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Updated: May 27, 2025
One could not be with M. Chebe five minutes before he would say in a confidential tone: "You know of the accident that happened to the Duc d'Orleans?" And then he would add, tapping his little bald pate "The same thing happened to me in my youth." Since that famous fall any sort of office work made him dizzy, and he had found himself inexorably confined to standing business.
She instantly aroused the sympathies of M. Chebe, for whom decayed gentlefolk had an irresistible charm, and he went away overjoyed, promising his daughter to call for her at seven o'clock at night in accordance with the terms agreed upon. The apprentice was at once ushered into the still empty workroom.
But Frantz is so far away. And then it would be such a terrible thing to do. I can't help pitying that unlucky Risler, though. No! the best way is to tell Madame Chebe. Will you undertake to do it, sister?" It was a dangerous commission.
She declared that one should make the most of the present for fear of the future, should seize happiness as it passes, as one often has no other support and consolation in life than the memory of a happy childhood. For once it happened that M. Chebe was right.
The letter was no longer there. The package lay on the table, open, revealing a photograph of Sidonie at fifteen. With her high-necked frock, her rebellious hair parted over the forehead, and the embarrassed pose of an awkward girl, the little Chebe of the old days, Mademoiselle Le Mire's apprentice, bore little resemblance to the Sidonie of to-day.
At last one day Sidonie entered that paradise of which she had heretofore caught only a glimpse. Madame Fromont, to whom Risler often spoke of her little neighbor's beauty and intelligence, asked him to bring her to the children's ball she intended to give at Christmas. At first Monsieur Chebe replied by a curt refusal.
I shall come to Paris every day with Georges. Monsieur Gardinois is very anxious to see his little Sidonie." M. Chebe shook his head. He considered it very imprudent. Business is business. A man ought to be on the spot, always on the spot, in the breach. Who could say? the factory might take fire in the night.
For, in her mind, it was not Risler alone whom her daughter took for her husband, but the whole sign of the establishment, illustrious in the commercial annals of Paris; and whenever she mentally announced that glorious event, Madame Chebe sat more erect than ever, stretching the silk of the bodice until it almost cracked.
When I call on her on Wednesdays, you should hear the tone in which she asks me, before everybody, how 'dear Madame Chebe' is. Oh! yes. I'm a Chebe and she's a Fromont. One's as good as the other, in my opinion. My grandfather was a druggist. What was hers? A peasant who got rich by money-lending.
No one knew better than he the fashionable shops and the bargains; and very often Madame Chebe, annoyed to see her husband's idiotic face at the window while she was energetically mending the family linen, would rid herself of him by giving him an errand to do. "You know that place, on the corner of such a street, where they sell such nice cakes. They would be nice for our dessert."
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