Facts
sustained that judgment in the mind of a woman who had never ceased to
be a provincial. Philippe, her favorite child, was he not the great
man of the family at last? in his early errors she saw only the
ebullitions of youth. Joseph, to the merit of whose productions she
was insensible, for she saw them too long in process of gestation to
admire them when finished, seemed to her no more advanced in 1828 than
he was in 1816. Poor Joseph owed money, and was bowed down by the
burden of debt; he had chosen, she felt, a worthless career that made
him no return. She could not conceive why they had given him the cross
of the Legion of honor. Philippe, on the other hand, rich enough to
cease gambling, a guest at the fetes of _Madame_, the brilliant colonel
who at all reviews and in all processions appeared before her eyes in
splendid uniforms, with his two crosses on his breast, realized all
her maternal dreams. One such day of public ceremony effaced from
Agathe's mind the horrible sight of Philippe's misery on the Quai de
l'Ecole; on that day he passed his mother at the self-same spot, in
attendance on the Dauphin, with plumes in his shako, and his pelisse
gorgeous with gold and fur. Agathe, who to her artist son was now a
sort of devoted gray sister, felt herself the mother of none but the
dashing aide-de-camp to his Royal Highness, the Dauphin of France.
Proud of Philippe, she felt he made the ease and happiness of her
life,--forgetting that the lottery-office, by which she was enabled to
live at all, came through Joseph.
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