Joseph never, for two
years, failed to fetch his mother at night, and bring her back to the
rue Mazarin; and often he went to take her to dinner; his friends
frequently saw him leave the opera or some brilliant salon to be
punctually at midnight at the office in the rue Vivienne.

Agathe soon acquired the monotonous regularity of life which becomes a
stay and a support to those who have endured the shock of violent
sorrows. In the morning, after doing up her room, in which there were
no longer cats and little birds, she prepared the breakfast at her own
fire and carried it into the studio, where she ate it with her son.
She then arranged Joseph's bedroom, put out the fire in her own
chamber, and brought her sewing to the studio, where she sat by the
little iron stove, leaving the room if a comrade or a model entered
it. Though she understood nothing whatever of art, the silence of the
studio suited her. In the matter of art she made not the slightest
progress; she attempted no hypocrisy; she was utterly amazed at the
importance they all attached to color, composition, drawing. When the
Cenacle friends or some brother-painter, like Schinner, Pierre
Grassou, Leon de Lora,--a very youthful "rapin" who was called at that
time Mistigris,--discussed a picture, she would come back afterwards,
examine it attentively, and discover nothing to justify their fine
words and their hot disputes. She made her son's shirts, she mended
his stockings, she even cleaned his palette, supplied him with rags to
wipe his brushes, and kept things in order in the studio. Seeing how
much thought his mother gave to these little details, Joseph heaped
attentions upon her in return. If mother and son had no sympathies in
the matter of art, they were at least bound together by signs of
tenderness. The mother had a purpose. One morning as she was petting
Joseph while he was sketching a large picture (finished in after years
and never understood), she said, as it were, casually and aloud,--

"My God! what is he doing?"

"Doing? who?"

"Philippe."

"Oh, ah! he's sowing his wild oats; that fellow will make something of
himself by and by."

"But he has gone through the lesson of poverty; perhaps it was poverty
which changed him to what he is. If he were prosperous he would be
good--"

"You think, my dear mother, that he suffered during that journey of
his. You are mistaken; he kept carnival in New York just as he does
here--"

"But if he is su