son's hand, kissed it, held it on her heart, and
looked in his face a long time,--letting him see the azure of her eyes
resplendent with a tenderness she had hitherto bestowed on Philippe
only. The painter, well fitted to judge of expression, was so struck
by the change, and saw so plainly how the heart of his mother had
opened to him, that he took her in his arms, and held her for some
moments to his heart, crying out like one beside himself,--"My mother!
oh, my mother!"

"Ah! I feel that I am forgiven!" she said. "God will confirm the
child's pardon of its mother."

"You must be calm: don't torment yourself; hear me. I feel myself
loved enough in this one moment for all the past," he said, as he laid
her back upon the pillows.

During the two weeks' struggle between life and death, there glowed
such love in every look and gesture and impulse of the soul of the
pious creature, that each effusion of her feelings seemed like the
expression of a lifetime. The mother thought only of her son; she
herself counted for nothing; sustained by love, she was unaware of her
sufferings. D'Arthez, Michel Chrestien, Fulgence Ridal, Pierre
Grassou, and Bianchon often kept Joseph company, 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 an