Three months later, the colonel, who ate and drank enough for four
men, finding fault with the food and compelling the poor widows, on
the score of his payments, to spend much money on their table, had not
yet paid down a single penny. His mother and Madame Descoings were
unwilling, out of delicacy, to remind him of his promise. The year
went by without one of those coins which Leon Gozlan so vigorously
called "tigers with five claws" finding its way from Philippe's pocket
to the household purse. It is true that the colonel quieted his
conscience on this score by seldom dining at home.
"Well, he is happy," said his mother; "he is easy in mind; he has a
place."
Through the influence of a feuilleton, edited by Vernou, a friend of
Bixiou, Finot, and Giroudeau, Mariette made her appearance, not at the
Panorama-Dramatique but at the Porte-Saint-Martin, where she triumphed
beside the famous Begrand. Among the directors of the theatre was a
rich and luxurious general officer, in love with an actress, for whose
sake he had made himself an impresario. In Paris, we frequently meet
with men so fascinated with actresses, singers, or ballet-dancers,
that they are willing to become directors of a theatre out of love.
This officer knew Philippe and Giroudeau. Mariette's first appearance,
heralded already by Finot's journal and also by Philippe's, was
promptly arranged by the three officers; for there seems to be
solidarity among the passions in a matter of folly.
The mischievous Bixiou was not long in revealing to his grandmother
and the devoted Agathe that Philippe, the cashier, the hero of heroes,
was in love with Mariette, the celebrated ballet-dancer at the
Porte-Saint-Martin. The news was a thunder-clap to the two widows;
Agathe's religious principles taught her to think that all women on
the stage were brands in the burning; moreover, she thought, and so
did Madame Descoings, that women of that kind dined off gold, drank
pearls, and wasted fortunes.
"Now do you suppose," said Joseph to his mother, "that my brother is
such a fool as to spend his money on Mariette? Such women only ruin
rich men."
"They talk of engaging Mariette at the Opera," said Bixiou. "Don't
be worried, Madame Bridau; the diplomatic body often comes to the
Porte-Saint-Martin, and that handsome girl won't stay long with your
son. I did hear that an ambassador was madly in love with her. By the
bye, another piece of news! Old Claparon is dead, and his son, who
has become a banker, has ordered the cheapest kind of funeral for him.
That fellow has no education; they wouldn't behave like that in
China."
Philippe, prompted by mercenary motives, proposed to Mariette that she
should marry him; but she, knowing herself on the eve of an engagement
at the Grand Opera, refused the offer, either because she guessed the
colonel's motive, or because she saw how important her independence
would be to her future fortune. For the remainder of this year,
Philippe never came more than twice a month to see his mother. Where
was he? Either at his office, or the theatre, or with Mariette. No
light whatever as to his conduct reached the household of the rue
Mazarin. Giroudeau, Finot, Bixiou, Vernou, Lousteau, saw him leading a
life of pleasure. Philippe shared the gay amusements of Tullia, a
leading singer at the Opera, of Florentine, who took Mariette's place
at the Porte-Saint-Martin, of Florine and Matifat, Coralie and
Camusot. After four o'clock, when he left his office, until midnight,
he amused himself; some party of pleasure had usually been arranged
the night before,--a good dinner, a card-party, a supper by some one
or other of the set. Philippe was in his element.
This carnival, which lasted eighteen months, was not altogether
without its troubles. The beautiful Mariette no sooner appeared at the
Opera, in January, 1821, than she captured one of the most
distinguished dukes of the court of Louis XVIII. Philippe tried to
make head against the peer, and by the month of April he was compelled
by his passion, notwithstanding some luck at cards, to dip into the
funds of which he was cashier. By May he had taken eleven hundred
francs. In that fatal month Mariette started for London, to see what
could be done with the lords while the temporary opera house in the
Hotel Choiseul, rue Lepelletier, was being prepared. The luckless
Philippe had ended, as often happens, in loving Mariette
notwithstanding her flagrant infidelities; she herself had never
thought him anything but a dull-minded, brutal soldier, the first rung
of a ladder on which she had never intended to remain long. So,
foreseeing the time when Philippe would have spent all his money, she
captured other journalistic support which released her from the
necessity of depending on him; nevertheless, she did feel the peculiar
gratitude that class of women acknowledge towards the first man who
smooths their way, as it were, among the difficulties and horrors of a
theatrical career.
