She held out to him a hundred francs in gold, wrapped up in paper.  Philippe came up the stairs he had just descended, and took the money.

“Well; won’t you kiss me?” she said, bursting into tears.

He pressed his mother in his arms, but without the warmth of feeling which was all that could give value to the embrace.

“Where shall you go?” asked Agathe.

“To Florentine, Girodeau’s mistress.  Ah! they are real friends!” he answered brutally.

He went away.  Agathe turned back with trembling limbs, and failing eyes, and aching heart.  She fell upon her knees, prayed God to take her unnatural child into His own keeping, and abdicated her woeful motherhood.

CHAPTER VI

By February, 1822, Madame Bridau had settled into the attic room recently occupied by Philippe, which was over the kitchen of her former appartement.  The painter’s studio and bedroom was opposite, on the other side of the staircase.  When Joseph saw his mother thus reduced, he was determined to make her as comfortable as possible.  After his brother’s departure he assisted in the re-arrangement of the garret room, to which he gave an artist’s touch.  He added a rug; the bed, simple in character but exquisite in taste, had something monastic about it; the walls, hung with a cheap glazed cotton selected with taste, of a color which harmonized with the furniture and was newly covered, gave the room an air of elegance and nicety.  In the hallway he added a double door, with a “portiere” to the inner one.  The window was shaded by a blind which gave soft tones to the light.  If the poor mother’s life was reduced to the plainest circumstances that the life of any woman could have in Paris, Agathe was at least better off than all others in a like case, thanks to her son.

To save his mother from the cruel cares of such reduced housekeeping, Joseph took her every day to dine at a table-d’hote in the rue de Beaune, frequented by well-bred women, deputies, and titled people, where each person’s dinner cost ninety francs a month.  Having nothing but the breakfast to provide, Agathe took up for her son the old habits she had formerly had with the father.  But in spite of Joseph’s pious lies, she discovered the fact that her dinner was costing him nearly a hundred francs a month.  Alarmed at such enormous expense, and not imaging that her son could earn much money by painting naked women, she obtained, thanks to her confessor, the Abbe Loraux, a place worth seven hundred francs a year in a lottery-office belonging to the Comtesse de Bauvan, the widow of a Chouan leader.  The lottery-offices of the government, the lot, as one might say, of privileged widows, ordinarily sufficed for the support of the family of each person who managed them.  But after the Restoration the difficulty of rewarding, within the limits of constitutional government, all the services