On the other hand, Madame Bridau, motherly love, kept her expenses down to the same sum.  By way of penance for her former over-confidence, she heroically cut off her own little enjoyments.  As with other timid souls of limited intelligence, one shock to her feelings rousing her distrust led her to exaggerate a defect in her character until it assumed the consistency of a virtue.  The Emperor, she said to herself, might forget them; he might die in battle; her pension, at any rate, ceased with her life.  She shuddered at the risk her children ran of being left alone in the world without means.  Quite incapable of understanding Roguin when he explained to her that in seven years Madame Descoings’s assignment would replace the money she had sold out of the Funds, she persisted in trusting neither the notary nor her aunt, nor even the government; she believed in nothing but herself and the privations she was practising.  By laying aside three thousand francs every year from her pension, she would have thirty thousand francs at the end of ten years; which would give fifteen hundred a year to her children.  At thirty-six, she might expect to live twenty years longer; and if she kept to the same system of economy she might leave to each child enough for the bare necessaries of life.

Thus the two widows passed from hollow opulence to voluntary poverty, —­one under the pressure of a vice, the other through the promptings of the purest virtue.  None of these petty details are useless in teaching the lesson which ought to be learned from this present history, drawn as it is from the most commonplace interests of life, but whose bearings are, it may be, only the more widespread.  The view from the windows into the student dens; the tumult of the rapins below; the necessity of looking up at the sky to escape the miserable sights of the damp angle of the street; the presence of that portrait, full of soul and grandeur despite the workmanship of an amateur painter; the sight of the rich colors, now old and harmonious, in that calm and placid home; the preference of the mother for her eldest child; her opposition to the tastes of the younger; in short, the whole body of facts and circumstances which make the preamble of this history are perhaps the generating causes to which we owe Joseph Bridau, one of the greatest painters of the modern French school of art.

Philippe, the elder of the two sons, was strikingly like his mother.  Though a blond lad, with blue eyes, he had the daring look which is readily taken for intrepidity and courage.  Old Claparon, who entered the ministry of the interior at the same time as Bridau, and was one of the faithful friends who played whist every night with the two widows, used to say of Philippe two or three times a month, giving him a tap on the cheek, “Here’s a young rascal who’ll stand to his guns!” The boy, thus stimulated, naturally and out of bravado, assumed a resolute manner.  That turn once given to his character, he became very adroit at all bodily exercises; his fights at the Lyceum taught him the endurance and contempt for pain which lays the foundation of military valor.  He also acquired, very naturally, a distaste for study; public education being unable to solve the difficult problem of developing “pari passu” the body and the mind.