All these things tore your heart, and made the treachery still more horrible by the contrast between the riches that eluded your outstretched hand and the ignoble mediocrity in which you were doomed to pass your life.

Sidonie was seriously ill for a long while.  As she lay in bed, whenever the window-panes rattled behind the curtains, the unhappy creature fancied that Georges’s wedding-coaches were driving through the street; and she had paroxysms of nervous excitement, without words and inexplicable, as if a fever of wrath were consuming her.

At last, time and youthful strength, her mother’s care, and, more than all, the attentions of Desiree, who now knew of the sacrifice her friend had made for her, triumphed over the disease.  But for a long while Sidonie was very weak, oppressed by a deadly melancholy, by a constant longing to weep, which played havoc with her nervous system.

Sometimes she talked of travelling, of leaving Paris.  At other times she insisted that she must enter a convent.  Her friends were sorely perplexed, and strove to discover the cause of that singular state of mind, which was even more alarming than her illness; when she suddenly confessed to her mother the secret of her melancholy.

She loved the elder Risler!  She never had dared to whisper it; but it was he whom she had always loved and not Frantz.

This news was a surprise to everybody, to Risler most of all; but little Chebe was so pretty, her eyes were so soft when she glanced at him, that the honest fellow instantly became as fond of her as a fool!  Indeed, it may be that love had lain in his heart for a long time without his realizing it.

And that is how it happened that, on the evening of her wedding-day, young Madame Risler, in her white wedding-dress, gazed with a smile of triumph at the window on the landing which had been the narrow setting of ten years of her life.  That haughty smile, in which there was a touch of profound pity and of scorn as well, such scorn as a parvenu feels for his poor beginnings, was evidently addressed to the poor sickly child whom she fancied she saw up at that window, in the depths of the past and the darkness.  It seemed to say to Claire, pointing at the factory: 

“What do you say to this little Chebe?  She is here at last, you see!”

CHAPTER VI

Noon.  The Marais is breakfasting.

Sitting near the door, on a stone which once served as a horse-block for equestrians, Risler watches with a smile the exit from the factory.  He never loses his enjoyment of the outspoken esteem of all these good people whom he knew when he was insignificant and humble like themselves.  The “Good-day, Monsieur Risler,” uttered by so many different voices, all in the same affectionate tone, warms his heart.  The children accost him without fear, the long-bearded designers, half-workmen, half-artists,