his age in such beings as the Giottos, Raphaels, Titians, Rubens, Murillos, – for, in my opinion, he will make a better painter than sculptor. God of heaven! if I had such a son, I should be as happy as the Emperor is to have given himself the King of Rome. Well, you are mistress of your child’s fate. Go your own way, madame; make him a fool, a miserable quill-driver, tie him to a desk, and you’ve murdered him! But I hope, in spite if all your efforts, that he will stay an artist. A true vocation is stronger than all the obstacles that can be opposed to it. Vocation! why the very word means a call; ay, the election of God himself! You will make your child unhappy, that’s all.” He flung the clay he no longer needed violently into a tub, and said to his model, “That will do for to-day.”
Agathe raised her eyes and saw, in a corner of the atelier where her glance had not before penetrated, a nude woman sitting on a stool, the sight of whom drove her away horrified.
“You are not to have the little Bridau here any more,” said Chaudet to his pupils, “it annoys his mother.”
“Eugh!” they all cried, as Agathe closed the door.
No sooner did the students of sculpture and painting find out that Madame Bridau did not wish her son to be an artist, than their whole happiness centred on getting Joseph among them. In spite of a promise not to go to the Institute which his mother exacted from him, the child often slipped into Regnauld the painter’s studio, where he was encouraged to daub canvas. When the widow complained that the bargain was not kept, Chaudet’s pupils assured her that Regnauld was not Chaudet, and they hadn’t the bringing up of her son, with other impertinences; and the atrocious young scamps composed a song with a hundred and thirty-seven couplets on Madame Bridau.
On the evening of that sad day Agathe refused to play at cards, and sat on her sofa plunged in such grief that the tears stood in her handsome eyes.
“What is the matter, Madame Bridau?” asked old Claparon.
“She thinks her boy will have to beg his bread because he has got the bump of painting,” said Madame Descoings; “but, for my part, I am not the least uneasy about the future of my step-son, little Bixiou, who has a passion for drawing. Men are born to get on.”
“You are right,” said the hard and severe Desroches, who, in spite of his talents, had never himself got on in the position of assistant-head of a department. “Happily I have only one son; otherwise, with my eighteen hundred francs a year, and a wife who makes barely twelve hundred out of her stamped-paper office, I don’t know what would become of me. I have just placed my boy as under-clerk to a lawyer; he gets twenty-five francs a month and his breakfast. I give him as much more, and he dines and sleeps at home. That’s all he gets; he must manage for himself, but he’ll make his way. I keep the fellow harder at work than if he were at school, and some day he will be a barrister. When I give him money to go to the theatre, he is as happy as a king and kisses me. Oh, I keep a tight hand on him, and he renders me an account of all he spends. You are too good to your children, Madame Bridau; if your son wants to go through hardships and privations, let him; they’ll make a man of him.”
“As for my boy,” said Du Bruel, a former chief of a division, who had just retired on a pension, “he is only sixteen; his mother dotes on him; but I shouldn’t listen to his choosing a profession at his age, – a mere fancy, a notion that may pass off. In my opinion, boys should be guided and controlled.”
“Ah, monsieur! you are rich, you are a man, and you have but one son,” said Agathe.
“Faith!” said Claparon, “children do tyrannize over us – over our hearts, I mean. Mine makes me furious; he has nearly ruined me, and now I won’t have anything to do with him – it’s a sort of independence. Well, he is the happier for it, and so am I. That fellow was partly the cause of his mother’s death. He chose to be a commercial traveller; and the trade just suited him, for he was no sooner in the house than he wanted to be out of it; he couldn’t keep in one place, and he wouldn’t learn anything. All I ask of God is that I may die before he dishonors my name. Those who have no children lose many pleasures, but they escape great sufferings.”
“And these men are fathers!” thought Agathe, weeping anew.
“What I am trying to show you, my dear Madame Bridau, is that you had better let your boy be a painter; if not, you will only waste your time.”
“If you were able to coerce him,” said the sour Desroches, “I should advise you to oppose his tastes; but weak as I see you are, you had better let him daub if he likes.”
“Console yourself, Agathe,” said Madame Descoings, “Joseph will turn out a great man.”
After this discussion, which was like all discussions, the widow’s friends united in giving her one and the same advice; which advice did not in the least relieve her anxieties. They advised her to let Joseph follow his bent.
“If he doesn’t turn out a genius,” said Du Bruel, who always tried to please Agathe, “you can then get him into some government office.”
When Madame Descoings accompanied the old clerks to the door she assured them, at the head of the stairs, that they were “Grecian sages.”
“Madame Bridau ought to be glad her son is willing to do anything,” said Claparon.
“Besides,” said Desroches, “if God preserves the Emperor, Joseph will always be looked after. Why should she worry?”
“She is timid about everything that concerns her children,” answered Madame Descoings. “Well, my good girl,” she said, returning to Agathe, “you see they are unanimous; why are you still crying?”
“If it was Philippe, I should have no anxiety. But you don’t know what goes on in that atelier; they have naked women!”
“I hope they keep good fires,” said Madame Descoings.
A few days after this, the disasters of the retreat from Moscow became known. Napoleon returned to Paris to organize fresh troops, and to ask further sacrifices from the country. The poor mother was then plunged into very different anxieties. Philippe, who was tired of school, wanted to serve under the Emperor; he saw a review at the Tuileries, – the last Napoleon ever held, – and he became infatuated with the idea of a soldier’s life. In those days military splendor, the show of uniforms, the authority of epaulets, offered irresistible seductions to a certain style of youth. Philippe thought he had the same vocation for the army that his brother Joseph showed for art. Without his mother’s knowledge, he wrote a petition to the Emperor, which read as follows: —
Sire, – I am the son of your Bridau; eighteen years of age, five feet six inches; I have good legs, a good constitution, and wish to be one of your soldiers. I ask you to let me enter the army, etc.
Within twenty-four hours, the Emperor had sent Philippe to the Imperial Lyceum at Saint-Cyr, and six months later, in November, 1813, he appointed him sub-lieutenant in a regiment of cavalry. Philippe spent the greater part of that winter in cantonments, but as soon as he knew how to ride a horse he was dispatched to the front, and went eagerly. During the campaign in France he was made a lieutenant, after an affair at the outposts where his bravery had saved his colonel’s life. The Emperor named him captain at the battle of La Fere-Champenoise, and took him on his staff. Inspired by such promotion, Philippe won the cross at Montereau. He witnessed Napoleon’s farewell at Fontainebleau, raved at the sight, and refused to serve the Bourbons. When he returned to his mother, in July, 1814, he found her ruined.
Joseph’s scholarship was withdrawn after the holidays, and Madame Bridau, whose pension came from the Emperor’s privy purse, vainly entreated that it might be inscribed
