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?”