“Whew!” cried Philippe, winking. “So you come from them, do you? I’m an old camel, who knows all about genuflections. My mother makes the excuse of her last illness to get something out of me for Joseph. No, thank you!” When Bixiou related this scene to Joseph, the poor painter was chilled to the very soul. “Does Philippe know I am ill?” asked Agathe in a piteous tone, the day after Bixiou had rendered an account of his fruitless errand. Joseph left the room, suffocating with emotion. The Abbe Loraux, who was sitting by the bedside of his penitent, took her hand and pressed it, and then he answered, “Alas! my child, you have never had but one son.” The words, which Agathe understood but too well, conveyed a shock which was the beginning of the end. She died twenty hours later. In the delirium which preceded death, the words, “Whom does Philippe take after?” escaped her. Joseph followed his mother to the grave alone. Philippe had gone, on business it was said, to Orleans; in reality, he was driven from Paris by the following letter, which Joseph wrote to him a moment after their mother had breathed her last sigh:-- Monster! my poor mother has died of the shock your letter caused her. Wear mourning, but pretend illness; I will not suffer her assassin to stand at my side before her coffin. Joseph B. The painter, who no longer had the heart to paint, though his bitter grief sorely needed the mechanical distraction which labor is wont to give, was surrounded by friends who agreed with one another never to leave him entirely alone. Thus it happened that Bixiou, who loved Joseph as much as a satirist can love any one, was sitting in the atelier with a group of other friends about two weeks after Agathe’s funeral. The servant entered with a letter, brought by an old woman, she said, who was waiting below for the answer. Monsieur,--To you, whom I scarcely dare to call my brother, I am forced to address myself, if only on account of the name I bear.-- Joseph turned the page and read the signature. The name “Comtesse Flore de Brambourg” made him shudder. He foresaw some new atrocity on the part of his brother. “That brigand,” he cried, “is the devil’s own. And he calls himself a man of honor! And he wears a lot of crosses on his breast! And he struts about at court instead of being bastinadoed! And the scoundrel is called Monsieur le Comte!” “There are many like him,” said Bixiou. “After all,” said Joseph, “the Rabouilleuse deserves her fate, whatever it is. She is not worth pitying; she’d have had my neck wrung like a chicken’s without so much as saying, ‘He’s innocent.’” Joseph flung away the letter, but Bixiou caught it in the air, and read it aloud, as follows:--