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, as did Madame Chebe’s cashmere, which had been rescued from every wreck, her wedding laces and two diamond studs, very tiny and very modest, which Sidonie sometimes begged her mother to show her, as they lay in the drawer of the bureau, in an old-fashioned white velvet case, on which the jeweller’s name, in gilt letters, thirty years old, was gradually fading.  That was the only bit of luxury in that poor annuitant’s abode.

For a very long time M. Chebe had sought a place which would enable him to eke out their slender income.  But he sought it only in what he called standing business, his health forbidding any occupation that required him to be seated.

It seemed that, soon after his marriage, when he was in a flourishing business and had a horse and tilbury of his own, the little man had had one day a serious fall.  That fall, to which he referred upon every occasion, served as an excuse for his indolence.

One could not be with M. Chebe five minutes before he would say in a confidential tone: 

“You know of the accident that happened to the Duc d’Orleans?”

And then he would add, tapping his little bald pate “The same thing happened to me in my youth.”

Since that famous fall any sort of office work made him dizzy, and he had found himself inexorably confined to standing business.  Thus, he had been in turn a broker in wines, in books, in truffles, in clocks, and in many other things beside.  Unluckily, he tired of everything, never considered his position sufficiently exalted for a former business man with a tilbury, and, by gradual degrees, by dint of deeming every sort of occupation beneath him, he had grown old and incapable, a genuine idler with low tastes, a good-for-nothing.