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, 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.