those days military splendor, the show of
uniforms, the authority of epaulets, offered irresistible seductions
to a certain style of youth. Philippe thought he had the same vocation
for the army that his brother Joseph showed for art. Without his
mother's knowledge, he wrote a petition to the Emperor, which read as
follows:--

Sire,--I am the son of your Bridau; eighteen years of age, five
feet six inches; I have good legs, a good constitution, and wish
to be one of your soldiers. I ask you to let me enter the army,
etc.

Within twenty-four hours, the Emperor had sent Philippe to the
Imperial Lyceum at Saint-Cyr, and six months later, in November, 1813,
he appointed him sub-lieutenant in a regiment of cavalry. Philippe
spent the greater part of that winter in cantonments, but as soon as
he knew how to ride a horse he was dispatched to the front, and went
eagerly. During the campaign in France he was made a lieutenant, after
an affair at the outposts where his bravery had saved his colonel's
life. The Emperor named him captain at the battle of La
Fere-Champenoise, and took him on his staff. Inspired by such
promotion, Philippe won the cross at Montereau. He witnessed Napoleon's
farewell at Fontainebleau, raved at the sight, and refused to serve the
Bourbons. When he returned to his mother, in July, 1814, he found her
ruined.

Joseph's scholarship was withdrawn after the holidays, and Madame
Bridau, whose pension came from the Emperor's privy purse, vainly
entreated that it might be inscribed on the rolls of the ministry of
the interior. Joseph, more of a painter than ever, was delighted with
the turn of events, and entreated his mother to let him go to Monsieur
Regnauld, promising to earn his own living. He declared he was quite
sufficiently advanced in the second class to get on without rhetoric.
Philippe, a captain at nineteen and decorated, who had, moreover,
served the Emperor as an aide-de-camp in two battles, flattered the
mother's vanity immensely. Coarse, blustering, and without real merit
beyond the vulgar bravery of a cavalry officer, he was to her mind a
man of genius; whereas Joseph, puny and sickly, with unkempt hair and
absent mind, seeking peace, loving quiet, and dreaming of an artist's
glory, would only bring her, she thought, worries and anxieties.

The winter of 1814-1815 was a lucky one for Joseph. Secretly
encouraged by Madame Descoings and Bixiou, a pupil of Gros, he went to
work in t