Forced to let his terrible mistress go to London without him, Philippe
went into winter quarters, as he called it,--that is, he returned to
his attic room in his mother's _appartement_. He made some gloomy
reflections as he went to bed that night, and when he got up again. He
was conscious within himself of the inability to live otherwise than
as he had been living the last year. The luxury that surrounded
Mariette, the dinners, the suppers, the evenings in the side-scenes,
the animation of wits and journalists, the sort of racket that went on
around him, the delights that tickled both his senses and his vanity,
--such a life, found only in Paris, and offering daily the charm of
some new thing, was now more than habit,--it had become to Philippe as
much a necessity as his tobacco or his brandy. He saw plainly that he
could not live without these continual enjoyments. The idea of suicide
came into his head; not on account of the deficit which must soon be
discovered in his accounts, but because he could no longer live with
Mariette in the atmosphere of pleasure in which he had disported
himself for over a year. Full of these gloomy thoughts, he entered for
the first time his brother's painting-room, where he found the painter
in a blue blouse, copying a picture for a dealer.
"So that's how pictures are made," said Philippe, by way of opening
the conversation.
"No," said Joseph, "that is how they are copied."
"How much do they pay you for that?"
"Eh! never enough; two hundred and fifty francs. But I study the
manner of the masters and learn a great deal; I found out the secrets
of their method. There's one of my own pictures," he added, pointing
with the end of his brush to a sketch with the colors still moist.
"How much do you pocket in a year?"
"Unfortunately, I am known only to painters. Schinner backs me; and he
has got me some work at the Chateau de Presles, where I am going in
October to do some arabesques, panels, and other decorations, for
which the Comte de Serizy, no doubt, will pay well. With such trifles
and with orders from the dealers, I may manage to earn eighteen
hundred to two thousand francs a year over and above the working
expenses. I shall send that picture to the next exhibition; if it hits
the public taste, my fortune is made. My friends think well of it."
"I don't know anything about such things," said Philippe, in a subdued
voice which caused Joseph to turn and look at him.
"What is the matter?" said the artist, seeing that his brother was
very pale.
"I should like to know how long it would take you to paint my
portrait?"
"If I worked steadily, and the weather were clear, I could finish it
in three or four days."
"That's too long; I have only one day to give you. My poor mother
loves me so much that I wished to leave her my likeness. We will say
no more about it."
"Why! are you going away again?"
"I am going never to return," replied Philippe with an air of forced
gayety.
"Look here, Philippe, what is the matter? If it is anything serious, I
am a man and not a ninny. I am accustomed to hard struggles, and if
discretion is needed, I have it."
"Are you sure?"
"On my honor."
"You will tell no one, no matter who?"
"No one."
"Well, I am going to blow my brains out."
"You!--are you going to fight a duel?"
"I am going to kill myself."
"Why?"
"I have taken eleven hundred francs from the funds in my hands; I have
got to send in my accounts to-morrow morning. Half my security is
lost; our poor mother will be reduced to six hundred francs a year.
That would be nothing! I could make a fortune for her later; but I am
dishonored! I cannot live under dishonor--"
"You will not be dishonored if it is paid back. To be sure, you will
lose your place, and you will only have the five hundred francs a year
from your cross; but you can live on five hundred francs."
"Farewell!" said Philippe, running rapidly downstairs, and not waiting
to hear another word.
Joseph left his studio and went down to breakfast with his mother; but
Philippe's confession had taken away his appetite. He took Madame
Descoings aside and told her the terrible news. The old woman made a
frightened exclamation, let fall the saucepan of milk she had in her
hand, and flung herself into a chair. Agathe rushed in; from one
exclamation to another the mother gathered the fatal truth.
"He! to fail in honor! the son of Bridau to take the money that was
trusted to him!"
