“And pray, mere Bridau,” he cried, in his little cracked voice, “how long are you going to be duped by your cursed brigand of a son?  Don’t give him a farthing.  Make yourself easy, I’ll answer for Philippe.  I should like to see him brought before the Court of Peers; it might save his future.  You are afraid he will be condemned; but I say, may it please God his lawyer lets him be convicted.  Go to Issoudun, secure the property for your children.  If you don’t succeed, if your brother has made a will in favor of that woman, and you can’t make him revoke it,—­well then, at least get all the evidence you can of undue influence, and I’ll institute proceedings for you.  But you are too honest a woman to know how to get at the bottom facts of such a matter.  I’ll go myself to Issoudun in the holidays,—­if I can.”

That “go myself” made Joseph tremble in his skin.  Desroches winked at him to let his mother go downstairs first, and then the lawyer detained the young man for a single moment.

“Your brother is a great scoundrel; he is the cause of the discovery of this conspiracy,—­intentionally or not, I can’t say, for the rascal is so sly no one can find out the exact truth as to that.  Fool or traitor,—­take your choice.  He will be put under the surveillance of the police, nothing more.  You needn’t be uneasy; no one knows this secret but myself.  Go to Issoudun with your mother.  You have good sense; try to save the property.”

“Come, my poor mother, Desroches is right,” said Joseph, rejoining Agathe on the staircase.  “I have sold my two pictures, let us start for Berry; you have two weeks’ leave of absence.”

After writing to her godmother to announce their arrival, Agathe and Joseph started the next evening for their trip to Issoudun, leaving Philippe to his fate.  The diligence rolled through the rue d’Enfer toward the Orleans highroad.  When Agathe saw the Luxembourg, to which Philippe had been transferred, she could not refrain from saying,—­

“If it were not for the Allies he would never be there!”

Many sons would have made an impatient gesture and smiled with pity; but the artist, who was alone with his mother in the coupe, caught her in his arms and pressed her to his heart, exclaiming:—­

“Oh, mother! you are a mother just as Raphael was a painter.  And you will always be a fool of a mother!”

Madame Bridau’s mind, diverted before long from her griefs by the distractions of the journey, began to dwell on the purpose of it.  She re-read the letter of Madame Hochon, which had so stirred up the lawyer Desroches.  Struck with the words “concubine” and “slut,” which the pen of a septuagenarian as pious as she was respectable had used to designate the woman now in process of getting hold of Jean-Jacques Rouget’s property, struck also with the word “imbecile” applied to Rouget himself, she began to ask herself how, by her presence at Issoudun, she was to save the inheritance.  Joseph, poor disinterested artist that he was, knew little enough about the Code, and his mother’s last remark absorbed his mind.