This carnival, which lasted eighteen months, was not altogether without its troubles.  The beautiful Mariette no sooner appeared at the Opera, in January, 1821, than she captured one of the most distinguished dukes of the court of Louis XVIII.  Philippe tried to make head against the peer, and by the month of April he was compelled by his passion, notwithstanding some luck at cards, to dip into the funds of which he was cashier.  By May he had taken eleven hundred francs.  In that fatal month Mariette started for London, to see what could be done with the lords while the temporary opera house in the Hotel Choiseul, rue Lepelletier, was being prepared.  The luckless Philippe had ended, as often happens, in loving Mariette notwithstanding her flagrant infidelities; she herself had never thought him anything but a dull-minded, brutal soldier, the first rung of a ladder on which she had never intended to remain long.  So, foreseeing the time when Philippe would have spent all his money, she captured other journalistic support which released her from the necessity of depending on him; nevertheless, she did feel the peculiar gratitude that class of women acknowledge towards the first man who smooths their way, as it were, among the difficulties and horrors of a theatrical career.

Forced to let his terrible mistress go to London without him, Philippe went into winter quarters, as he called it,—­that is, he returned to his attic room in his mother’s appartement.  He made some gloomy reflections as he went to bed that night, and when he got up again.  He was conscious within himself of the inability to live otherwise than as he had been living the last year.  The luxury that surrounded Mariette, the dinners, the suppers, the evenings in the side-scenes, the animation of wits and journalists, the sort of racket that went on around him, the delights that tickled both his senses and his vanity, —­such a life, found only in Paris, and offering daily the charm of some new thing, was now more than habit,—­it had become to Philippe as much a necessity as his tobacco or his brandy.  He saw plainly that he could not live without these continual enjoyments.  The idea of suicide came into his head; not on account of the deficit which must soon be discovered in his accounts, but because he could no longer live with Mariette in the atmosphere of pleasure in which he had disported himself for over a year.  Full of these gloomy thoughts, he entered for the first time his brother’s painting-room, where he found the painter in a blue blouse, copying a picture for a dealer.

“So that’s how pictures are made,” said Philippe, by way of opening the conversation.

“No,” said Joseph, “that is how they are copied.”

“How much do they pay you for that?”

“Eh! never enough; two hundred and fifty francs.  But I study the manner of the masters and learn a great deal; I found out the secrets of their method.  There’s one of my own pictures,” he added, pointing with the end of his brush to a sketch with the colors still moist.