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He had been celebrating, in company with his two faithful borrowers, Chebe and Delobelle, his first moment of leisure, the end of that almost endless period of seclusion during which he had been superintending the manufacture of his press, with all the searchings, the joys, and the disappointments of the inventor. It had been long, very long. At the last moment he had discovered a defect.
You're not the same as you used to be," Mamma Delobelle would say, surprised to see her in such high spirits and above all so active.
Desiree would have liked to be strong enough to rise and kiss that lovely, placid brow, furrowed by wrinkles which did not mar its beauty. In striking contrast to that picture, the illustrious Delobelle appeared to his daughter through the open door in one of his favorite attitudes.
They stopped at a refreshment booth, in close proximity to a very noisy and numerously attended rustic festival, for there must be an audience for Delobelle, who would saunter along, absorbed by his chimera, dressed in gray, with gray gaiters, a little hat over his ear, a light top coat on his arm, imagining that the stage represented a country scene in the suburbs of Paris, and that he was playing the part of a Parisian sojourning in the country.
Delobelle had not acted for a long time; but having, as he said, no right to abandon the stage, he kept his mania alive by clinging to a number of the strolling player's habits, and the supper on returning home was one of them, as was his habit of delaying his return until the last footlight in the boulevard theatres was extinguished.
The people in the house said, "Monsieur Delobelle is going to buy a theatre." On the boulevard, in the actors' cafes, nothing was talked of but this transaction.
A childlike shyness, and the Germanisms of speech which he never had laid aside in his life of absorbing toil, embarrassed him much in giving expression to his ideas. Moreover, his friends overawed him. They had in respect to him the tremendous superiority of the man who does nothing over the man who works; and M. Chebe, less generous than Delobelle, did not hesitate to make him feel it.
The Delobelles never receive calls. The mother, who has turned her head, thinks at first that some one has come from the shop to get the week's work. "My husband has just gone to your place, Monsieur. We have nothing here. Monsieur Delobelle has taken everything." The man comes forward without speaking, and as he approaches the window his features can be distinguished.
That idea was the dramatic renown of the illustrious Delobelle. After he had left the provincial theatres to pursue his profession in Paris, Delobelle waited for an intelligent manager, the ideal and providential manager who discovers geniuses, to seek him out and offer him a role suited to his talents.
It was a memorable evening. In Madame Chebe's bedroom, littered with pieces of cloth and pins and small toilet articles, Desiree Delobelle superintended Sidonie's toilet. The child, appearing taller because of her short skirt of red flannel with black stripes, stood before the mirror, erect and motionless, in the glittering splendor of her costume. She was charming.
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