He took his leaded cane, and moistened a cigar.

“I can’t accept your invitation; I am to take our mother to dine at a table d’hote.”

“Ah! how is she, the poor, dear woman?”

“She is pretty well,” answered the painter, “I have just repainted our father’s portrait, and aunt Descoings’s.  I have also painted my own, and I should like to give our mother yours, in the uniform of the dragoons of the Imperial Guard.”

“Very good.”

“You will have to come and sit.”

“I’m obliged to be in this hen-coop from nine o’clock till five.”

“Two Sundays will be enough.”

“So be it, little man,” said Napoleon’s staff officer, lighting his cigar at the porter’s lamp.

When Joseph related Philippe’s position to his mother, on their way to dinner in the rue de Beaune, he felt her arm tremble in his, and joy lighted up her worn face; the poor soul breathed like one relieved of a heavy weight.  The next day, inspired by joy and gratitude, she paid Joseph a number of little attentions; she decorated his studio with flowers, and bought him two stands of plants.  On the first Sunday when Philippe was to sit, Agathe arranged a charming breakfast in the studio.  She laid it all out on the table; not forgetting a flask of brandy, which, however, was only half full.  She herself stayed behind a screen, in which she made a little hole.  The ex-dragoon sent his uniform the night before, and she had not refrained from kissing it.  When Philippe was placed, in full dress, on one of those straw horses, all saddled, which Joseph had hired for the occasion, Agathe, fearing to betray her presence, mingled the soft sound of her tears with the conversation of the two brothers.  Philippe posed for two hours before and two hours after breakfast.  At three o’clock in the afternoon, he put on his ordinary clothes and, as he lighted a cigar, he proposed to his brother to go and dine together in the Palais-Royal, jingling gold in his pocket as he spoke.

“No,” said Joseph, “it frightens me to see gold about you.”

“Ah! you’ll always have a bad opinion of me in this house,” cried the colonel in a thundering voice.  “Can’t I save my money, too?”

“Yes, yes!” cried Agathe, coming out of her hiding-place, and kissing her son.  “Let us go and dine with him, Joseph!”

Joseph dared not scold his mother.  He went and dressed himself; and Philippe took them to the Rocher de Cancale, where he gave them a splendid dinner, the bill for which amounted to a hundred francs.

“The devil!” muttered Joseph uneasily; “with an income of eleven hundred francs you manage, like Ponchard in the ‘Dame Blance,’ to save enough to buy estates.”

“Bah, I’m on a run of luck,” answered the dragoon, who had drunk enormously.

Hearing this speech just as they were on the steps of the cafe, and before they got into the carriage to go to the theatre,—­for Philippe was to take his mother to the Cirque-Olympique (the only theatre her confessor allowed her to visit),—­Joseph pinched his mother’s arm.  She at once pretended to feel unwell, and refused to go the theatre; Philippe accordingly took them back to the rue Mazarin, where, as soon as she was alone with Joseph in her garret, Agathe fell into a gloomy silence.