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Updated: June 15, 2025
Claire's refinement of manner seemed to her to be vulgarized and annihilated by Risler's shuffling gait. "How ugly he must make me look when we are walking together!" she said to herself. And her heart beat fast as she thought what a charming, happy, admired couple they would have made, she and this Georges Fromont, whose arm was trembling beneath her own.
And if Desiree spoke with great confidence, it was because she was intimately acquainted with the woman who was so well adapted to Frantz Risler's needs. She was only a year younger than he, just enough to make her younger than her husband and a mother to him at the same time. Pretty? No, not exactly, but attractive rather than ugly, notwithstanding her infirmity, for she was lame, poor child!
Risler's first feeling upon entering the room was one of mad indignation, a longing to fall upon the things before him, to tear and rend and shatter everything. Nothing, you see, resembles a woman so much as her bedroom. Even when she is absent, her image still smiles in the mirrors that have reflected it. A little something of her, of her favorite perfume, remains in everything she has touched.
On the evening of Risler's wedding he had been married but a few months himself he had experienced anew, in that woman's presence, all the emotion of the stormy evening at Savigny. Thereafter, without self-examination, he avoided seeing her again or speaking with her.
"Do you remember, Sigismond?" he said, after a pause. The old cashier, engrossed in his memories of long ago, of Risler's first employment at the factory, replied: "I should think I do remember listen! The first time we dined together at the Palais-Royal was in February, 'forty-six, the year we put in the planches-plates at the factory." Risler shook his head. "Oh! no I mean three years ago.
To Risler's mind that phrase explained everything: his partner's constant presence, his choice of guests, and the marvellous gowns worn by Sidonie, who beautified herself in the interests of the firm. This coquetry on his mistress's part drove Fromont Jeune to despair.
"Frantz Frantz!" she said; and they remained there side by side, silent and burning with emotion, soothed by Madame Dobson's romance, which reached their ears by snatches through the shrubbery: "Ton amour, c'est ma folie. Helas! je n'en puis guei-i-i-r." Suddenly Risler's tall figure appeared in the doorway. "This way, Chebe, this way. They are in the summerhouse."
Sigismond counted the packages, weighed them with his eye as they passed, and gazed inquisitively into Risler's apartments through the open windows. The carpets that were shaken with a great noise, the jardinieres that were brought into the sunlight filled with fragile, unseasonable flowers, rare and expensive, the gorgeous hangings none of these things escaped his notice.
The cashier was sitting there, motionless, among heaps of papers and great books, which he had been turning over, some of which had fallen to the floor. At the sound of his employer's footsteps he did not even lift his eyes. He had recognized Risler's step.
When he was once convinced of the treachery of Georges and Sidonie, Risler's degradation seemed to the cashier less impossible of comprehension. On what other theory could his indifference, in the face of his partner's heavy expenditures, be explained? The excellent Sigismond, in his narrow, stereotyped honesty, could not understand the delicacy of Risler's heart.
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