, and she heard them talking art in a low voice
in a corner of her room.

"Oh, how I wish I knew what color is!" she exclaimed one evening as she
heard them discussing one of Joseph's pictures.

Joseph, on his side, was sublimely devoted to his mother. He never left
her chamber; answered tenderness by tenderness, cherishing her upon his
heart. The spectacle was never afterwards forgotten by his friends; and
they themselves, a band of brothers in talent and nobility of nature,
were to Joseph and his mother all that they should have been,--friends
who prayed, and truly wept; not saying prayers and shedding tears, but
one with their friend in thought and action. Joseph, inspired as much
by feeling as by genius, divined in the occasional expression of his
mother's face a desire that was deep hidden in her heart, and he said
one day to d'Arthez,--

"She has loved that brigand Philippe too well not to want to see him
before she dies."

Joseph begged Bixiou, who frequented the Bohemian regions where Philippe
was still occasionally to be found, to persuade that shameless son to
play, if only out of pity, a little comedy of tenderness which might
wrap the mother's heart in a winding-sheet of illusive happiness.
Bixiou, in his capacity as an observing and misanthropical scoffer,
desired nothing better than to undertake such a mission. When he had
made known Madame Bridau's condition to the Comte de Brambourg, who
received him in a bedroom hung with yellow damask, the colonel laughed.

"What the devil do you want me to do there?" he cried. "The only service
the poor woman can render me is to die as soon as she can; she would be
rather a sorry figure at my marriage with Mademoiselle de Soulanges.
The less my family is seen, the better my position. You can easily
understand that I should like to bury the name of Bridau under all the
monuments in Pere-Lachaise. My brother irritates me by bringing the name
into publicity. You are too knowing not to see the situation as I do.
Look at it as if it were your own: if you were a deputy, with a tongue
like yours, you would be as much feared as Chauvelin; you would be made
Comte Bixiou, and director of the Beaux-Arts. Once there, how should you
like it if your grandmother Descoings were to turn up? Would you want
that worthy woman, who looked like a Madame Saint-Leon, to be hanging on
to you? Would you give her an arm in the Tuileries, and present her to
the noble family you were trying