d
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 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