close observer.  These persons are the equestrian order of poverty; they continue to drive about in cabriolets.  In the second order we find old men who have become indifferent to everything, and, in June, put the cross of the Legion of honor on alpaca overcoats; that is the poverty of small incomes, —­of old clerks, who live at Sainte-Perine and care no longer about their outward man.  Then comes, in the third place, poverty in rags, the poverty of the people, the poverty that is poetic; which Callot, Hogarth, Murillo, Charlet, Raffet, Gavarni, Meissonier, Art itself adores and cultivates, especially during the carnival.  The man in whom poor Agathe thought she recognized her son was astride the last two classes of poverty.  She saw the ragged neck-cloth, the scurfy hat, the broken and patched boots, the threadbare coat, whose buttons had shed their mould, leaving the empty shrivelled pod dangling in congruity with the torn pockets and the dirty collar.  Scraps of flue were in the creases of the coat, which showed plainly the dust that filled it.  The man drew from the pockets of his seam-rent iron-gray trousers a pair of hands as black as those of a mechanic.  A knitted woollen waistcoat, discolored by use, showed below the sleeves of his coat, and above the trousers, and no doubt served instead of a shirt.  Philippe wore a green silk shade with a wire edge over his eyes; his head, which was nearly bald, the tints of his skin, and his sunken face too plainly revealed that he was just leaving the terrible Hopital du Midi.  His blue overcoat, whitened at the seams, was still decorated with the ribbon of his cross; and the passers-by looked at the hero, doubtless some victim of the government, with curiosity and commiseration; the rosette attracted notice, and the fiercest “ultra” was jealous for the honor of the Legion.  In those days, however much the government endeavored to bring the Order into disrepute by bestowing its cross right and left, there were not fifty-three thousand persons decorated.

Agathe trembled through her whole being.  If it were impossible to love this son any longer, she could still suffer for him.  Quivering with this last expression of motherhood, she wept as she saw the brilliant staff officer of the Emperor turn to enter tobacconist’s and pause on the threshold; he had felt in his pocket and found nothing.  Agathe left the bridge, crossed the quai rapidly, took out her purse, thrust it into Philippe’s hand, and fled away as if she had committed a crime.  After that, she ate nothing for two days; before her was the horrible vision of her son dying of hunger in the streets of Paris.

“When he has spent all the money in my purse, who will give him any?” she thought.  “Giroudeau did not deceive us; Philippe is just out of that hospital.”