to enter? Damn it, you'd wish her six
feet under ground, in a leaden night-gown. Come, breakfast with me, and
let us talk of something else. I am a parvenu, my dear fellow, and I
know it. I don't choose that my swaddling-clothes shall be seen. My son
will be more fortunate than I; he will be a great lord. The scamp will
wish me dead; I expect it,--or he won't be my son."

He rang the bell, and ordered the servant to serve breakfast.

"The fashionable world wouldn't see you in your mother's bedroom," said
Bixiou. "What would it cost you to seem to love that poor woman for a
few hours?"

"Whew!" cried Philippe, winking. "So you come from them, do you? I'm an
old camel, who knows all about genuflections. My mother makes the excuse
of her last illness to get something out of me for Joseph. No, thank
you!"

When Bixiou related this scene to Joseph, the poor painter was chilled
to the very soul.

"Does Philippe know I am ill?" asked Agathe in a piteous tone, the day
after Bixiou had rendered an account of his fruitless errand.

Joseph left the room, suffocating with emotion. The Abbe Loraux, who was
sitting by the bedside of his penitent, took her hand and pressed it,
and then he answered, "Alas! my child, you have never had but one son."

The words, which Agathe understood but too well, conveyed a shock which
was the beginning of the end. She died twenty hours later.

In the delirium which preceded death, the words, "Whom does Philippe
take after?" escaped her.

Joseph followed his mother to the grave alone. Philippe had gone, on
business it was said, to Orleans; in reality, he was driven from Paris
by the following letter, which Joseph wrote to him a moment after their
mother had breathed her last sigh:--

Monster! my poor mother has died of the shock your letter caused
her. Wear mourning, but pretend illness; I will not suffer her
assassin to stand at my side before her coffin.

Joseph B.

The painter, who no longer had the heart to paint, though his bitter
grief sorely needed the mechanical distraction which labor is wont to
give, was surrounded by friends who agreed with one another never to
leave him entirely alone. Thus it happened that Bixiou, who loved Joseph
as much as a satirist can love any one, was sitting in the atelier with
a group of other friends about two weeks after Agathe's funeral. The
servant entered with a letter, brought by an old woman, she said, who
was waiting below for the