“Dear Joseph!” cried Agathe in tears, kissing her son, “God will bless you.  You do love him, then, poor persecuted fellow?  He is indeed our glory and our hope for the future.  So young, so brave, so unfortunate! everything is against him; we three must always stand by him.”

“You see now that painting is good for something,” cried Joseph, overjoyed to have won his mother’s permission to be a great artist.

Madame Bridau rushed to meet her beloved son, Colonel Philippe, at Havre.  Once there, she walked every day beyond the round tower built by Francois I., to look out for the American packet, enduring the keenest anxieties.  Mothers alone know how such sufferings quicken maternal love.  The vessel arrived on a fine morning in October, 1819, without delay, and having met with no mishap.  The sight of a mother and the air of one’s native land produces a certain affect on the coarsest nature, especially after the miseries of a sea-voyage.  Philippe gave way to a rush of feeling, which made Agathe think to herself, “Ah! how he loves me!” Alas, the hero loved but one person in the world, and that person was Colonel Philippe.  His misfortunes in Texas, his stay in New York,—­a place where speculation and individualism are carried to the highest pitch, where the brutality of self-interest attains to cynicism, where man, essentially isolated, is compelled to push his way for himself and by himself, where politeness does not exist,—­in fact, even the minor events of Philippe’s journey had developed in him the worst traits of an old campaigner:  he had grown brutal, selfish, rude; he drank and smoked to excess; physical hardships and poverty had depraved him.  Moreover, he considered himself persecuted; and the effect of that idea is to make persons who are unintelligent persecutors and bigots themselves.  To Philippe’s conception of life, the universe began at his head and ended at his feet, and the sun shone for him alone.  The things he had seen in New York, interpreted by his practical nature, carried away his last scruples on the score of morality.  For such beings, there are but two ways of existence.  Either they believe, or they do not believe; they have the virtues of honest men, or they give themselves up to the demands of necessity; in which case they proceed to turn their slightest interests and each passing impulse of their passions into necessities.

Such a system of life carries a man a long way.  It was only in appearance that Colonel Philippe retained the frankness, plain-dealing, and easy-going freedom of a soldier.  This made him, in reality, very dangerous; he seemed as guileless as a child, but, thinking only of himself, he never did anything without reflecting what he had better do,—­like a wily lawyer planning some trick “a la Maitre Gonin”; words cost him nothing, and he said as many as he could to get people to believe.  If, unfortunately, some one refused to accept the explanations with which he justified the contradictions between