The widow trembled in every limb; her eyes dilated and then grew
fixed; she sat down and burst into tears.
"Where is he?" she cried amid the sobs. "Perhaps he has flung himself
into the Seine."
"You must not give up all hope," said Madame Descoings, "because a
poor lad has met with a bad woman who has led him to do wrong. Dear
me! we see that every day. Philippe has had such misfortunes! he has
had so little chance to be happy and loved that we ought not to be
surprised at his passion for that creature. All passions lead to
excess. My own life is not without reproach of that kind, and yet I
call myself an honest woman. A single fault is not vice; and after
all, it is only those who do nothing that are never deceived."
Agathe's despair overcame her so much that Joseph and the Descoings
were obliged to lessen Philippe's wrong-doings by assuring her that
such things happened in all families.
"But he is twenty-eight years old," cried Agathe, "he is no longer a
child."
Terrible revelation of the inward thought of the poor woman on the
conduct of her son.
"Mother, I assure you he thought only of your sufferings and of the
wrong he had done you," said Joseph.
"Oh, my God! let him come back to me, let him live, and I will forgive
all," cried the poor mother, to whose mind a horrible vision of
Philippe dragged dead out of the river presented itself.
Gloomy silence reigned for a short time. The day went by with cruel
alternations of hope and fear; all three ran to the window at the
least sound, and gave way to every sort of conjecture. While the
family were thus grieving, Philippe was quietly getting matters in
order at his office. He had the audacity to give in his accounts with
a statement that, fearing some accident, he had retained eleven
hundred francs at his own house for safe keeping. The scoundrel left
the office at five o'clock, taking five hundred francs more from the
desk, and coolly went to a gambling-house, which he had not entered
since his connection with the paper, for he knew very well that a
cashier must not be seen to frequent such a place. The fellow was not
wanting in acumen. His past conduct proved that he derived more from
his grandfather Rouget than from his virtuous sire, Bridau. Perhaps he
might have made a good general; but in private life, he was one of
those utter scoundrels who shelter their schemes and their evil
actions behind a screen of strict legality, and the privacy of the
family roof.
At this conjuncture Philippe maintained his coolness. He won at first,
and gained as much as six thousand francs; but he let himself be
dazzled by the idea of getting out of his difficulties at one stroke.
He left the trente-et-quarante, hearing that the black had come up
sixteen times at the roulette table, and was about to put five
thousand francs on the red, when the black came up for the seventeenth
time. The colonel then put a thousand francs on the black and won. In
spite of this remarkable piece of luck, his head grew weary; he felt
it, though he continued to play. But that divining sense which leads a
gambler, and which comes in flashes, was already failing him.
Intermittent perceptions, so fatal to all gamblers, set in. Lucidity
of mind, like the rays of the sun, can have no effect except by the
continuity of a direct line; it can divine only on condition of not
breaking that line; the curvettings of chance bemuddle it. Philippe
lost all. After such a strain, the careless mind as well as the
bravest weakens. When Philippe went home that night he was not
thinking of suicide, for he had never really meant to kill himself; he
no longer thought of his lost place, nor of the sacrificed security,
nor of his mother, nor of Mariette, the cause of his ruin; he walked
along mechanically. When he got home, his mother in tears, Madame
Descoings, and Joseph, all fell on his neck and kissed him and brought
him joyfully to a seat by the fire.
"Bless me!" thought he, "the threat has worked."
The brute at once assumed an air suitable to the occasion; all the
more easily, because his ill-luck at cards had deeply depressed him.
Seeing her atrocious Benjamin so pale and woe-begone, the poor mother
knelt beside him, kissed his hands, pressed them to her heart, and
gazed at him for a long time with eyes swimming in tears.
"Philippe," she said, in a choking voice, "promise not to kill
yourself, and all shall be forgotten."
Philippe looked at his sorrowing brother and at Madame Descoings,
whose eyes were full of tears, and thought to himself, "They are good
creatures." Then he took his mother in his arms, raised her and put
her on his knee, pressed her to his heart and whispered as he kissed
her, "For the second time, you give me life."
