When he went home to his mother in July 1814, he found her a ruined woman. In the course of the long vacation Joseph’s scholarship was cancelled; and Madame Bridau, whose pension had been paid out of the Emperor’s privy purse, vainly applied for a clerkship for him in the offices of the Ministry of the Interior. Joseph, more than ever devoted to painting, was enchanted, and only besought his mother to allow him to go to Monsieur Regnauld’s studio, promising her that he would make a living. He was, he said, high enough in the second class at school, and could get on without rhetoric.
Philippe, a captain, and wearing an Order at nineteen, after serving under Napoleon on two battlefields, immensely flattered his mother’s pride; so, though he was rough, noisy, and in reality devoid of all merit but the vulgar courage of a slashing swordsman, to her he was the man of genius; while Joseph, who was small, sickly, and thin, with a rugged brow, who loved peace and quiet, and dreamed of fame as an artist, was doomed, as she declared, never to give her anything but worry and anxiety. The winter of 1814–15 was a good one for Joseph, who, by the secret interest of Madame Descoings and of Bixiou, a pupil of Gros, was admitted to work in that famous studio, whence proceeded so many different types of talent, and where he formed a close intimacy with Schinner.
Then came the great 20th of March; Captain Bridau, who joined the Emperor at Lyons and escorted him back to the Tuileries, was promoted to be Major of the Dragoon Guards. After the battle of Waterloo, where he was wounded, but slightly, and won the Cross of a Commander of the Legion of Honor, he next found himself with Maréchal Davoust at Saint-Denis, and not with the army of the Loire; thus, by the interest of Maréchal Davoust, he was allowed to retain his Cross and his rank in the army, but he was put upon half-pay. Joseph, uneasy about the future, studied meanwhile with an ardor that made him ill more than once in the midst of the hurricane of public events.
“It is the smell of paint,” Agathe would say to Madame Descoings. “He ought to give up work that is so bad for his health.”
All Agathe’s anxieties were then centered in her son the Lieutenant-Colonel. She saw him again in 1816, fallen from his pay and profits of about nine thousand francs a year as Major in the Emperor’s Dragoon Guards, to half-pay amounting to three hundred francs a month; she spent her little savings in furnishing for him the attic over the kitchen.
Philippe was one of the most assiduous Bonapartists that haunted the Café Lemblin, a thorough constitutional Boeotia. There he acquired the habits, manners, and style of living of half-pay officers; nay, he outdid them, as any young man of twenty was sure to do, solemnly vowing a mortal hatred of the Bourbons; he was not to be talked over, and even refused such opportunities as were offered him of employment in the field with his full rank. In his mother’s eyes Philippe was showing great strength of character.
“His father could have done no better,” said she.
Philippe could live on his half-pay. He would cost his mother nothing, while Joseph was entirely dependent on the two widows. From that moment Agathe’s preference for Philippe was manifest. Hitherto it had been covert; but the persecution under which he suffered as a faithful adherent to the Emperor, the memory of the wound her darling son had received, his courage in adversity—which, voluntary as it was, seemed to her noble adversity—brought out Agathe’s weakness. The words, “He is unfortunate,” justified everything.
Joseph, whose nature overflowed with the childlike simplicity which is superabundant in the youthful artist-soul, and who had been brought up to admire his elder brother, far from resenting his mother’s favoritism, vindicated it by sharing in her worship of a “veteran” who had won Napoleon’s Orders in two battles—of a man wounded at Waterloo. How could he doubt the superiority of this big brother, whom he had seen in the splendid green-and-gold uniform of the Dragoon Guards, at the head of his squadron on the Champ de Mai. And in spite of her preference, Agathe was a good mother. She loved Joseph, but not blindly; she simply did not understand him. Joseph worshiped his mother, whereas Philippe allowed her to adore him. Still, for her the dragoon moderated his military coarseness, while he never disguised his contempt for Joseph, though expressing it not unkindly. As he looked at his brother’s powerful head, too large for a body kept thin by constant work, and still, at the age of seventeen, slight and weakly, he would call him “the brat.” His patronizing ways would have been offensive but for the artist’s indifference, in the belief, indeed, that a soldier always had a kind heart under his rough manners. The poor boy did not yet know that really first-rate military men are as gentle and polite as other superior persons. Genius is everywhere true to itself.
“Poor child!” Philippe would say to his mother. “Don’t tease him; let him amuse himself.” And this contempt
