ng certain steps,
gave her leave of absence for two weeks.

"Ah! my friend," she said to Joseph, as she went to bed that night, "it
is our severity which drove him to it."

"I'll go and see Desroches," answered Joseph.

While the artist was confiding his brother's affairs to the younger
Desroches,--who by this time had the reputation of being one of the
keenest and most astute lawyers in Paris, and who, moreover, did sundry
services for personages of distinction, among others for des Lupeaulx,
then secretary of a ministry,--Giroudeau called upon the widow. This
time, Agathe believed him.

"Madame," he said, "if you can produce twelve thousand francs your son
will be set at liberty for want of proof. It is necessary to buy the
silence of two witnesses."

"I will get the money," said the poor mother, without knowing how or
where.

Inspired by this danger, she wrote to her godmother, old Madame Hochon,
begging her to ask Jean-Jacques Rouget to send her the twelve thousand
francs and save his nephew Philippe. If Rouget refused, she entreated
Madame Hochon to lend them to her, promising to return them in two
years. By return of courier, she received the following letter:--

My dear girl: Though your brother has an income of not less than
forty thousand francs a year, without counting the sums he has
laid by for the last seventeen years, and which Monsieur Hochon
estimates at more than six hundred thousand francs, he will not
give one penny to nephews whom he has never seen. As for me, you
know I cannot dispose of a farthing while my husband lives. Hochon
is the greatest miser in Issoudun. I do not know what he does with
his money; he does not give twenty francs a year to his
grandchildren. As for borrowing the money, I should have to get
his signature, and he would refuse it. I have not even attempted
to speak to your brother, who lives with a concubine, to whom he
is a slave. It is pitiable to see how the poor man is treated in
his own home, when he might have a sister and nephews to take care
of him.

I have hinted to you several times that your presence at Issoudun
might save your brother, and rescue a fortune of forty, perhaps
sixty, thousand francs a year from the claws of that slut; but you
either do not answer me, or you seem never to understand my
meaning. So to-day I am obliged to write without epistolary
circumlocution. I feel for the misfortune which has overtaken