“What the devil do you want me to do there?” he cried.  “The only service the poor woman can render me is to die as soon as she can; she would be rather a sorry figure at my marriage with Mademoiselle de Soulanges.  The less my family is seen, the better my position.  You can easily understand that I should like to bury the name of Bridau under all the monuments in Pere-Lachaise.  My brother irritates me by bringing the name into publicity.  You are too knowing not to see the situation as I do.  Look at it as if it were your own:  if you were a deputy, with a tongue like yours, you would be as much feared as Chauvelin; you would be made Comte Bixiou, and director of the Beaux-Arts.  Once there, how should you like it if your grandmother Descoings were to turn up?  Would you want that worthy woman, who looked like a Madame Saint-Leon, to be hanging on to you?  Would you give her an arm in the Tuileries, and present her to the noble family you were trying to enter?  Damn it, you’d wish her six feet under ground, in a leaden night-gown.  Come, breakfast with me, and let us talk of something else.  I am a parvenu, my dear fellow, and I know it.  I don’t choose that my swaddling-clothes shall be seen.  My son will be more fortunate than I; he will be a great lord.  The scamp will wish me dead; I expect it,—­or he won’t be my son.”

He rang the bell, and ordered the servant to serve breakfast.

“The fashionable world wouldn’t see you in your mother’s bedroom,” said Bixiou.  “What would it cost you to seem to love that poor woman for a few hours?”

“Whew!” cried Philippe, winking.  “So you come from them, do you?  I’m an old camel, who knows all about genuflections.  My mother makes the excuse of her last illness to get something out of me for Joseph.  No, thank you!”

When Bixiou related this scene to Joseph, the poor painter was chilled to the very soul.

“Does Philippe know I am ill?” asked Agathe in a piteous tone, the day after Bixiou had rendered an account of his fruitless errand.

Joseph left the room, suffocating with emotion.  The Abbe Loraux, who was sitting by the bedside of his penitent, took her hand and pressed it, and then he answered, “Alas! my child, you have never had but one son.”

The words, which Agathe understood but too well, conveyed a shock which was the beginning of the end.  She died twenty hours later.

In the delirium which preceded death, the words, “Whom does Philippe take after?” escaped her.

Joseph followed his mother to the grave alone.  Philippe had gone, on business it was said, to Orleans; in reality, he was driven from Paris by the following letter, which Joseph wrote to him a moment after their mother had breathed her last sigh:—­

  Monster! my poor mother has died of the shock your letter caused
  her.  Wear mourning, but pretend illness; I will not suffer her
  assassin to stand at my side before her coffin.