Fromont and Risler | Page 9

the Rue des
Francs- Bourgeois, they turned the corner of the Archives into the Rue
de Braque. There they stopped first, and Madame Chebe alighted at her
door, which was too narrow for the magnificent green silk frock, so that
it vanished in the hall with rustlings of revolt and with all its folds
muttering. A few minutes later, a tall, massive portal on the Rue des
Vieilles- Haudriettes, bearing on the escutcheon that betrayed the
former family mansion, beneath half-effaced armorial bearings, a sign
in blue letters, Wall Papers, was thrown wide open to allow the
wedding-carriage to pass through.
Thereupon the bride, hitherto motionless and like one asleep, seemed to
wake suddenly, and if all the lights in the vast buildings, workshops or
storehouses, which surrounded the courtyard, had not been
extinguished, Risler might have seen that pretty, enigmatical face
suddenly lighted by a smile of triumph. The wheels revolved less
noisily on the fine gravel of a garden, and soon stopped before the
stoop of a small house of two floors. It was there that the young
Fromonts lived, and Risler and his wife were to take up their abode on
the floor above. The house had an aristocratic air. Flourishing
commerce avenged itself therein for the dismal street and the
out-of-the-way quarter. There was a carpet on the stairway leading to
their apartment, and on all sides shone the gleaming whiteness of
marble, the reflection of mirrors and of polished copper.
While Risler was parading his delight through all the rooms of the new
apartment, Sidonie remained alone in her bedroom. By the light of the
little blue lamp hanging from the ceiling, she glanced first of all at the
mirror, which gave back her reflection from head to foot, at all her
luxurious surroundings, so unfamiliar to her; then, instead of going to
bed, she opened the window and stood leaning against the sill,

motionless as a statue.
The night was clear and warm. She could see distinctly the whole
factory, its innumerable unshaded windows, its glistening panes, its tall
chimney losing itself in the depths of the sky, and nearer at hand the
lovely little garden against the ancient wall of the former mansion. All
about were gloomy, miserable roofs and squalid streets. Suddenly she
started. Yonder, in the darkest, the ugliest of all those attics crowding
so closely together, leaning against one another, as if overweighted
with misery, a fifth-floor window stood wide open, showing only
darkness within. She recognized it at once. It was the window of the
landing on which her parents lived.
The window on the landing!
How many things the mere name recalled! How many hours, how
many days she had passed there, leaning on that damp sill, without rail
or balcony, looking toward the factory. At that moment she fancied that
she could see up yonder little Chebe's ragged person, and in the frame
made by that poor window, her whole child life, her deplorable youth
as a Parisian street arab, passed before her eyes.
CHAPTER II
LITTLE CHEBE'S STORY
In Paris the common landing is like an additional room, an enlargement
of their abodes, to poor families confined in their too small apartments.
They go there to get a breath of air in summer, and there the women
talk and the children play.
When little Chebe made too much noise in the house, her mother would
say to her: "There there! you bother me, go and play on the landing."
And the child would go quickly enough.
This landing, on the upper floor of an old house in which space had not
been spared, formed a sort of large lobby, with a high ceiling, guarded
on the staircase side by a wrought-iron rail, lighted by a large window

which looked out upon roofs, courtyards, and other windows, and,
farther away, upon the garden of the Fromont factory, which was like a
green oasis among the huge old walls.
There was nothing very cheerful about it, but the child liked it much
better than her own home. Their rooms were dismal, especially when it
rained and Ferdinand did not go out.
With his brain always smoking with new ideas, which unfortunately
never came to anything, Ferdinand Chebe was one of those slothful,
project- devising bourgeois of when there are so many in Paris. His
wife, whom he had dazzled at first, had soon detected his utter
insignificance, and had ended by enduring patiently and with
unchanged demeanor his continual dreams of wealth and the disasters
that immediately followed them.
Of the dot of eighty thousand francs which she had brought him, and
which he had squandered in his absurd schemes, only a small annuity
remained, which still gave them a position of some importance in the
eyes of their neighbors,