“I have no right to abandon the stage!” he would then assert.

In the mouth of that poor devil, who had not set foot on the boards for years, it was irresistibly comical.  But one lost the inclination to laugh when one saw his wife and his daughter swallowing particles of arsenic day and night, and heard them repeat emphatically as they broke their needles against the brass wire with which the little birds were mounted: 

“No! no!  Monsieur Delobelle has no right to abandon the stage.”

Happy man, whose bulging eyes, always smiling condescendingly, and whose habit of reigning on the stage had procured for him for life that exceptional position of a spoiled and admired child-king!  When he left the house, the shopkeepers on the Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, with the predilection of the Parisian for everything and everybody connected with the theatre, saluted him respectfully.  He was always so well dressed!  And then he was so kind, so obliging!  When you think that every Saturday night, he, Ruy Blas, Antony, Raphael in the ‘Filles de Maybre,’ Andres in the ‘Pirates de la Savane,’ sallied forth, with a bandbox under his arm, to carry the week’s work of his wife and daughter to a flower establishment on the Rue St.-Denis!

Why, even when performing such a commission as that, this devil of a fellow had such nobility of bearing, such native dignity, that the young woman whose duty it was to make up the Delobelle account was sorely embarrassed to hand to such an irreproachable gentleman the paltry stipend so laboriously earned.

On those evenings, by the way, the actor did not return home to dinner.  The women were forewarned.

He always met some old comrade on the boulevard, some unlucky devil like himself—­there are so many of them in that sacred profession!—­whom he entertained at a restaurant or cafe.  Then, with scrupulous fidelity—­and very grateful they were to him—­he would carry the rest of the money home, sometimes with a bouquet for his wife or a little present for Desiree, a nothing, a mere trifle.  What would you have?  Those are the customs of the stage.  It is such a simple matter in a melodrama to toss a handful of louis through the window!

“Ho! varlet, take this purse and hie thee hence to tell thy mistress I await her coming.”

And so, notwithstanding their marvellous courage, and although their trade was quite lucrative, the Delobelles often found themselves in straitened circumstances, especially in the dull season of the ’Articles de Paris.’

Luckily the excellent Risler was at hand, always ready to accommodate his friends.

Guillaume Risler, the third tenant on the landing, lived with his brother Frantz, who was fifteen years his junior.  The two young Swiss, tall and fair, strong and ruddy, brought into the dismal, hard-working house glimpses of the country and of health.  The elder was a draughtsman at the Fromont factory and was paying for the education of his brother, who attended Chaptal’s lectures, pending his admission to the Ecole Centrale.