The Descoings managed to serve an excellent dinner, and to add two
bottles of old wine with a little "liqueur des iles," a treasure left
over from her former business.
"Agathe," she said at dessert, "we must let him smoke his cigars," and
she offered some to Philippe.
These two poor creatures fancied that if they let the fellow take his
ease, he would like his home and stay in it; both, therefore, tried to
endure his tobacco-smoke, though each loathed it. That sacrifice was
not so much as noticed by Philippe.
On the morrow, Agathe looked ten years older. Her terrors calmed,
reflection came back to her, and the poor woman had not closed an eye
throughout that horrible night. She was now reduced to six hundred
francs a year. Madame Descoings, like all fat women fond of good
eating, was growing heavy; her step on the staircase sounded like the
chopping of logs; she might die at any moment; with her life, four
thousand francs would disappear. What folly to rely on that resource!
What should she do? What would become of them? With her mind made up
to become a sick-nurse rather than be supported by her children,
Agathe did not think of herself. But Philippe? what would he do if
reduced to live on the five hundred francs of an officer of the Legion
of honor? During the past eleven years, Madame Descoings, by giving up
three thousand francs a year, had paid her debt twice over, but she
still continued to sacrifice her grandson's interests to those of the
Bridau family. Though all Agathe's honorable and upright feelings were
shocked by this terrible disaster, she said to herself: "Poor boy! is
it his fault? He is faithful to his oath. I have done wrong not to
marry him. If I had found him a wife, he would not have got entangled
with this danseuse. He has such a vigorous constitution--"
Madame Descoings had likewise reflected during the night as to the
best way of saving the honor of the family. At daybreak, she got out
of bed and went to her friend's room.
"Neither you nor Philippe should manage this delicate matter," she
urged. "Our two old friends Du Bruel and Claparon are dead, but we
still have Desroches, who is very sagacious. I'll go and see him this
morning. He can tell the newspaper people that Philippe trusted a
friend and has been made a victim; that his weakness in such respects
makes him unfit to be a cashier; what has now happened may happen
again, and that Philippe prefers to resign. That will prevent his
being turned off."
Agathe, seeing that this business lie would save the honor of her son,
at any rate in the eyes of strangers, kissed Madame Descoings, who
went out early to make an end of the dreadful affair.
Philippe, meanwhile, had slept the sleep of the just. "She is sly,
that old woman," he remarked, when his mother explained to him why
breakfast was late.
Old Desroches, the last remaining friend of these two poor women, who,
in spite of his harsh nature, never forgot that Bridau had obtained
for him his place, fulfilled like an accomplished diplomat the
delicate mission Madame Descoings had confided to him. He came to dine
that evening with the family, and notified Agathe that she must go the
next day to the Treasury, rue Vivienne, sign the transfer of the funds
involved, and obtain a coupon for the six hundred francs a year which
still remained to her. The old clerk did not leave the afflicted
household that night without obliging Philippe to sign a petition to
the minister of war, asking for his reinstatement in the active army.
Desroches promised the two women to follow up the petition at the war
office, and to profit by the triumph of a certain duke over Philippe
in the matter of the danseuse, and so obtain that nobleman's
influence.
"Philippe will be lieutenant-colonel in the Duc de Maufrigneuse's
regiment within three months," he declared, "and you will be rid of
him."
Desroches went away, smothered with blessings from the two poor widows
and Joseph. As to the newspaper, it ceased to exist at the end of two
months, just as Finot had predicted. Philippe's crime had, therefore,
so far as the world knew, no consequences. But Agathe's motherhood had
received a deadly wound. Her belief in her son once shaken, she lived
in perpetual fear, mingled with some satisfactions, as she saw her
worst apprehensions unrealized.
When men like Philippe, who are endowed with physical courage, and yet
are cowardly and ignoble in their moral being, see matters and things
resuming their accustomed course about them after some catastrophe in
which their honor and decency is well-nigh lost, such family kindness,
or any show of friendliness towards them is a premium of
encouragement. They count on impunity; their minds distorted, their
passions gratified, only prompt them to study how it happened that
they succeeded in getting round all social laws; the result is they
become alarmingly adroit.
