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Updated: June 10, 2025
"Don't you worry about me, my dear Delobelle. I'll sleep in that armchair. I won't be in your way, I tell you!" The actor heaved a sigh. "Ah! yes, that armchair. It was our poor Zizi's. She sat up many a night in it, when work was pressing. Ah, me! those who leave this world are much the happiest." He had always at hand such selfish, comforting maxims.
They would all set off together, the Chebes, the Rislers, and the illustrious Delobelle. Only Desiree and her mother never were of the party. The poor, crippled child, ashamed of her deformity, never would stir from her chair, and Mamma Delobelle stayed behind to keep her company.
While the financier enthusiastically pulled up the collar of his invisible shirt, while the comique exclaimed "gnouf! gnouf!" with a gesture forgotten by Parisians for ten years, Desiree thought with dismay of the enormous hole that impromptu banquet would make in the paltry earnings of the week, and Mamma Delobelle, full of business, upset the whole buffet in order to find a sufficient number of plates.
Absorbed by some evil thought, which made her smile in anticipation, she stretched out to the fire her dainty shoes, saturated with snow, and her openwork stockings. "Well, what do you propose to do now?" Delobelle asked after a pause. "Stay here till daylight and get a little rest. Then I will see." "I have no bed to offer you, my poor girl. Mamma Delobelle has gone to bed."
Sometimes, leaving the Chebes and Delobelle in the midst of the fete, Risler would go into the fields with his brother and the "little one" in search of flowers for patterns for his wall-papers. Frantz, with his long arms, would pull down the highest branches of a hawthorn, or would climb a park wall to pick a leaf of graceful shape he had spied on the other side.
He talked about "my theatre!" and his letters were addressed, "Monsieur Delobelle, Manager."
He might, perhaps, especially at the beginning, have obtained a passably good engagement at a theatre of the third order, but Delobelle did not choose to lower himself. He preferred to wait, to struggle, as he said! And this is how he awaited the struggle.
She began to talk at once, to pour out the wrath that had been stifling her for an hour, and while she was describing the scene in the factory, lowering her voice because of Madame Delobelle, who was asleep close by, the magnificence of her costume in that poor, bare, fifth floor, the dazzling whiteness of her disordered finery amid the heaps of coarse hats and the wisps of straw strewn about the room, all combined to produce the effect of a veritable drama, of one of those terrible upheavals of life when rank, feelings, fortunes are suddenly jumbled together.
He had no perception of the rivalries, the petty hatreds that met and passed one another above all those bejewelled foreheads. He did not notice Delobelle, standing with his elbow on the mantel, one hand in the armhole of his waistcoat and his hat upon his hip, weary of his eternal attitudinizing, while the hours slipped by and no one thought of utilizing his talents.
Mamma Delobelle sits by Desiree's bed, working by the light from the window, and nursing her daughter. From time to time she raises her eyes to contemplate that mute despair, that mysterious disease, then hastily resumes her work; for it is one of the hardest trials of the poor that they can not suffer at their ease.
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