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.

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.