That evening when Joseph returned, bringing his mother from Madame Desroches’s, the concierge told him of Philippe’s freak,—­how he had called intending to wait, and gone away again immediately.

“I am ruined—­unless he has had the delicacy to take the copy,” cried the painter, instantly suspecting the theft.  He ran rapidly up the three flights and rushed into his studio.  “God be praised!” he ejaculated.  “He is, what he always has been, a vile scoundrel.”

Agathe, who had followed Joseph, did not understand what he was saying; but when her son explained what had happened, she stood still, with the tears in her eyes.

“Have I but one son?” she said in a broken voice.

“We have never yet degraded him to the eyes of strangers,” said Joseph; “but we must now warn the concierge.  In future we shall have to keep the keys ourselves.  I’ll finish his blackguard face from memory; there’s not much to do to it.”

“Leave it as it is; it will pain me too much ever to look at it,” answered the mother, heart-stricken and stupefied at such wickedness.

Philippe had been told how the money for this copy was to be expended; moreover he knew the abyss into which he would plunge his brother through the loss of the Rubens; but nothing restrained him.  After this last crime Agathe never mentioned him; her face acquired an expression of cold and concentrated and bitter despair; one thought took possession of her mind.

“Some day,” she said to herself, “we shall hear of a Bridau in the police courts.”

Two months later, as Agathe was about to start for her office, an old officer, who announced himself as a friend of Philippe on urgent business, called on Madame Bridau, who happened to be in Joseph’s studio.

When Giroudeau gave his name, mother and son trembled, and none the less because the ex-dragoon had the face of a tough old sailor of the worst type.  His fishy gray eyes, his piebald moustache, the remains of his shaggy hair fringing a skull that was the color of fresh butter, all gave an indescribably debauched and libidinous expression to his appearance.  He wore an old iron-gray overcoat decorated with the red ribbon of an officer of the Legion of honor, which met with difficulty over a gastronomic stomach in keeping with a mouth that stretched from ear to ear, and a pair of powerful shoulders.  The torso was supported by a spindling pair of legs, while the rubicund tints on the cheek-bones bore testimony to a rollicking life.  The lower part of the cheeks, which were deeply wrinkled, overhung a coat-collar of velvet the worse for wear.  Among other adornments, the ex-dragoon wore enormous gold rings in his ears.

“What a ’noceur’!” thought Joseph, using a popular expression, meaning a “loose fish,” which had lately passed into the ateliers.