A fortnight later, Philippe, once more a man of leisure, lazy and
bored, renewed his fatal cafe life,--his drams, his long games of
billiards embellished with punch, his nightly resort to the
gambling-table, where he risked some trifling stake and won enough to
pay for his dissipations. Apparently very economical, the better to
deceive his mother and Madame Descoings, he wore a hat that was greasy,
with the nap rubbed off at the edges, patched boots, a shabby overcoat,
on which the red ribbon scarcely showed so discolored and dirty was it
by long service at the buttonhole and by the spatterings of coffee and
liquors. His buckskin gloves, of a greenish tinge, lasted him a long
while; and he only gave up his satin neckcloth when it was ragged
enough to look like wadding. Mariette was the sole object of the
fellow's love, and her treachery had greatly hardened his heart. When
he happened to win more than usual, or if he supped with his old
comrade, Giroudeau, he followed some Venus of the slums, with brutal
contempt for the whole sex. Otherwise regular in his habits, he
breakfasted and dined at home and came in every night about one
o'clock. Three months of this horrible life restored Agathe to some
degree of confidence.
As for Joseph, who was working at the splendid picture to which he
afterwards owed his reputation, he lived in his atelier. On the
prediction of her grandson Bixiou, Madame Descoings believed in
Joseph's future glory, and she showed him every sort of motherly
kindness; she took his breakfast to him, she did his errands, she
blacked his boots. The painter was never seen till dinner-time, and
his evenings were spent at the Cenacle among his friends. He read a
great deal, and gave himself that deep and serious education which
only comes through the mind itself, and which all men of talent strive
after between the ages of twenty and thirty. Agathe, seeing very
little of Joseph, and feeling no uneasiness about him, lived only for
Philippe, who gave her the alternations of fears excited and terrors
allayed, which seem the life, as it were, of sentiment, and to be as
necessary to maternity as to love. Desroches, who came once a week to
see the widow of his patron and friend, gave her hopes. The Duc de
Maufrigneuse had asked to have Philippe in his regiment; the minister
of war had ordered an inquiry; and as the name of Bridau did not
appear on any police list, nor an any record at the Palais de Justice,
Philippe would be reinstated in the army early in the coming year.
To arrive at this result, Desroches set all the powers that he could
influence in motion. At the prefecture of police he learned that
Philippe spent his evenings in the gambling-house; and he thought it
best to tell this fact privately to Madame Descoings, exhorting her
keep an eye on the lieutenant-colonel, for one outbreak would imperil
all; as it was, the minister of war was not likely to inquire whether
Philippe gambled. Once restored to his rank under the flag of his
country, he would perhaps abandon a vice only taken up from idleness.
Agathe, who no longer received her friends in the evening, sat in the
chimney-corner reading her prayers, while Madame Descoings consulted
the cards, interpreted her dreams, and applied the rules of the
"cabala" to her lottery ventures. This jovial fanatic never missed a
single drawing; she still pursued her trey,--which never turned up. It
was nearly twenty-one years old, just approaching its majority; on
this ridiculous idea the old woman now pinned her faith. One of its
three numbers had stayed at the bottom of all the wheels ever since
the institution of the lottery. Accordingly, Madame Descoings laid
heavy stakes on that particular number, as well as on all the
combinations of the three numbers. The last mattress remaining to her
bed was the place where she stored her savings; she unsewed the
ticking, put in from time to time the bit of gold saved from her
needs, wrapped carefully in wool, and then sewed the mattress up
again. She intended, at the last drawing, to risk all her savings on
the different combinations of her treasured trey.
This passion, so universally condemned, has never been fairly studied.
