However, all Agathe’s anxieties were at this time for her son the lieutenant-colonel.  When she saw him again in 1816, reduced from the salary of nine thousand francs (paid to a commander in the dragoons of the Imperial Guard) to a half-pay of three hundred francs a month, she fitted up her attic rooms for him, and spent her savings in doing so.  Philippe was one of the faithful Bonapartes of the cafe Lemblin, that constitutional Boeotia; he acquired the habits, manners, style, and life of a half-pay officer; indeed, like any other young man of twenty-one, he exaggerated them, vowed in good earnest a mortal enmity to the Bourbons, never reported himself at the War department, and even refused opportunities which were offered to him for employment in the infantry with his rank of lieutenant-colonel.  In his mother’s eyes, Philippe seemed in all this to be displaying a noble character.

“The father himself could have done no more,” she said.

Philippe’s half-pay sufficed him; he cost nothing at home, whereas all Joseph’s expenses were paid by the two widows.  From that moment, Agathe’s preference for Philippe was openly shown.  Up to that time it had been secret; but the persecution of this faithful servant of the Emperor, the recollection of the wound received by her cherished son, his courage in adversity, which, voluntary though it were, seemed to her a glorious adversity, drew forth all Agathe’s tenderness.  The one sentence, “He is unfortunate,” explained and justified everything.  Joseph himself,—­with the innate simplicity which superabounds in the artist-soul in its opening years, and who was, moreover, brought up to admire his big brother,—­so far from being hurt by the preference of their mother, encouraged it by sharing her worship of the hero who had carried Napoleon’s orders on two battlefields, and was wounded at Waterloo.  How could he doubt the superiority of the grand brother, whom he had beheld in the green and gold uniform of the dragoons of the Guard, commanding his squadron on the Champ de Mars?

Agathe, notwithstanding this preference, was an excellent mother.  She loved Joseph, though not blindly; she simply was unable to understand him.  Joseph adored his mother; Philippe let his mother adore him.  Towards her, the dragoon softened his military brutality; but he never concealed the contempt he felt for Joseph,—­expressing it, however, in a friendly way.  When he looked at his brother, weak and sickly as he was at seventeen years of age, shrunken with determined toil, and over-weighted with his powerful head, he nicknamed him “Cub.”  Philippe’s patronizing manners would have wounded any one less carelessly indifferent than the artist, who had, moreover, a firm belief in the goodness of heart which soldiers hid, he thought, beneath a brutal exterior.  Joseph did not yet know, poor boy, that soldiers of genius are as gentle and courteous in manner as other superior men in any walk of life.  All genius is alike, wherever found.