“Your mother has aged ten years in two months,” whispered the Descoings to Joseph, as they all embraced, and the two trunks were being handed down.

“How do you do, mere Descoings?” was the cool greeting the colonel bestowed on the old woman whom Joseph was in the habit of calling “maman Descoings.”

“I have no money to pay for a hackney-coach,” said Agathe, in a sad voice.

“I have,” replied the young painter.  “What a splendid color Philippe has turned!” he cried, looking at his brother.

“Yes, I’ve browned like a pipe,” said Philippe.  “But as for you, you’re not a bit changed, little man.”

Joseph, who was now twenty-one, and much thought of by the friends who had stood by him in his days of trial, felt his own strength and was aware of his talent; he represented the art of painting in a circle of young men whose lives were devoted to science, letters, politics, and philosophy.  Consequently, he was wounded by his brother’s contempt, which Philippe still further emphasized with a gesture, pulling his ears as if he were still a child.  Agathe noticed the coolness which succeeded the first glow of tenderness on the part of Joseph and Madame Descoings; but she hastened to tell them of Philippe’s sufferings in exile, and so lessened it.  Madame Descoings, wishing to make a festival of the return of the prodigal, as she called him under her breath, had prepared one of her good dinners, to which old Claparon and the elder Desroches were invited.  All the family friends were to come, and did come, in the evening.  Joseph had invited Leon Giraud, d’Arthez, Michel Chrestien, Fulgence Ridal, and Horace Bianchon, his friends of the fraternity.  Madame Descoings had promised Bixiou, her so-called step-son, that the young people should play at ecarte.  Desroches the younger, who had now taken, under his father’s stern rule, his degree at law, was also of the party.  Du Bruel, Claparon, Desroches, and the Abbe Loraux carefully observed the returned exile, whose manners and coarse features, and voice roughened by the abuse of liquors, together with his vulgar glance and phraseology, alarmed them not a little.  While Joseph was placing the card-tables, the more intimate of the family friends surrounded Agathe and asked,—­

“What do you intend to make of Philippe?”

“I don’t know,” she answered, “but he is determined not to serve the Bourbons.”

“Then it will be very difficult for you to find him a place in France.  If he won’t re-enter the army, he can’t be readily got into government employ,” said old Du Bruel.  “And you have only to listen to him to see he could never, like my son, make his fortune by writing plays.”

The motion of Agathe’s eyes, with which alone she replied to this speech, showed how anxious Philippe’s future made her; they all kept silence.  The exile himself, Bixiou, and the younger Desroches were playing at ecarte, a game which was then the rage.