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While the guests invited for the ball were arriving and mingling with the dinner-guests, while the orchestra was tuning up, while the cavaliers, eyeglass in position, strutted before the impatient, white-gowned damsels, the bridegroom, awed by so great a throng, had taken refuge with his friend Planus Sigismond Planus, cashier of the house of Fromont for thirty years in that little gallery decorated with flowers and hung with a paper representing shrubbery and clambering vines, which forms a sort of background of artificial verdure to Vefour's gilded salons.
A voice in the crowd exclaimed: "Poor devil!" Then another, a tremulous voice, choking with emotion, asked timidly: "Is it quite certain that he's dead?" Everybody looked at Planus and began to laugh. "Well, here's a greenhorn," said the officer. "Don't I tell you that he was all blue this morning, when we cut him down to take him to the chasseurs' barracks!"
He was so much in need of kindness! But the noise of vehicles made him a little dizzy. "My head is spinning," he said to Planus: "Lean hard on me, old fellow-don't be afraid." And honest Planus drew himself up, escorting his friend with the artless, unconventional pride of a peasant of the South bearing aloft his village saint. At last they arrived at the Palais-Royal.
Nonsense! it would make Madame What-d'ye-call-her, yonder, too happy. On the contrary, I mean to live to live with my Frantz, and for him, and for nothing else." "Bravo!" said Sigismond, "that's the way I like to hear you talk." At that moment Mademoiselle Planus came to say that the room was ready. Risler apologized for the trouble he was causing them. "You are so comfortable, so happy here.
Luckily; for the courage and determination of both partners were none too much to put the house on its feet once more. The poor house of Fromont had sprung leaks on all sides. So Pere Planus still had wretched nights, haunted by the nightmare of notes maturing and the ominous vision of the little blue man. But, by strict economy, they always succeeded in paying.
In fact, since his unaccountable falling-out with Sigismond, since the cashier had adopted that attitude of cold silence toward him, he had avoided meeting him. His wounded friendship had always led him to shun an explanation; he had a sort of pride in not asking Planus why he bore him ill-will.
In addition to all these advantages, only a hedge separated this paradise from another "chalet with garden" of precisely the same description, occupied by Sigismond Planus the cashier, and his sister. To Madame Chebe that was a most precious circumstance.
On the premises of Fromont Jeune and Risler Aine, Sigismond Planus is the god of the establishment at that season, and his little office a sanctuary where all the clerks perform their devotions. In the silence of the sleeping factory, the heavy pages of the great books rustle as they are turned, and names called aloud cause search to be made in other books. Pens scratch.
Then, suddenly, shame and disgust seized upon him and he rushed from the hall, overturning chairs and tables, pursued by the terror and imprecations of all those scandalized bourgeois. Never had Sigismond Planus returned home so late without giving his sister warning, during the twenty years and more that he had lived at Montrouge. Consequently Mademoiselle Planus was greatly worried.
Ask leave of absence at once, and come. "I know that you have your bread to earn out there, and your future to assure; but a man of honor should think more of the name his parents gave him than of anything else. And I tell you that if you do not come at once, a time will come when the name of Risler will be so overwhelmed with shame that you will not dare to bear it. SIGISMOND PLANUS, "Cashier."
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