No one has understood this opium of poverty. The lottery, all-powerful
fairy of the poor, bestowed the gift of magic hopes. The turn of the
wheel which opens to the gambler a vista of gold and happiness, lasts
no longer than a flash of lightning, but the lottery gave five days'
existence to that magnificent flash. What social power can to-day, for
the sum of five sous, give us five days' happiness and launch us
ideally into all the joys of civilization? Tobacco, a craving far more
immoral than play, destroys the body, attacks the mind, and stupefies
a nation; while the lottery did nothing of the kind. This passion,
moreover, was forced to keep within limits by the long periods that
occurred between the drawings, and by the choice of wheels which each
investor individually clung to. Madame Descoings never staked on any
but the "wheel of Paris." Full of confidence that the trey cherished
for twenty-one years was about to triumph, she now imposed upon
herself enormous privations, that she might stake a large amount of
savings upon the last drawing of the year. When she dreamed her
cabalistic visions (for all dreams did not correspond with the numbers
of the lottery), she went and told them to Joseph, who was the sole
being who would listen, and not only not scold her, but give her the
kindly words with which an artist knows how to soothe the follies of
the mind. All great talents respect and understand a real passion;
they explain it to themselves by finding the roots of it in their own
hearts or minds. Joseph's ideas was, that his brother loved tobacco
and liquors, Maman Descoings loved her trey, his mother loved God,
Desroches the younger loved lawsuits, Desroches the elder loved
angling,--in short, all the world, he said, loved something. He
himself loved the "beau ideal" in all things; he loved the poetry of
Lord Byron, the painting of Gericault, the music of Rossini, the
novels of Walter Scott. "Every one to his taste, maman," he would say;
"but your trey does hang fire terribly."
"It will turn up, and you will be rich, and my little Bixiou as well."
"Give it all to your grandson," cried Joseph; "at any rate, do what
you like best with it."
"Hey! when it turns up I shall have enough for everybody. In the first
place, you shall have a fine atelier; you sha'n't deprive yourself of
going to the opera so as to pay for your models and your colors. Do
you know, my dear boy, you make me play a pretty shabby part in that
picture of yours?"
By way of economy, Joseph had made the Descoings pose for his
magnificent painting of a young courtesan taken by an old woman to a
Doge of Venice. This picture, one of the masterpieces of modern
painting, was mistaken by Gros himself for a Titian, and it paved the
way for the recognition which the younger artists gave to Joseph's
talent in the Salon of 1823.
"Those who know you know very well what you are," he answered gayly.
"Why need you trouble yourself about those who don't know you?"
For the last ten years Madame Descoings had taken on the ripe tints of
a russet apple at Easter. Wrinkles had formed in her superabundant
flesh, now grown pallid and flabby. Her eyes, full of life, were
bright with thoughts that were still young and vivacious, and might be
considered grasping; for there is always something of that spirit in a
gambler. Her fat face bore traces of dissimulation and of the mental
reservations hidden in the depths of her heart. Her vice necessitated
secrecy. There were also indications of gluttony in the motion of her
lips. And thus, although she was, as we have seen, an excellent and
upright woman, the eye might be misled by her appearance. She was an
admirable model for the old woman Joseph wished to paint. Coralie, a
young actress of exquisite beauty who died in the flower of her youth,
the mistress of Lucien de Rubempre, one of Joseph's friends, had given
him the idea of the picture. This noble painting has been called a
plagiarism of other pictures, while in fact it was a splendid
arrangement of three portraits. Michel Chrestien, one of his
companions at the Cenacle, lent his republican head for the senator,
to which Joseph added a few mature tints, just as he exaggerated the
expression of Madame Descoings's features. This fine picture, which
was destined to make a great noise and bring the artist much hatred,
jealousy, and admiration, was just sketched out; but, compelled as he
was to work for a living, he laid it aside to make copies of the old
masters for the dealers; thus he penetrated the secrets of their
processes, and his brush is therefore one of the best trained of the
modern school. The shrewd sense of an artist led him to conceal the
profits he was beginning to lay by from his mother and Madame
Descoings, aware that each had her road to ruin,--the one in Philippe,
the other in the lottery. This astuteness is seldom wanting among
painters; busy for days together in the solitude of their studios,
engaged in work which, up to a certain point, leaves the mind free,
they are in some respects like women,--their thoughts turn about the
little events of life, and they contrive to get at their hidden
meaning.
