Philippe, her favorite child, was he not the great man of the family at last?
in his early errors she saw only the ebullitions of youth.

Joseph, to the merit of whose productions she was insensible, for she saw them too long in process of gestation to admire them when finished, seemed to her no more advanced in 1828 than he was in 1816.
Poor Joseph owed money, and was bowed down by the burden of debt; he had chosen, she felt, a worthless career that made him no return.

She could not conceive why they had given him the cross of the Legion of honor.
Philippe, on the other hand, rich enough to cease gambling, a guest at the fetes of _Madame_, the brilliant colonel who at all reviews and in all processions appeared before her eyes in splendid uniforms, with his two crosses on his breast, realized all her maternal dreams.

One such day of public ceremony effaced from Agathe's mind the horrible sight of Philippe's misery on the Quai de l'Ecole; on that day he passed his mother at the self-same spot, in attendance on the Dauphin, with plumes in his shako, and his pelisse gorgeous with gold and fur.

Agathe, who to her artist son was now a sort of devoted gray sister, felt herself the mother of none but the dashing aide-de-camp to his Royal Highness, the Dauphin of France.