on. And yet, as late as 1828, though she
was the directress of an excellent office which she owed entirely to
Joseph's fame, Madame Bridau still had no belief in that fame, which
was hotly contested, as all true glory ever will be. The great painter,
struggling with his genius, had enormous wants; he did not earn
enough to pay for the luxuries which his relations to society, and
his distinguished position in the young School of Art demanded. Though
powerfully sustained by his friends of the Cenacle and by Mademoiselle
des Touches, he did not please the Bourgeois. That being, from whom
comes the money of these days, never unties its purse-strings for genius
that is called in question; unfortunately, Joseph had the classics and
the Institute, and the critics who cry up those two powers, against him.
The brave artist, though backed by Gros and Gerard, by whose influence
he was decorated after the Salon of 1827, obtained few orders. If the
ministry of the interior and the King's household were with difficulty
induced to buy some of his greatest pictures, the shopkeepers and the
rich foreigners noticed them still less. Moreover, Joseph gave way
rather too much, as we must all acknowledge, to imaginative fancies, and
that produced a certain inequality in his work which his enemies made
use of to deny his talent.

"High art is at a low ebb," said his friend Pierre Grassou, who made
daubs to suit the taste of the bourgeoisie, in whose _appartements_ fine
paintings were at a discount.

"You ought to have a whole cathedral to decorate; that's what you
want," declared Schinner; "then you would silence criticism with a
master-stroke."

Such speeches, which alarmed the good Agathe, only corroborated the
judgment she had long since formed upon Philippe and Joseph. Facts
sustained that judgment in the mind of a woman who had never ceased to
be a provincial. Philippe, her favorite child, was he not the great man
of the family at last? in his early errors she saw only the ebullitions
of youth. Joseph, to the merit of whose productions she was insensible,
for she saw them too long in process of gestation to admire them when
finished, seemed to her no more advanced in 1828 than he was in 1816.
Poor Joseph owed money, and was bowed down by the burden of debt; he had
chosen, she felt, a worthless career that made him no return. She could
not conceive why they had given him the cross of the Legion of honor.
Philippe, on the other hand, ri