However, everything went well at first.  It was midsummer, and M. Chebe, always in his shirt-sleeves, was busily employed in getting settled.  Each nail to be driven in the house was the subject of leisurely reflections, of endless discussions.  It was the same with the garden.  He had determined at first to make an English garden of it, lawns always green, winding paths shaded by shrubbery.  But the trouble of it was that it took so long for the shrubbery to grow.

“I have a mind to make an orchard of it,” said the impatient little man.

And thenceforth he dreamed of nothing but vegetables, long lines of beans, and peach-trees against the wall.  He dug for whole mornings, knitting his brows in a preoccupied way and wiping his forehead ostentatiously before his wife, so that she would say: 

“For heaven’s sake, do rest a bit—­you’re killing yourself.”

The result was that the garden was a mixture:  flowers and fruit, park and kitchen garden; and whenever he went into Paris M. Chebe was careful to decorate his buttonhole with a rose from his rose-bushes.

While the fine weather lasted, the good people did not weary of admiring the sunsets behind the fortifications, the long days, the bracing country air.  Sometimes, in the evening, when the windows were open, they sang duets; and in presence of the stars in heaven, which began to twinkle simultaneously with the lanterns on the railway around the city, Ferdinand would become poetical.  But when the rain came and he could not go out, what misery!  Madame Chebe, a thorough Parisian, sighed for the narrow streets of the Marais, her expeditions to the market of Blancs-Manteaux, and to the shops of the quarter.

As she sat by the window, her usual place for sewing and observation, she would gaze at the damp little garden, where the volubilis and the nasturtiums, stripped of their blossoms, were dropping away from the lattices with an air of exhaustion, at the long, straight line of the grassy slope of the fortifications, still fresh and green, and, a little farther on, at the corner of a street, the office of the Paris omnibuses, with all the points of their route inscribed in enticing letters on the green walls.  Whenever one of the omnibuses lumbered away on its journey, she followed it with her eyes, as a government clerk at Cayenne or Noumea gazes after the steamer about to return to France; she made the trip with it, knew just where it would stop, at what point it would lurch around a corner, grazing the shop-windows with its wheels.

As a prisoner, M. Chebe became a terrible trial.  He could not work in the garden.  On Sundays the fortifications were deserted; he could no longer strut about among the workingmen’s families dining on the grass, and pass from group to group in a neighborly way, his feet encased in embroidered slippers, with the authoritative demeanor of a wealthy landowner of the vicinity.  This he missed more than anything else, consumed as he was by the desire to make people think about him.  So that, having nothing to do, having no one to pose before, no one to listen to his schemes, his stories, the anecdote of the accident to the Duc d’Orleans—­a similar accident had happened to him in his youth, you remember—­the unfortunate Ferdinand overwhelmed his wife with reproaches.