Fool or
traitor,--take your choice. He will be put under the surveillance of
the police, nothing more. You needn't be uneasy; no one knows this
secret but myself. Go to Issoudun with your mother. You have good
sense; try to save the property."
"Come, my poor mother, Desroches is right," said Joseph, rejoining
Agathe on the staircase. "I have sold my two pictures, let us start
for Berry; you have two weeks' leave of absence."
After writing to her godmother to announce their arrival, Agathe and
Joseph started the next evening for their trip to Issoudun, leaving
Philippe to his fate. The diligence rolled through the rue d'Enfer
toward the Orleans highroad. When Agathe saw the Luxembourg, to which
Philippe had been transferred, she could not refrain from saying,--
"If it were not for the Allies he would never be there!"
Many sons would have made an impatient gesture and smiled with pity;
but the artist, who was alone with his mother in the coupe, caught her
in his arms and pressed her to his heart, exclaiming:--
"Oh, mother! you are a mother just as Raphael was a painter. And you
will always be a fool of a mother!"
Madame Bridau's mind, diverted before long from her griefs by the
distractions of the journey, began to dwell on the purpose of it. She
re-read the letter of Madame Hochon, which had so stirred up the
lawyer Desroches. Struck with the words "concubine" and "slut," which
the pen of a septuagenarian as pious as she was respectable had used
to designate the woman now in process of getting hold of Jean-Jacques
Rouget's property, struck also with the word "imbecile" applied to
Rouget himself, she began to ask herself how, by her presence at
Issoudun, she was to save the inheritance.
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