neat. Then, by some
mysterious fatality, Joseph could not keep his clothes clean; dress him
in new clothes, and he immediately made them look like old ones. The
elder, on the other hand, took care of his things out of mere vanity.
Unconsciously, the mother acquired a habit of scolding Joseph and
holding up his brother as an example to him. Agathe did not treat the
two children alike; when she went to fetch them from school, the thought
in her mind as to Joseph always was, "What sort of state shall I
find him in?" These trifles drove her heart into the gulf of maternal
preference.

No one among the very ordinary persons who made the society of the two
widows--neither old Du Bruel nor old Claparon, nor Desroches the father,
nor even the Abbe Loraux, Agathe's confessor--noticed Joseph's faculty
for observation. Absorbed in the line of his own tastes, the future
colorist paid no attention to anything that concerned himself. During
his childhood this disposition was so like torpor that his father grew
uneasy about him. The remarkable size of the head and the width of the
brow roused a fear that the child might be liable to water on the brain.
His distressful face, whose originality was thought ugliness by those
who had no eye for the moral value of a countenance, wore rather a
sullen expression during his childhood. The features, which developed
later in life, were pinched, and the close attention the child paid to
what went on about him still further contracted them. Philippe flattered
his mother's vanity, but Joseph won no compliments. Philippe sparkled
with the clever sayings and lively answers that lead parents to believe
their boys will turn out remarkable men; Joseph was taciturn, and a
dreamer. The mother hoped great things of Philippe, and expected nothing
of Joseph.

Joseph's predilection for art was developed by a very commonplace
incident. During the Easter holidays of 1812, as he was coming home from
a walk in the Tuileries with his brother and Madame Descoings, he saw
a pupil drawing a caricature of some professor on the wall of the
Institute, and stopped short with admiration at the charcoal sketch,
which was full of satire. The next day the child stood at the window
watching the pupils as they entered the building by the door on the
rue Mazarin; then he ran downstairs and slipped furtively into the
long courtyard of the Institute, full of statues, busts, half-finished
marbles, plasters, and baked clays; at