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Updated: June 11, 2025
All these dreams of little Chebe, Sidonie Risler had realized. The brothers went to the gate opening on the quay, in which the key was usually left. They entered, making their way among trees and shrubs of recent growth.
Sidonie, as she passed, could hear the shouts of the workmen, the dull, heavy blows of the bars of the printing-press, the mighty, rhythmical hum of the machinery; and all those sounds of toil, blended in her memory with recollections of fetes and blue-lined carriages, haunted her persistently.
Claire's eyes opened wide in amazement and horror, for she felt that a terrible drama had entered her life at that moment through the little low door of denunciation. The old man continued with a sneer: "That little Sidonie has fine, sharp teeth." "Sidonie!" "Faith, yes, to be sure. I have told you the name. At all events, you'd have found it out some day or other.
A bullet intended for a deer had pierced his temple. The chateau was turned upside-down. All the hunters, among them the unknown bungler that had fired the fatal shot, started in haste for Paris. Claire, frantic with grief, entered the room where her father lay on his deathbed, there to remain; and Risler, being advised of the catastrophe, came to take Sidonie home.
He was worn out with the effort he had made: he lay still and said nothing: but his brain went on working, painfully gathering together its scattered memories. Where had he seen her?... At last he remembered: yes, he had met her on the attic landing: she was a servant, and her name was Sidonie. He watched her with half-closed eyes, so that she could not see him.
Sidonie, for her part, seemed to have forgotten everything, and to have retained no other feeling but contempt for that weak, cowardly creature. Moreover, she had many other things to think about. Her husband had just had a piano placed in her red salon, between the windows.
But her ambition confined itself to a superficial aspect of things. "Claire Fromont plays the piano; I will sing. She is considered a refined and distinguished woman, and I intend that people shall say the same of me." Without a thought of improving her education, Sidonie passed her life running about among milliners and dressmakers. "What are people going to wear this winter?" was her cry.
He believed that he accomplished that object by devoting himself exclusively to Sidonie, and arranging even more entertainments for her than on her former visit. The carriages that had been shut up in the carriage-house for two years, and were dusted once a week because the spiders spun their webs on the silk cushions, were placed at her disposal.
The young women took their work, Georges tried to read a newspaper, while Madame Fromont polished her rings and M. Gardinois and his son-in-law played billiards in the adjoining room. How long that evening seemed to Sidonie! She had but one wish, to be alone-alone with her thoughts.
Madame Dobson sat for a moment with Frantz and Sidonie under a little arbor which a climbing vine studded with pink buds; then, realizing that she was in the way, she returned to the salon, and as before, while Georges was there, began to play and sing softly and with expression.
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