The Two Brothers

te. The high gray walls of the college and of the library which Cardinal Mazarin presented to the city of Paris, and which the French Academy was in after days to inhabit, cast chill shadows

without extraordinary uproar and disturbance at the time of year when the examinations are going on, and the competitors are shut up in their cells. To win a prize, they were obliged, within a given time, to make, if a sculptor, a clay model; if a painter, a picture such as may be seen at th

tivated those aerial gardens that police regulations forbid, though their vegetable products purify the atmosphere. The house, which backed up against another fronting on the rue de Seine, was necessarily shallow, and the staircase wound round upon itself. The third floor was the last. Three windows to three rooms, namely, a dining-room, a small salon, and a chamber on one side of the landi

s with the Egyptian heads that Jacob Desmalter manufactured by the gross in 1806, covering them with a silken green stuff bearing a design of white geometric circles. Above this piece of furniture hung a portrait of Bridau, done in pastel by the hand of an amateur, which at once attracted the eye. Though art might have something to say against it, no one could fail to recognize the firmness of the noble and obscure citizen upon that brow. The serenity of the eyes, gentle, yet proud, was well given; the sagacious mind, to which the

saucers. Garments lay everywhere. The room breathed of the provinces and of constancy. Everything that once belonged to Bridau was scrupulously preserved. Even the implements in his desk received the care which the widow of a paladin might have bestowed upon her husband's armor. One slight detail here will serve to bring the tender devotion of this woman before the reader's mind. She had wrapped up a pen and sealed the package, on which she wrote these words, "Last pen used by my dear husband." The cup from which he drank his last draught was on the fireplace; caps and false hair were tossed, at a later period, over the glass globes which covered these precious relics. Aft

her removal to the rue Mazarin a shade of melancholy came upon her face, which made it very touching. She hoped a little in the Emperor; but the Emperor at

ared the dinner. In the evenings a few old friends, persons employed at the ministry who owed their places to Bridau, came for a game of cards with the two widows. Madame Descoings still cherished her trey, which she declared was obstinate about turning up. She expected, by one grand stroke, to repay the enforced loan she had made upon her niece. She was fonder of the little Bridaus than she was of her grandson Bixiou,-partly from a sense of the wrong she had done them, partly because she felt the kindness of her niece, who, under her worst deprivations, never uttered a word of r

em; he might die in battle; her pension, at any rate, ceased with her life. She shuddered at the risk her children ran of being left alone in the world without means. Quite incapable of understanding Roguin when he explained to her that in seven years Madame Descoings's assignment would replace the money she had sold out of the Funds, she persisted in trusting neither the notary nor her aunt, nor even the government; she belie

may be, only the more widespread. The view from the windows into the student dens; the tumult of the rapins below; the necessity of looking up at the sky to escape the miserable sights of the damp angle of the street; the presence of that portrait, full of soul and grandeur despite the workmanship of an amateur painter; the sight of the rich colors, now old

hist every night with the two widows, used to say of Philippe two or three times a month, giving him a tap on the cheek, "Here's a young rascal who'll stand to his guns!" The boy, thus stimulated, naturally and out of bravado, assumed a resolute manner. That turn once given to his character, he became very adr

efs. Joseph, three years younger, was like his father, but only on the defective side. In the first place, his thick black hair was always in disorder, no matter what pains were taken with it; while Philippe's, notwithstanding his vivacity, was invariably neat. Then, by some mysterious fatality, Joseph could not keep his clothes clean; dress him in new clothes, and he immediately made them look like old ones. The eld

at his father grew uneasy about him. The remarkable size of the head and the width of the brow roused a fear that the child might be liable to water on the brain. His distressful face, whose originality was thought ugliness by those who had no eye for the moral value of a countenance, wore rather a sullen expression during his childhood. The features, which developed later in life, were pinched, and

admiration at the charcoal sketch, which was full of satire. The next day the child stood at the window watching the pupils as they entered the building by the door on the rue Mazarin; then he ran downstairs and slipped furtively into the long courtyard of the Institute, full of statues, busts, half-finished

see him, taking the crumbs of his b

child

ss, how

at him for a time, the pupils were struck with his persistency and with the expression of his face. They asked him what he wanted. Joseph answere

om, "you will certainly be a great man. Long live the son of Madame Bridau

ve to bear all sorts of trials,-yes, trials,-enough to break your legs and arms and soul and body. All the fellows you see here hav

ht up in the air; then he placed the other arm as if Jo

n stand like that, without lowering or changing the position of your arms

cried all the rest. "You must su

en years, stood motionless for five minut

are moving

, confound you!

u see him there," said a third, pointing to the

with the Imperial sceptre in his hand, was torn d

ad. At that moment a bald-headed little man, pale and sickly in appea

hins?" he exclaimed, as he l

, who is posing," said the ta

udet, lowering Joseph's arms. "How long have you been standing ther

ter of

ought yo

to be an

elong? where do

amma's

!" cried t

ls!" cried Chaudet.

