he artist much hatred,
jealousy, and admiration, was just sketched out; but, compelled as he
was to work for a living, he laid it aside to make copies of the old
masters for the dealers; thus he penetrated the secrets of their
processes, and his brush is therefore one of the best trained of the
modern school. The shrewd sense of an artist led him to conceal the
profits he was beginning to lay by from his mother and Madame
Descoings, aware that each had her road to ruin,--the one in Philippe,
the other in the lottery. This astuteness is seldom wanting among
painters; busy for days together in the solitude of their studios,
engaged in work which, up to a certain point, leaves the mind free,
they are in some respects like women,--their thoughts turn about the
little events of life, and they contrive to get at their hidden
meaning.

Joseph had bought one of those magnificent chests or coffers of a past
age, then ignored by fashion, with which he decorated a corner of his
studio, where the light danced upon the bas-reliefs and gave full
lustre to a masterpiece of the sixteenth century artisans. He saw the
necessity for a hiding-place, and in this coffer he had begun to
accumulate a little store of money. With an artist's carelessness, he
was in the habit of putting the sum he allowed for his monthly
expenses in a skull, which stood on one of the compartments of the
coffer. Since his brother had returned to live at home, he found a
constant discrepancy between the amount he spent and the sum in this
receptacle. The hundred francs a month disappeared with incredible
celerity. Finding nothing one day, when he had only spent forty or
fifty francs, he remarked for the first time: "My money must have got
wings." The next month he paid more attention to his accounts; but add
as he might, like Robert Macaire, sixteen and five are twenty-three,
he could make nothing of them. When, for the third time, he found a
still more important discrepancy, he communicated the painful fact to
Madame Descoings, who loved him, he knew, with that maternal, tender,
confiding, credulous, enthusiastic love that he had never had from his
own mother, good as she was,--a love as necessary to the early life of
an artist as the care of the hen is to her unfledged chickens. To her
alone could he confide his horrible suspicions. He was as sure of his
friends as he was of himself; and the Descoings, he knew, would take
nothing to put in her lottery. At the id