Joseph had bought one of those magnificent chests or coffers of a past
age, then ignored by fashion, with which he decorated a corner of his
studio, where the light danced upon the bas-reliefs and gave full
lustre to a masterpiece of the sixteenth century artisans. He saw the
necessity for a hiding-place, and in this coffer he had begun to
accumulate a little store of money. With an artist's carelessness, he
was in the habit of putting the sum he allowed for his monthly
expenses in a skull, which stood on one of the compartments of the
coffer. Since his brother had returned to live at home, he found a
constant discrepancy between the amount he spent and the sum in this
receptacle. The hundred francs a month disappeared with incredible
celerity. Finding nothing one day, when he had only spent forty or
fifty francs, he remarked for the first time: "My money must have got
wings." The next month he paid more attention to his accounts; but add
as he might, like Robert Macaire, sixteen and five are twenty-three,
he could make nothing of them. When, for the third time, he found a
still more important discrepancy, he communicated the painful fact to
Madame Descoings, who loved him, he knew, with that maternal, tender,
confiding, credulous, enthusiastic love that he had never had from his
own mother, good as she was,--a love as necessary to the early life of
an artist as the care of the hen is to her unfledged chickens. To her
alone could he confide his horrible suspicions. He was as sure of his
friends as he was of himself; and the Descoings, he knew, would take
nothing to put in her lottery. At the idea which then suggested itself
the poor woman wrung her hands. Philippe alone could have committed
this domestic theft.
"Why didn't he ask me, if he wanted it?" cried Joseph, taking a dab of
color on his palette and stirring it into the other colors without
seeing what he did. "Is it likely I should refuse him?"
"It is robbing a child!" cried the Descoings, her face expressing the
deepest disgust.
"No," replied Joseph, "he is my brother; my purse is his: but he ought
to have asked me."
"Put in a special sum, in silver, this morning, and don't take
anything out," said Madame Descoings. "I shall know who goes into the
studio; and if he is the only one, you will be certain it is he."
The next day Joseph had proof of his brother's forced loans upon him.
Philippe came to the studio when his brother was out and took the
little sum he wanted. The artist trembled for his savings.
"I'll catch him at it, the scamp!" he said, laughing, to Madame
Descoings.
"And you'll do right: we ought to break him of it. I, too, I have
missed little sums out of my purse. Poor boy! he wants tobacco; he's
accustomed to it."
"Poor boy! poor boy!" cried the artist. "I'm rather of Fulgence and
Bixiou's opinion: Philippe is a dead-weight on us. He runs his head
into riots and has to be shipped to America, and that costs the mother
twelve thousand francs; he can't find anything to do in the forests of
the New World, and so he comes back again, and that costs twelve
thousand more. Under pretence of having carried two words of Napoleon
to a general, he thinks himself a great soldier and makes faces at the
Bourbons; meantime, what does he do? amuse himself, travel about, see
foreign countries! As for me, I'm not duped by his misfortunes; he
doesn't look like a man who fails to get the best of things! Somebody
finds him a good place, and there he is, leading the life of a
Sardanapalus with a ballet-girl, and guzzling the funds of his
journal; that costs the mother another twelve thousand francs! I don't
care two straws for myself, but Philippe will bring that poor woman to
beggary. He thinks I'm of no account because I was never in the
dragoons of the Guard; but perhaps I shall be the one to support that
poor dear mother in her old age, while he, if he goes on as he does,
will end I don't know how. Bixiou often says to me, 'He is a downright
rogue, that brother of yours.' Your grandson is right. Philippe will
be up to some mischief that will compromise the honor of the family,
and then we shall have to scrape up another ten or twelve thousand
francs! He gambles every night; when he comes home, drunk as a
templar, he drops on the staircase the pricked cards on which he marks
the turns of the red and black. Old Desroches is trying to get him
back into the army, and, on my word on honor, I believe he would hate
to serve again. Would you ever have believed that a boy with such
heavenly blue eyes and the look of Bayard could turn out such a
scoundrel?"