, get his introduction to get me into a hospital. The woman who takes you this letter, monsieur, has been eleven days running to the Hôtel de Brambourg in the Rue de Clichy without being able to obtain any help from my husband. The state in which I am prevents my employing an attorney so as to obtain by law what is due to me and to die in peace. Indeed, nothing can save me; I know it. So if you will positively have nothing to say to your unhappy sister-in-law, give me money enough to enable me to put an end to my days; for your brother, I see, wishes my death, and always has wished it. Though he told me he knew three certain ways of killing a woman, I had not the wit to foresee the means he has taken.
“If so be you should honor me with a little assistance, and judge for yourself of the misery I am in, I am living in the Rue du Houssay, at the corner of the Rue Chantereine, on the fifth floor. If I do not pay my arrears of rent tomorrow, I must turn out. And where am I to go, monsieur? May I sign myself,
“What a foul pit of infamy!” said Joseph. “What is there behind it?”
“Have the woman up first; that will be a worthy preface to the story no doubt,” said Bixiou.
A minute after there appeared on the scene a woman whom Bixiou described as walking rags. She was, in fact, a mass of clothes and old gowns, one over another, bordered with mud from the weather, the whole mounted on thick legs and splay feet, with patched stockings and shoes, from which the water oozed through many cracks. To crown this mass of rubbish was such a head as Charlet has given to his sweepers, helmeted with a hideous bandana, worn threadbare even in the creases.
“What is your name?”
