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 allowed to enter the atelier, he burst into a holy wrath.

“I was under obligations to your deceased husband, I wished to help his son, to watch his first steps in the noblest of all careers,” he cried.  “Yes, madame, learn, if you do not know it, that a great artist is a king, and more than a king; he is happier, he is independent, he lives as he likes, he reigns in the world of fancy.  Your son has a glorious future before him.  Faculties like his are rare; they are only disclosed at his age in such beings as the Giottos, Raphaels, Titians, Rubens, Murillos,—­for, in my opinion, he will make a better painter than sculptor.  God of heaven! if I had such a son, I should be as happy as the Emperor is to have given himself the King of Rome.  Well, you are mistress of your child’s fate.  Go your own way, madame; make him a fool, a miserable quill-driver, tie him to a desk, and you’ve murdered him!  But I hope, in spite if all your efforts, that he will stay an artist.  A true vocation is stronger than all the obstacles that can be opposed to it.  Vocation! why the very word means a call; ay, the election of God himself!  You will make your child unhappy, that’s all.”  He flung the clay he no longer needed violently into a tub, and said to his model, “That will do for to-day.”

Agathe raised her eyes and saw, in a corner of the atelier where her glance had not before penetrated, a nude woman sitting on a stool, the sight of whom drove her away horrified.

“You are not to have the little Bridau here any more,” said Chaudet to his pupils, “it annoys his mother.”