This great picture, which was to become so famous, and to give rise to so much animosity, jealousy, and admiration, was only begun; Joseph, compelled to suspend his work on it, and to execute commissions for a living, was busy copying pictures by the old masters, thus studying all their methods; no painter handles his brush more learnedly. His good sense as an artist had counseled him to conceal from Madame Descoings and from his mother the amount of money he was beginning to make, seeing that each had a road to ruin—one in Philippe, and the other in the lottery. The peculiar coolness shown by the soldier in his downfall, the way in which he had counted on his pretended purpose of suicide—which Joseph had seen through—the mistakes he had made in the career he ought never to have abandoned, in short, the smallest details of his conduct, had at last opened Joseph’s eyes.
Such insight is rarely lacking in painters. Occupied day after day in the silence of the studio, in work which leaves the mind, to a certain extent, free, they grow in some sort womanly; their thoughts wander round the small facts of life, and detect their covert meaning.
Joseph had bought a fine old cabinet—they were yet the fashion—to decorate a corner of his studio, where the light played on the panels in relief, and gave lustre to a masterpiece of some sixteenth century craftsman. Inside it he found a secret drawer, where he hoarded a small sum in case of need. With the easy trustfulness of an artist, he was accustomed to keep the cash he allowed himself for pocket-money in a skull that lay on one of the divisions of this cabinet; but, since his brother’s return, he found a constant discrepancy between the sums he spent and the balance left. The hundred francs a month melted with extraordinary rapidity. On finding nothing when he had spent but forty or fifty francs, the first time he said to himself, “My money has gone traveling post, it would seem!” The next time he carefully noted his expenses; but in vain did he count, like Robert Macaire, “Sixteen and five make twenty-three,” it would not come right.
On finding it a third time still more seriously wrong, he mentioned the painful subject to his Maman Descoings, who loved him, as he felt, with that maternal affection, tender, trusting, credulous, and enthusiastic, which his mother did not feel, however kind she might be, and which is as needful to an artist at the opening of his career as a hen’s care is to her chicks till they are fledged. To her only could he confide his horrible suspicions. He was as sure of his friends as of himself; Madame Descoings would certainly never take anything to risk in the lottery; and the poor soul wrung her hands at the thought as he said, “Only Philippe could commit this petty household theft.”
“Why does not he ask me for what he wants?” exclaimed Joseph, mixing the paints on his palette in utter confusion of colors, without heeding what he was doing. “Should I refuse to give him money?”
“But it is robbing an infant!” cried the old woman, with horror expressed in her face.
“No,” replied Joseph, “he can have it; he is my brother; my purse is his, but he ought to ask me.”
“Place a fixed sum of money there this morning and don’t touch it,” said Madame Descoings; “I shall know who comes to the studio, and if nobody comes in but Philippe you will know for certain.”
Thus, by next day, Joseph had proof of the forced loans levied on him by his brother. Philippe came up to the studio in his brother’s absence and took the little cash he needed. The artist feared for his little hoard.
“Wait a bit, wait a bit, I will catch you out, my fine rascal!” said he to Madame Descoings, with a laugh.
“Quite right; we ought to punish him, for I have found a deficit occasionally in my own purse. But, poor boy, he must have his tobacco; he has made a habit of it.”
“Poor boy! and poor boy indeed!” retorted the artist. “I am beginning to agree with Fulgence and Bixiou—Philippe is always dragging at us. First he gets mixed up in a riot, and has to be sent to America, and that costs my mother twelve thousand francs; then he has not the wit to find anything in the wilds of the New World, and it costs just as much to get him home again; under the pretext of having repeated two words from Napoleon to a general, he believes himself a great soldier, and bound to sulk with the Bourbons; meanwhile he can travel, and amuse himself, and see the world! I am not to be caught with such birdlime as the story of his woes; he does not look like a man who has not made himself comfortable wherever he was!
“Then my fine fellow has a capital place found for him; he lives like Sardanapalus with an opera girl, robs the till of a newspaper, and costs his mother another twelve thousand francs. Certainly, so far as I am concerned, what need I care? But Philippe will bring the poor mother to want. He treats me like the dirt under his feet because I never was in the Dragoon Guards! And it will be my part, perhaps, to maintain that poor dear mother in her old age, while, if he goes on as he has begun, the retired officer will end I don’t know where.
“Bixiou said to me, ‘Your
