chalks, prints and drawing-paper. At school, the future colorist
sketched his masters, drew his comrades, charcoaled the dormitories,
and showed surprising assiduity in the drawing-class. Lemire, the
drawing-master, struck not only with the lad's inclination but also
with his actual progress, came to tell Madame Bridau of her son's
faculty. Agathe, like a true provincial, who knows as little of art as
she knows much of housekeeping, was terrified. When Lemire left her,
she burst into tears.

"Ah!" she cried, when Madame Descoings went to ask what was the
matter. "What is to become of me! Joseph, whom I meant to make a
government clerk, whose 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 a division before he was twenty-five,
he, my boy, he wants to be a painter,--a vagabond! I always knew that
child would give me nothing but trouble."

Madame Descoings confessed that for several months past she had
encouraged Joseph's passion, aiding and abetting his Sunday and
Thursday visits to the Institute. At the Salon, to which she had taken
him, the little fellow had shown an interest in the pictures, which
was, she declared, nothing short of miraculous.

"If he understands painting at thirteen, my dear," she said, "your
Joseph will be a man of genius."

"Yes; and see what genius did for his father,--killed him with
overwork at forty!"

At the close of autumn, just as Joseph was entering his fourteenth