Then he went the round of his pupils, Joseph following him, listening and trying to understand. The treat was brought; all the lads, the sculptor himself, and the child had their share. Then Joseph was made much of, as he had before been made game of. This scene_, in which the rough fun and good heart of the artist tribe were revealed to him, as he understood by instinct, made a prodigious impression on the boy. This glimpse of Chaudet the sculptor, snatched away by a too early death while the Emperor’s patronage promised him glory, was like a vision to Joseph.
The child said nothing to his mother of this escapade, but every Sunday and Thursday he spent three hours in Chaudet’s studio. Madame Descoings, always ready to humor the cherubs’ fancies, henceforth gave Joseph charcoal, red chalk, lithographs, and drawing-paper. At the Lycée Impérial the budding artist sketched the masters, took portraits of his schoolfellows, scrawled on the dormitory walls, and was astonishingly diligent in the drawing-class. Lemire, his master there, astounded not merely by his talent, but by the progress he made, came to speak to Madame Bridau of her son’s evident vocation. Agathe, a true provincial, and as ignorant of art as she was accomplished in housekeeping, was filled with alarms. When Lemire was gone, she burst into tears.
“Oh!” she cried, as Madame Descoings came in, “I am undone! Joseph, whom I meant to make a clerk, who has his way ready made for him in the Ministry of the Interior, and guarded by the shade of his father, would have been at the head of an office by the time he was five-and-twenty.—Well, he is bent on being a painter—a beggar’s trade. I always knew that boy would bring me nothing but trouble!”
Madame Descoings had to confess that for some months past she had been encouraging Joseph in his passion and screening his stolen Sunday and Thursday visits to the School of Art. At the Salon, whither she had taken him, the little fellow’s interest in the pictures was something miraculous.
“And if he understands painting at the age of thirteen, my dear, your Joseph will be a man of genius.”
“I daresay; and see what genius brought his father to! To die, worked to death, at forty.”
Late in the autumn, just as Joseph was reaching the age of fourteen, Agathe, in spite of Madame Descoings’ entreaties, went across to see Chaudet, and insist that her son should not be led into mischief. She found Chaudet in his blue overall, modeling his latest statue. He was barely civil in his reception of the widow of the man who had once done him a service in very critical circumstances, but his health was already undermined; he was working with the fevered energy which enables a man to do in a few moments things which it is difficult to achieve in as many months; he had just hit on a thing he had long been striving for, and handled his clay and modeling tool with hasty jerks which, to Agathe, in her ignorance, seemed to be those of a maniac. In any other frame of mind Chaudet would have laughed outright; but as he heard this mother blaspheming Art, bewailing the fate forced upon her son, and requesting that he might never more be admitted to the studio, he broke out in sacred fury.
“I am under obligations to your lamented husband; I hoped to make him some return by helping your son, by watching over your little Joseph’s first step in the noblest of all careers!” he exclaimed. “Yes, madame, I may tell you, if you do not know it, that a great artist is a king, more than a king; for, in the first place, he is happier, and he is independent; he lives as he pleases; and besides, he rules over the world of imagination. Your son has a splendid future before him! Such talents as his are rare; they are not revealed so young in any artists but a Giotto, a Raphael, a Titian, a Rubens, a Murillo—for he will be a painter, I think, rather than a sculptor. Light of Heaven! If I had such a boy, I should be as happy as the Emperor is in being the father of the King of Home I—Well, madame, you are mistress of your child’s fate. Go, make an idiot of him, a man who will only put one leg before the other, a wretched scrivener; you will be committing murder! I only hope that, in spite of all your efforts, he will always remain an artist! A vocation is stronger than all the obstacles opposed to its working. A vocation!—the word means a call—Ah! it is election by God!
“But you will make your child miserable!”
He violently flung the handful of clay he had ceased to need into a tub, and said to his model, “That will do for today.”
Agathe looked up, and saw a naked woman sitting on a stool, in a corner of the studio which had not yet come under her eye. At the sight she fled in horror.
“You are not to let little Bridau come here any more,” said Chaudet to his pupils. “Madame his mother does not approve.”
“Hoo-oo!” shouted the lads as Agathe closed the door.
“And Joseph has been going to that place!” said the poor woman, in consternation at what she had seen and heard.
As soon as the students of painting and sculpture heard that Madame Bridau would not allow her son to become an artist, all their delight was to get Joseph to their own rooms. In
