"_Allons, mes filles--doucement, là-bas--et vos lits? qui les fait--les bons saints du paradis, peut-être?_" And Marianne and Lizette would slink away to the waiting beds. Nothing escaped this eye. If the _poule sultane_ was gone lame, limping in the inner quadrangle, madame's eye saw the trouble--a thorn in the left claw, before the feathered cripple had had time to reach her objective point, her mistress's capacious lap, and the healing touch of her skilful surgeon's fingers. Neither were the cockatoes nor the white parrots given license to make all the noise in the court-yard. When madame had an unusually loquacious moment, these more strictly professional conversationists were taught their place.
"_E'ben, toi_--and thou wishest to proclaim to the world what a gymnast thou art--swinging on thy perch? Quietly, quietly, there are also others who wish to praise themselves! And now, my child, you were telling me how good you had been to your old grandmother, and how she scolded you. Well, and how about obedience to our parents, _hein_--how about that?" This, as the old face bent to the maiden beside her.
There was one, assuredly, who had not failed in his duty to his parents. Monsieur Paul's whole life, as we learned later, had been a willing sacrifice to the unconscious tyranny of his mother's affection. The son was gifted with those gifts which, in a Parisian atelier, would easily have made him successful, if not famous. He had the artistic endowment in an unusual degree; it was all one to him, whether he modelled in clay, or carved in wood, or stone, or built a house, or restored old bric-a-brac. He had inherited the old world roundness of artistic ability--his was the plastic renascent touch that might have developed into that of a Giotto or a Benvenuto.
It was such a sacrifice as this that he had lain at his mother's feet.
Think you for an instant the clever, witty, canny woman in Madame Le Mois looked upon her son's renouncing the world of Paris, and holding to the glories of Dives and their famous inn in the light of a sacrifice? "_Parbleu!_" she would explode, when the subject was touched on, "it was a lucky thing for him that Paul had had an old mother to keep him from burning his fingers. Paris! What did the provinces want with Paris? Paris had need enough of them, the great, idle, shiftless, dissipated, cruel old city, that ground all their sons to powder, and then scattered their ashes abroad like so many cinders. Oh, yes, Paris couldn't get along without the provinces, to plunder and rob, to seduce their sons away from living good, pure lives, and to suck these lives as a pig would a trough of fresh water! But the provinces, if they valued their souls, shunned Paris as they would the devil. And as for artists--when it came to the young of the provinces, who thought they could paint or model--