e learned from this present
history, drawn as it is from the most commonplace interests of life, but
whose bearings are, it may be, only the more widespread. The view from
the windows into the student dens; the tumult of the rapins below; the
necessity of looking up at the sky to escape the miserable sights of the
damp angle of the street; the presence of that portrait, full of soul
and grandeur despite the workmanship of an amateur painter; the sight of
the rich colors, now old and harmonious, in that calm and placid home;
the preference of the mother for her eldest child; her opposition to
the tastes of the younger; in short, the whole body of facts and
circumstances which make the preamble of this history are perhaps the
generating causes to which we owe Joseph Bridau, one of the greatest
painters of the modern French school of art.

Philippe, the elder of the two sons, was strikingly like his mother.
Though a blond lad, with blue eyes, he had the daring look which is
readily taken for intrepidity and courage. Old Claparon, who entered the
ministry of the interior at the same time as Bridau, and was one of the
faithful friends who played whist every night with the two widows, used
to say of Philippe two or three times a month, giving him a tap on the
cheek, "Here's a young rascal who'll stand to his guns!" The boy, thus
stimulated, naturally and out of bravado, assumed a resolute manner.
That turn once given to his character, he became very adroit at all
bodily exercises; his fights at the Lyceum taught him the endurance and
contempt for pain which lays the foundation of military valor. He also
acquired, very naturally, a distaste for study; public education being
unable to solve the difficult problem of developing "pari passu" the
body and the mind.

Agathe believed that the purely physical resemblance which Philippe bore
to her carried with it a moral likeness; and she confidently expected
him to show at a future day her own delicacy of feeling, heightened by
the vigor of manhood. Philippe was fifteen years old when his mother
moved into the melancholy _appartement_ in the rue Mazarin; and the
winning ways of a lad of that age went far to confirm the maternal
beliefs. Joseph, three years younger, was like his father, but only on
the defective side. In the first place, his thick black hair was always
in disorder, no matter what pains were taken with it; while Philippe's,
notwithstanding his vivacity, was invariably