a friend of the Emperor; and if you will teach me

of the Interior," exclaimed Chaudet, struck by a reco

mons

mps, that his father did me a service. Here, Corde-a-puits, go and get some cakes and sugar-plums," he said to the pupil who had tortured Joseph, givi

tion of the sculptor,-for whom the Emperor's protection opened a way to future glory, closed soon after by his premature death,-was like a vision to little Joseph. The child said nothing to his mother about this adventure, but he spent two hours every Sunday and every Thursday in Chaudet's atelier. From that time forth, Madame Descoings, who humored the fancies of the two cherubim, kept Joseph supplied with pencils and red chalks, prints and drawing-paper.

hose career was all marked out for him at the ministry of the interior, where, protected by his father's memory, he might have risen to be chief of

abetting his Sunday and Thursday visits to the Institute. At the Salon, to which she had taken him, the

irteen, my dear," she said, "your

id for his father,-killed h

ved him at a critical moment, rather roughly; but, already at death's door, he was struggling with passionate ardor to do in a few hours work he could hardly have accomplished in several months. As Madame Bridau entered, he had just found an effect long sought for, and was handling his tools and clay with spasmodic je

are only disclosed at his age in such beings as the Giottos, Raphaels, Titians, Rubens, Murillos,-for, in my opinion, he will make a better painter than sculptor. God of heaven! if I had such a son, I should be as happy as the Emperor is to have given himself the King of Rome. Well, you are mistress of your child's fate. Go your own way, madame; make him a fool, a miserable quill-driver, tie him to a des

where her glance had not before penetrated, a nude woman si

dau here any more," said Chaudet to

cried, as Agath

he Institute which his mother exacted from him, the child often slipped into Regnauld the painter's studio, where he was encouraged to daub canvas. When the widow complained that the bargain was not kept, Chaudet's pupil

play at cards, and sat on her sofa plunged in suc

r, Madame Bridau?"

," said Madame Descoings; "but, for my part, I am not the least uneasy about the futur

t would become of me. I have just placed my boy as under-clerk to a lawyer; he gets twenty-five francs a month and his breakfast. I give him as much more, and he dines and sleeps at home. That's all he gets; he must manage for himself, but he'll make his way. I keep the fellow harder at work than if he were at school, and some day

is only sixteen; his mother dotes on him; but I shouldn't listen to his choosing a profession at hi

, you are a man, and you ha

e happier for it, and so am I. That fellow was partly the cause of his mother's death. He chose to be a commercial traveller; and the trade just suited him, for he was no sooner in the house than he wanted to be out

fathers!" thought A

ridau, is that you had better let your boy be a

s, "I should advise you to oppose his tastes; but weak a

said Madame Descoings, "Jose

united in giving her one and the same advice; which advice did not in the l

uel, who always tried to please Agathe, "you

rks to the door she assured them, at the head

glad her son is willing to

serves the Emperor, Joseph will always

red Madame Descoings. "Well, my good girl," she said, returning t

nxiety. But you don't know what goes on

good fires," sai

o was tired of school, wanted to serve under the Emperor; he saw a review at the Tuileries,-the last Napoleon ever held,-and he became infatuated with the idea of a soldier's life. In those days military splendor, the show of uniforms, the authority of ep

f your Bridau; eight

ve good legs, a good

diers. I ask you to l

t

knew how to ride a horse he was dispatched to the front, and went eagerly. During the campaign in France he was made a lieutenant, after an affair at the outposts where his bravery had saved his colonel's life. The Emperor named him captain at the battle of La Fere-Champ

let him go to Monsieur Regnauld, promising to earn his own living. He declared he was quite sufficiently advanced in the second class to get on without rhetoric. Philippe, a captain at nineteen and decorated, who had, moreover, served the Emperor as an aide-de-camp in two battles, flattered the mother's vanity immense

h Schinner. The return from Elba came; Captain Bridau joined the Emperor at Lyons, accompanied him to the Tuileries, and was appointed to the command of a squadron in the dragoons of the Guard. After the battle of Waterloo-in which he was slightly wounded, and where he won t

gh this period with an ardor which several times ma

id to Madame Descoings. "He ought to give

rooms for him, and spent her savings in doing so. Philippe was one of the faithful Bonapartes of the cafe Lemblin, that constitutional Boeotia; he acquired the habits, manners, style, and life of a half-pay officer; indeed, like any other young man of twenty-one, he exaggerated them, vowed in goo

f could have done

versity, which, voluntary though it were, seemed to her a glorious adversity, drew forth all Agathe's tenderness. The one sentence, "He is unfortunate," explained and justified everything. Joseph himself,-with the innate simplicity which superabounds in the artist-soul in its opening years, and who was, moreover, brought up to admire his big brother,-so far fr

oseph,-expressing it, however, in a friendly way. When he looked at his brother, weak and sickly as he was at seventeen years of age, shrunken with determined toil, and over-weighted with his powerful head, he nicknamed him "Cub." Philippe's patronizing manners would have wounded any one less carelessly indiffer

his mother, "we mustn't plagu

olonel's contempt was a ma

e and protect his brother