“No, Joseph, no; you have loved me, but I have not returned you love for love.  Ah! would that I could live a little longer—­ Give me your hand.”

Agathe took her son’s hand, kissed it, held it on her heart, and looked in his face a long time,—­letting him see the azure of her eyes resplendent with a tenderness she had hitherto bestowed on Philippe only.  The painter, well fitted to judge of expression, was so struck by the change, and saw so plainly how the heart of his mother had opened to him, that he took her in his arms, and held her for some moments to his heart, crying out like one beside himself,—­“My mother! oh, my mother!”

“Ah!  I feel that I am forgiven!” she said.  “God will confirm the child’s pardon of its mother.”

“You must be calm:  don’t torment yourself; hear me.  I feel myself loved enough in this one moment for all the past,” he said, as he laid her back upon the pillows.

During the two weeks’ struggle between life and death, there glowed such love in every look and gesture and impulse of the soul of the pious creature, that each effusion of her feelings seemed like the expression of a lifetime.  The mother thought only of her son; she herself counted for nothing; sustained by love, she was unaware of her sufferings.  D’Arthez, Michel Chrestien, Fulgence Ridal, Pierre Grassou, and Bianchon often kept Joseph company, and she heard them talking art in a low voice in a corner of her room.

“Oh, how I wish I knew what color is!” she exclaimed one evening as she heard them discussing one of Joseph’s pictures.

Joseph, on his side, was sublimely devoted to his mother.  He never left her chamber; answered tenderness by tenderness, cherishing her upon his heart.  The spectacle was never afterwards forgotten by his friends; and they themselves, a band of brothers in talent and nobility of nature, were to Joseph and his mother all that they should have been,—­friends who prayed, and truly wept; not saying prayers and shedding tears, but one with their friend in thought and action.  Joseph, inspired as much by feeling as by genius, divined in the occasional expression of his mother’s face a desire that was deep hidden in her heart, and he said one day to d’Arthez,—­

“She has loved that brigand Philippe too well not to want to see him before she dies.”

Joseph begged Bixiou, who frequented the Bohemian regions where Philippe was still occasionally to be found, to persuade that shameless son to play, if only out of pity, a little comedy of tenderness which might wrap the mother’s heart in a winding-sheet of illusive happiness.  Bixiou, in his capacity as an observing and misanthropical scoffer, desired nothing better than to undertake such a mission.  When he had made known Madame Bridau’s condition to the Comte de Brambourg, who received him in a bedroom hung with yellow damask, the colonel laughed.