After his marriage Risler had given up the brewery.  Sidonie would have been glad to have him leave the house in the evening for a fashionable club, a resort of wealthy, well-dressed men; but the idea of his returning, amid clouds of pipe-smoke, to his friends of earlier days, Sigismond, Delobelle, and her own father, humiliated her and made her unhappy.  So he ceased to frequent the place; and that was something of a sacrifice.  It was almost a glimpse of his native country, that brewery situated in a remote corner of Paris.  The infrequent carriages, the high, barred windows of the ground floors, the odor of fresh drugs, of pharmaceutical preparations, imparted to that narrow little Rue Blondel a vague resemblance to certain streets in Basle or Zurich.

The brewery was managed by a Swiss and crowded with men of that nationality.  When the door was opened, through the smoke-laden atmosphere, dense with the accents of the North, one had a vision of a vast, low room with hams hanging from the rafters, casks of beer standing in a row, the floor ankle-deep with sawdust, and on the counter great salad-bowls filled with potatoes as red as chestnuts, and baskets of pretzels fresh from the oven, their golden knots sprinkled with white salt.

For twenty years Risler had had his pipe there, a long pipe marked with his name in the rack reserved for the regular customers.  He had also his table, at which he was always joined by several discreet, quiet compatriots, who listened admiringly, but without comprehending them, to the endless harangues of Chebe and Delobelle.  When Risler ceased his visits to the brewery, the two last-named worthies likewise turned their backs upon it, for several excellent reasons.  In the first place, M. Chebe now lived a considerable distance away.  Thanks to the generosity of his children, the dream of his whole life was realized at last.

“When I am rich,” the little man used to say in his cheerless rooms in the Marais, “I will have a house of my own, at the gates of Paris, almost in the country, a little garden which I will plant and water myself.  That will be better for my health than all the excitement of the capital.”

Well, he had his house now, but he did not enjoy himself in it.  It was at Montrouge, on the road that runs around the city.  “A small chalet, with garden,” said the advertisement, printed on a placard which gave an almost exact idea of the dimensions of the property.  The papers were new and of rustic design, the paint perfectly fresh; a water-butt planted beside a vine-clad arbor played the part of a pond.  In addition to all these advantages, only a hedge separated this paradise from another “chalet with garden” of precisely the same description, occupied by Sigismond Planus the cashier, and his sister.  To Madame Chebe that was a most precious circumstance.  When the good woman was bored, she would take a stock of knitting and darning and go and sit in the old maid’s arbor, dazzling her with the tale of her past splendors.  Unluckily, her husband had not the same source of distraction.