hrough Davoust's intercession, his cross and
his rank were secured to him, but he was placed on half-pay.

Joseph, anxious about his future, studied all through this period
with an ardor which several times made him ill in the midst of these
tumultuous events.

"It is the smell of the paints," Agathe said to Madame Descoings. "He
ought to give up a business so injurious to his health."

However, all Agathe's anxieties were at this time for her son the
lieutenant-colonel. When she saw him again in 1816, reduced from the
salary of nine thousand francs (paid to a commander in the dragoons of
the Imperial Guard) to a half-pay of three hundred francs a month, she
fitted up her attic rooms for him, and spent her savings in doing so.
Philippe was one of the faithful Bonapartes of the cafe Lemblin, that
constitutional Boeotia; he acquired the habits, manners, style, and life
of a half-pay officer; indeed, like any other young man of twenty-one,
he exaggerated them, vowed in good earnest a mortal enmity to the
Bourbons, never reported himself at the War department, and even refused
opportunities which were offered to him for employment in the infantry
with his rank of lieutenant-colonel. In his mother's eyes, Philippe
seemed in all this to be displaying a noble character.

"The father himself could have done no more," she said.

Philippe's half-pay sufficed him; he cost nothing at home, whereas
all Joseph's expenses were paid by the two widows. From that moment,
Agathe's preference for Philippe was openly shown. Up to that time it
had been secret; but the persecution of this faithful servant of the
Emperor, the recollection of the wound received by her cherished son,
his courage in adversity, which, voluntary though it were, seemed to
her a glorious adversity, drew forth all Agathe's tenderness. The one
sentence, "He is unfortunate," explained and justified everything.
Joseph himself,--with the innate simplicity which superabounds in the
artist-soul in its opening years, and who was, moreover, brought up to
admire his big brother,--so far from being hurt by the preference of
their mother, encouraged it by sharing her worship of the hero who
had carried Napoleon's orders on two battlefields, and was wounded at
Waterloo. How could he doubt the superiority of the grand brother,
whom he had beheld in the green and gold uniform of the dragoons of the
Guard, commanding his squadron on the Champ de Mars?

Agathe, notwithstanding