Joseph had bought one of those magnificent chests or coffers of a past
age, then ignored by fashion, with which he decorated a corner of his
studio, where the light danced upon the bas-reliefs and gave full
lustre to a masterpiece of the sixteenth century artisans. He saw the
necessity for a hiding-place, and in this coffer he had begun to
accumulate a little store of money. With an artist's carelessness, he
was in the habit of putting the sum he allowed for his monthly
expenses in a skull, which stood on one of the compartments of the
coffer. Since his brother had returned to live at home, he found a
constant discrepancy between the amount he spent and the sum in this
receptacle. The hundred francs a month disappeared with incredible
celerity. Finding nothing one day, when he had only spent forty or
fifty francs, he remarked for the first time: "My money must have got
wings." The next month he paid more attention to his accounts; but add
as he might, like Robert Macaire, sixteen and five are twenty-three,
he could make nothing of them. When, for the third time, he found a
still more important discrepancy, he communicated the painful fact to
Madame Descoings, who loved him, he knew, with that maternal, tender,
confiding, credulous, enthusiastic love that he had never had from his
own mother, good as she was,--a love as necessary to the early life of
an artist as the care of the hen is to her unfledged chickens. To her
alone could he confide his horrible suspicions.
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