Forced to let his terrible mistress go to London without him, Philippe
went into winter quarters, as he called it,--that is, he returned to
his attic room in his mother's _appartement_. He made some gloomy
reflections as he went to bed that night, and when he got up again. He
was conscious within himself of the inability to live otherwise than
as he had been living the last year. The luxury that surrounded
Mariette, the dinners, the suppers, the evenings in the side-scenes,
the animation of wits and journalists, the sort of racket that went on
around him, the delights that tickled both his senses and his vanity,
--such a life, found only in Paris, and offering daily the charm of
some new thing, was now more than habit,--it had become to Philippe as
much a necessity as his tobacco or his brandy. He saw plainly that he
could not live without these continual enjoyments. The idea of suicide
came into his head; not on account of the deficit which must soon be
discovered in his accounts, but because he could no longer live with
Mariette in the atmosphere of pleasure in which he had disported
himself for over a year. Full of these gloomy thoughts, he entered for
the first time his brother's painting-room, where he found the painter
in a blue blouse, copying a picture for a dealer.
"So that's how pictures are made," said Philippe, by way of opening
the conversation.
"No," said Joseph, "that is how they are copied.
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