This fine picture, which was destined to make a great noise and bring the artist much hatred, jealousy, and admiration, was just sketched out; but, compelled as he was to work for a living, he laid it aside to make copies of the old masters for the dealers; thus he penetrated the secrets of their processes, and his brush is therefore one of the best trained of the modern school.  The shrewd sense of an artist led him to conceal the profits he was beginning to lay by from his mother and Madame Descoings, aware that each had her road to ruin,—­the one in Philippe, the other in the lottery.  This astuteness is seldom wanting among painters; busy for days together in the solitude of their studios, engaged in work which, up to a certain point, leaves the mind free, they are in some respects like women,—­their thoughts turn about the little events of life, and they contrive to get at their hidden meaning.

Joseph had bought one of those magnificent chests or coffers of a past age, then ignored by fashion, with which he decorated a corner of his studio, where the light danced upon the bas-reliefs and gave full lustre to a masterpiece of the sixteenth century artisans.  He saw the necessity for a hiding-place, and in this coffer he had begun to accumulate a little store of money.  With an artist’s carelessness, he was in the habit of putting the sum he allowed for his monthly expenses in a skull, which stood on one of the compartments of the coffer.  Since his brother had returned to live at home, he found a constant discrepancy between the amount he spent and the sum in this receptacle.  The hundred francs a month disappeared with incredible celerity.  Finding nothing one day, when he had only spent forty or fifty francs, he remarked for the first time:  “My money must have got wings.”  The next month he paid more attention to his accounts; but add as he might, like Robert Macaire, sixteen and five are twenty-three, he could make nothing of them.  When, for the third time, he found a still more important discrepancy, he communicated the painful fact to Madame Descoings, who loved him, he knew, with that maternal, tender, confiding, credulous, enthusiastic love that he had never had from his own mother, good as she was,—­a love as necessary to the early life of an artist as the care of the hen is to her unfledged chickens.  To her alone could he confide his horrible suspicions.  He was as sure of his friends as he was of himself; and the Descoings, he knew, would take nothing to put in her lottery.  At the idea which then suggested itself the poor woman wrung her hands.  Philippe alone could have committed this domestic theft.

“Why didn’t he ask me, if he wanted it?” cried Joseph, taking a dab of color on his palette and stirring it into the other colors without seeing what he did.  “Is it likely I should refuse him?”

“It is robbing a child!” cried the Descoings, her face expressing the deepest disgust.

“No,” replied Joseph, “he is my brother; my purse is his:  but he ought to have asked me.”