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Updated: May 22, 2025
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.
"Kiss her," she said softly; and as they stood there side by side, their heads leaning over the child, Georges was afraid of waking her, and he embraced the mother passionately. "Ah! here's Sigismond. How goes the world, Pere Sigismond? How is business? Is it good with you?"
Whenever Frantz came down from his brother's closet, old Sigismond was sure to be watching for him, and would walk a few steps with him in his long, lute-string sleeves, quill and knife in hand. He kept the young man informed concerning matters at the factory. For some time past, things seemed to have changed for the better.
A group of officers and several soldiers in duck trousers were looking on at a distance, whispering as if in a church; and an assistant-surgeon was writing a report of the death on a high window-ledge. To him Sigismond spoke. "I should like very much to see him," he said softly. "Go and look."
It was the letter which Frantz had written to his sister-in-law a year before, and which Sidonie had sent to her husband on the day following their terrible scene, to revenge herself on him and his brother at the same time. Risler could have survived his wife's treachery, but that of his brother had killed him. When Sigismond understood, he was petrified with horror.
It was in that room just opposite that we dined on that memorable evening." And he pointed to the great windows of the salon of Cafe Vefour, gleaming in the rays of the setting sun like the chandeliers at a wedding feast. "Ah! yes, true," murmured Sigismond, abashed. What an unlucky idea of his to bring his friend to a place that recalled such painful things!
'dame', yes, he's quite a dashing buck, that fellow." Being decidedly indifferent to heroism of that stamp, Risler and Sigismond were drinking their beer without paying much attention to the music, when, at the end of the song, amid the applause and cries and uproar that followed it, Pere Planus uttered an exclamation: "Why, that is odd; one would say but no, I'm not mistaken.
One night, near the end of January, old Sigismond Planus, cashier of the house of Fromont Jeune and Risler Aine, was awakened with a start in his little house at Montrouge by the same teasing voice, the same rattling of chains, followed by that fatal cry: "The notes!" "That is true," thought the worthy man, sitting up in bed; "day after to-morrow will be the last day of the month.
But the window is wide open." Sigismond, greatly surprised, went and knocked at his friend's door. "Risler! Risler!" He called in great anxiety: "Risler, are you there? Are you asleep?" There was no reply. He opened the door. The room was cold. It was evident that the damp air had been blowing in all night through the open window.
When the last man was paid, Sigismond came out of his office. The two friends recognized each other and embraced; and in the silence of the factory, at rest for twenty-four hours and deathly still in all its empty buildings, the cashier explained to Frantz the state of affairs. He described Sidonie's conduct, her mad extravagance, the total wreck of the family honor.
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