The following Sunday Philippe came again. This time his mother was visibly present at the sitting. She served the breakfast, and put several questions to the dragoon. She then learned that the nephew of old Madame Hochon, the friend of her mother, played a considerable part in literature. Philippe and his friend Giroudeau lived among a circle of journalists, actresses, and booksellers, where they were regarded in the light of cashiers. Philippe, who had been drinking kirsch before posing, was loquacious. He boasted that he was about to become a great man. But when Joseph asked a question as to his pecuniary resources he was dumb. It so happened that there was no newspaper on the following day, it being a fete, and to finish the picture Philippe proposed to sit again on the morrow. Joseph told him that the Salon was close at hand, and as he did not have the money to buy two frames for the pictures he wished to exhibit, he was forced to procure it by finishing a copy of a Rubens which had been ordered by Elie Magus, the picture-dealer. The original belonged to a wealthy Swiss banker, who had only lent it for ten days, and the next day was the last; the sitting must therefore be put off till the following Sunday.
"Is that it?" asked Philippe, pointing to a picture by Rubens on an easel.
"Yes," replied Joseph; "it is worth twenty thousand francs. That's what genius can do. It will take me all to-morrow to get the tones of the original and make the copy look so old it can't be distinguished from it."
"Adieu, mother," said Philippe, kissing Agathe. "Next Sunday, then."
The next day Elie Magus was to come for his copy. Joseph's friend, Pierre Grassou, who was working for the same dealer, wanted to see it when finished. To play him a trick, Joseph, when he heard his knock, put the copy, which was varnished with a special glaze of his own, in place of the original, and put the original on his easel. Pierre Grassou was completely taken in; and then amazed and delighted at Joseph's success.
"Do you think it will deceive old Magus?" he said to Joseph.
"We shall see," answered the latter.
The dealer did not come as he had promised. It was getting late;
Agathe dined that day with Madame Desroches, who had lately lost her husband, and Joseph proposed to Pierre Grassou to dine at his table d'hote. As he went out he left the key of his studio with the concierge.
An hour later Philippe appeared and said to the concierge,--
"I am to sit this evening; Joseph will be in soon, and I will wait for him in the studio."
The woman gave him the key; Philippe went upstairs, took the copy, thinking it was the original, and went down again; returned the key to the concierge with the excuse that he had forgotten something, and hurried off to sell his Rubens for three thousand francs. He had taken the precaution to convey a message from his brother to Elie Magus, asking him not to call till the following day.
That evening when Joseph returned, bringing his mother from Madame Desroches's, the concierge told him of Philippe's freak,--how he had called intending to wait, and gone away again immediately.
"I am ruined--unless he has had the delicacy to take the copy," cried the painter, instantly suspecting the theft. He ran rapidly up the three flights and rushed into his studio. "God be praised!" he ejaculated. "He is, what he always has been, a vile scoundrel."
Agathe, who had followed Joseph, did not understand what he was saying; but when her son explained what had happened, she stood still, with the tears in her eyes.
"Have I but one son?" she said in a broken voice.
"We have never yet degraded him to the eyes of strangers," said Joseph; "but we must now warn the concierge. In future we shall have to keep the keys ourselves. I'll finish his blackguard face from memory; there's not much to do to it."
"Leave it as it is; it will pain me too much ever to look at it," answered the mother, heart-stricken and stupefied at such wickedness.
Philippe had been told how the money for this copy was to be expended; moreover he knew the abyss into which he would plunge his brother through the loss of the Rubens; but nothing restrained him. After this last crime Agathe never mentioned him; her face acquired an expression of cold and concentrated and bitter despair; one thought took possession of her mind.
"Some day," she said to herself, "we shall hear of a Bridau in the police courts."
Two months later, as Agathe was about to start for her office, an old officer, who announced himself as a friend of Philippe on urgent business, called on Madame Bridau, who happened to be in Joseph's studio.
When Giroudeau gave his name, mother and son trembled, and none the less because the ex-dragoon had the face of a tough old sailor of the worst type. His fishy gray eyes, his piebald moustache, the remains of his shaggy hair fringing a skull that was the color of fresh butter, all gave an indescribably debauched and libidinous expression to his appearance. He wore an old iron-gray overcoat decorated with the red ribbon of an officer of the Legion of honor, which met with difficulty over a gastronomic stomach in keeping with a mouth that stretched from ear to ear, and a pair of powerful shoulders. The torso was supported by a spindling pair of legs, while the rubicund tints on the cheek- bones bore testimony to a rollicking life. The lower part of the cheeks, which were deeply wrinkled, overhung a coat-collar of velvet the worse for wear. Among other adornments, the ex-dragoon wore enormous gold rings in his ears.
"What a 'noceur'!" thought Joseph, using a popular expression, meaning a "loose fish," which had lately passed into the ateliers.