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She entered one of the carriages standing at the gate and ordered the driver to take her to the actor's lodgings on the Boulevard Beaumarchais. For some time past Mamma Delobelle had been making straw hats for export-a dismal trade if ever there was one, which brought in barely two francs fifty for twelve hours' work.
In the morning in his bedroom, often in his bed, he rehearsed roles in his former repertory; and the Delobelle ladies trembled with emotion when they heard behind the partition tirades from 'Antony' or the 'Medecin des Enfants', declaimed in a sonorous voice that blended with the thousand- and-one noises of the great Parisian bee-hive.
M. Chebe went very far: "Let him beware! he has been foolish enough to send the father and mother away from their daughter; if anything happens to her, he can't blame us. A girl who hasn't her parents' example before her eyes, you understand " "Certainly certainly," said Delobelle; "especially as Sidonie has become a great flirt. However, what can you expect? He will get no more than he deserves.
Why, even when performing such a commission as that, this devil of a fellow had such nobility of bearing, such native dignity, that the young woman whose duty it was to make up the Delobelle account was sorely embarrassed to hand to such an irreproachable gentleman the paltry stipend so laboriously earned. On those evenings, by the way, the actor did not return home to dinner.
"Well! no," said Risler, inspired by heroic courage, which he owed principally to the proximity of the factory and to the thought that the welfare of his family was at stake. Delobelle was astounded. He had believed that the business was as good as done, and he stared at his companion, intensely agitated, his eyes as big as saucers, and rolling his papers in his hand.
"Very well," the sick girl would reply, with a faint, heartbroken smile, which illumined her sorrowful face and showed all the ravages that had been wrought upon it, as a sunbeam, stealing into a poor man's lodging, instead of brightening it, brings out more clearly its cheerlessness and nudity. The illustrious Delobelle was never there.
The river was a long distance away. She would be very tired. However, there was no other way than that. "I am going to bed, my child; are you going to sit up any longer?" With her eyes on her work, "my child" replied that she was. She wished to finish her dozen. "Good-night, then," said Mamma Delobelle, her enfeebled sight being unable to endure the light longer.
"Nobody could make me follow such a business!" he would say, expanding his chest, and he would add, looking at Risler with the air of a physician making a professional call, "Just wait till you've had one severe attack." Delobelle was not so fierce, but he adopted a still loftier tone. The cedar does not see a rose at its foot. Delobelle did not see Risler at his feet.
Meanwhile the sun, shining in at the open window, made the feathers of the hummingbirds glisten. The springtime, youth, the songs of the birds, the fragrance of the flowers, transfigured that dismal fifth-floor workroom, and Desiree said in all seriousness to Mamma Delobelle, putting her nose to her friend's bouquet: "Have you noticed how sweet the flowers smell this year, mamma?"
Each divined for whom the other was waiting, and they did not try to deceive each other. "Isn't my son-in-law here?" asked M. Chebe, eying the documents spread over the table, and emphasizing the words "my son-in-law," to indicate that Risler belonged to him and to nobody else. "I am waiting for him," Delobelle replied, gathering up his papers.
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