Artists are often rebuked for their oddities, for the liberties they take with nature, for that horror of the conventional which impels them to follow by-paths; but who can ever describe all the absurd fancies, all the idiotic eccentricities with which a bourgeois without occupation can succeed in filling the emptiness of his life?  M. Chebe imposed upon himself certain rules concerning his goings and comings, and his walks abroad.  While the Boulevard Sebastopol was being built, he went twice a day “to see how it was getting on.”

No one knew better than he the fashionable shops and the bargains; and very often Madame Chebe, annoyed to see her husband’s idiotic face at the window while she was energetically mending the family linen, would rid herself of him by giving him an errand to do.  “You know that place, on the corner of such a street, where they sell such nice cakes.  They would be nice for our dessert.”

And the husband would go out, saunter along the boulevard by the shops, wait for the omnibus, and pass half the day in procuring two cakes, worth three sous, which he would bring home in triumph, wiping his forehead.

M. Chebe adored the summer, the Sundays, the great footraces in the dust at Clamart or Romainville, the excitement of holidays and the crowd.  He was one of those who went about for a whole week before the fifteenth of August, gazing at the black lamps and their frames, and the scaffoldings.  Nor did his wife complain.  At all events, she no longer had that chronic grumbler prowling around her chair for whole days, with schemes for gigantic enterprises, combinations that missed fire in advance, lamentations concerning the past, and a fixed determination not to work at anything to earn money.

She no longer earned anything herself, poor woman; but she knew so well how to save, her wonderful economy made up so completely for everything else, that absolute want, although a near neighbor of such impecuniosity as theirs, never succeeded in making its way into those three rooms, which were always neat and clean, or in destroying the carefully mended garments or the old furniture so well concealed beneath its coverings.

Opposite the Chebes’ door, whose copper knob gleamed in bourgeois fashion upon the landing, were two other and smaller ones.

On the first, a visiting-card, held in place by four nails, according to the custom in vogue among industrial artists, bore the name of

Risler
designer of patterns.

On the other was a small square of leather, with these words in gilt letters: 

Mesdames Delobelle
birds and insects for ornament.

The Delobelles’ door was often open, disclosing a large room with a brick floor, where two women, mother and daughter, the latter almost a child, each as weary and as pale as the other, worked at one of the thousand fanciful little trades which go to make up what is called the ’Articles de Paris’.