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Agathe read the list. The Descoings read nothing; she was struck down as by a thunderbolt. At the change in her face, at the cry she gave, old Desroches and Joseph carried her to her bed. Agathe went for a doctor.
Cuno is amazed that a mere peasant should have defeated one of his foresters, and that one the affianced lover of his daughter, Agathe, and who, as his son-in-law, would inherit his office, provided he could prove his fitness for it by a trial shot on the wedding day. That day had been set for the morrow.
Agathe could doubt no longer; her best-beloved son had neither delicacy nor honor. On the morrow of that frightful vision, before Philippe left the house after breakfast, she drew him into her chamber and begged him, in a tone of entreaty, to ask her for what money he needed. After that, the applications were so numerous that in two weeks Agathe was drained of all her savings.
Already the poor mother had had a dreadful vision in her first sleep: Philippe entered the room and took from the pockets of her gown all the money he could find. Agathe pretended to sleep, but she passed the rest of the night in tears. She saw the truth only too clearly. "One wrong act is not a vice," Madame Descoings had declared; but after so many repetitions, vice was unmistakable.
While he examined them anew, recognizing each masterpiece, studying the manner of each painter, and searching for the signature, his mother had gone to see and thank her brother, urged thereto by old Hochon, who, having heard of the follies the painter had committed the night before, almost despaired of the Bridau cause. "Your adversaries have the cunning of foxes," he said to Agathe.
"But he is twenty-eight years old," cried Agathe, "he is no longer a child." Terrible revelation of the inward thought of the poor woman on the conduct of her son. "Mother, I assure you he thought only of your sufferings and of the wrong he had done you," said Joseph.
The Descoings made an allowance of six hundred a year to Bixiou, whom she had acknowledged as her grandson during the last few months, also six hundred to Joseph; the rest of her income, together with that of Agathe, was spent for the household wants. All their savings were by this time eaten up. "Make yourselves easy," said the lieutenant-colonel.
"As for my boy," said Du Bruel, a former chief of a division, who had just retired on a pension, "he is only sixteen; his mother dotes on him; but I shouldn't listen to his choosing a profession at his age, a mere fancy, a notion that may pass off. In my opinion, boys should be guided and controlled." "Ah, monsieur! you are rich, you are a man, and you have but one son," said Agathe.
In returning to Issoudun after thirty years' absence, Agathe was about to find such changes in its manners and customs that it is necessary to sketch, in a few words, a picture of that town. Without it, the reader would scarcely understand the heroism displayed by Madame Hochon in assisting her goddaughter, or the strange situation of Jean-Jacques Rouget.
They talked and gave each other indications that I could not hear. As they drew themselves up on the roof, I cried: "And Aunt Agathe? And Jacques? And Rose?" They shook their heads. Large tears coursed down their cheeks. They explained to me that Jacques had struck his head against a beam and that Rose had been carried down with her husband's body, to which she clung.
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