th, Madame Descoings, who humored the fancies of the two
cherubim, kept Joseph supplied with pencils and red chalks, prints and
drawing-paper. At school, the future colorist sketched his masters,
drew his comrades, charcoaled the dormitories, and showed surprising
assiduity in the drawing-class. Lemire, the drawing-master, struck not
only with the lad's inclination but also with his actual progress,
came to tell Madame Bridau of her son's faculty. Agathe, like a
true provincial, who knows as little of art as she knows much of
housekeeping, was terrified. When Lemire left her, she burst into tears.

"Ah!" she cried, when Madame Descoings went to ask what was the matter.
"What is to become of me! Joseph, whom I meant to make a government
clerk, whose career was all marked out for him at the ministry of the
interior, where, protected by his father's memory, he might have risen
to be chief of a division before he was twenty-five, he, my boy, he
wants to be a painter,--a vagabond! I always knew that child would give
me nothing but trouble."

Madame Descoings confessed that for several months past she had
encouraged Joseph's passion, aiding and abetting his Sunday and Thursday
visits to the Institute. At the Salon, to which she had taken him, the
little fellow had shown an interest in the pictures, which was, she
declared, nothing short of miraculous.

"If he understands painting at thirteen, my dear," she said, "your
Joseph will be a man of genius."

"Yes; and see what genius did for his father,--killed him with overwork
at forty!"

At the close of autumn, just as Joseph was entering his fourteenth year,
Agathe, contrary to Madame Descoings's entreaties, went to see Chaudet,
and requested that he would cease to debauch her son. She found the
sculptor in a blue smock, modelling his last statue; he received the
widow of the man who formerly had served him at a critical moment,
rather roughly; but, already at death's door, he was struggling
with passionate ardor to do in a few hours work he could hardly have
accomplished in several months. As Madame Bridau entered, he had just
found an effect long sought for, and was handling his tools and clay
with spasmodic jerks and movements that seemed to the ignorant Agathe
like those of a maniac. At any other time Chaudet would have laughed;
but now, as he heard the mother bewailing the destiny he had opened to
her child, abusing art, and insisting that Joseph should no longer be
a