to the front, and went eagerly.  During the campaign in France he was made a lieutenant, after an affair at the outposts where his bravery had saved his colonel’s life.  The Emperor named him captain at the battle of La Fere-Champenoise, and took him on his staff.  Inspired by such promotion, Philippe won the cross at Montereau.  He witnessed Napoleon’s farewell at Fontainebleau, raved at the sight, and refused to serve the Bourbons.  When he returned to his mother, in July, 1814, he found her ruined.

Joseph’s scholarship was withdrawn after the holidays, and Madame Bridau, whose pension came from the Emperor’s privy purse, vainly entreated that it might be inscribed on the rolls of the ministry of the interior.  Joseph, more of a painter than ever, was delighted with the turn of events, and entreated his mother to let him go to Monsieur Regnauld, promising to earn his own living.  He declared he was quite sufficiently advanced in the second class to get on without rhetoric.  Philippe, a captain at nineteen and decorated, who had, moreover, served the Emperor as an aide-de-camp in two battles, flattered the mother’s vanity immensely.  Coarse, blustering, and without real merit beyond the vulgar bravery of a cavalry officer, he was to her mind a man of genius; whereas Joseph, puny and sickly, with unkempt hair and absent mind, seeking peace, loving quiet, and dreaming of an artist’s glory, would only bring her, she thought, worries and anxieties.

The winter of 1814-1815 was a lucky one for Joseph.  Secretly encouraged by Madame Descoings and Bixiou, a pupil of Gros, he went to work in the celebrated atelier of that painter, whence a vast variety of talent issued in its day, and there he formed the closest intimacy with Schinner.  The return from Elba came; Captain Bridau joined the Emperor at Lyons, accompanied him to the Tuileries, and was appointed to the command of a squadron in the dragoons of the Guard.  After the battle of Waterloo—­in which he was slightly wounded, and where he won the cross of an officer of the Legion of honor—­he happened to be near Marshal Davoust at Saint-Denis, and was not with the army of the Loire.  In consequence of this, and through Davoust’s intercession, his cross and his rank were secured to him, but he was placed on half-pay.

Joseph, anxious about his future, studied all through this period with an ardor which several times made him ill in the midst of these tumultuous events.

“It is the smell of the paints,” Agathe said to Madame Descoings.  “He ought to give up a business so injurious to his health.”