It was a large room, hung with blue satin under white lace.  A veritable cocotte’s nest.  There were torn and rumpled tulle ruffles lying about, bows, and artificial flowers.  The wax candles around the mirror had burned down to the end and cracked the candlesticks; and the bed, with its lace flounces and valances, its great curtains raised and drawn back, untouched in the general confusion, seemed like the bed of a corpse, a state bed on which no one would ever sleep again.

Risler’s first feeling upon entering the room was one of mad indignation, a longing to fall upon the things before him, to tear and rend and shatter everything.  Nothing, you see, resembles a woman so much as her bedroom.  Even when she is absent, her image still smiles in the mirrors that have reflected it.  A little something of her, of her favorite perfume, remains in everything she has touched.  Her attitudes are reproduced in the cushions of her couch, and one can follow her goings and comings between the mirror and the toilette table in the pattern of the carpet.  The one thing above all others in that room that recalled Sidonie was an ‘etagere’ covered with childish toys, petty, trivial knickknacks, microscopic fans, dolls’ tea-sets, gilded shoes, little shepherds and shepherdesses facing one another, exchanging cold, gleaming, porcelain glances.  That ‘etagere’ was Sidonie’s very soul, and her thoughts, always commonplace, petty, vain, and empty, resembled those gewgaws.  Yes, in very truth, if Risler, while he held her in his grasp last night, had in his frenzy broken that fragile little head, a whole world of ‘etagere’ ornaments would have come from it in place of a brain.

The poor man was thinking sadly of all these things amid the ringing of hammers and the heavy footsteps of the furniture-movers, when he heard an interloping, authoritative step behind him, and Monsieur Chebe appeared, little Monsieur Chebe, flushed and breathless, with flames darting from his eyes.  He assumed, as always, a very high tone with his son-in-law.

“What does this mean?  What is this I hear?  Ah! so you’re moving, are you?”

“I am not moving, Monsieur Chebe—­I am selling out.”

The little man gave a leap like a scalded fish.

“You are selling out?  What are you selling, pray?”

“I am selling everything,” said Risler in a hollow voice, without even looking at him.

“Come, come, son-in-law, be reasonable.  God knows I don’t say that Sidonie’s conduct—­But, for my part, I know nothing about it.  I never wanted to know anything.  Only I must remind you of your dignity.  People wash their dirty linen in private, deuce take it!  They don’t make spectacles of themselves as you’ve been doing ever since morning.  Just see everybody at the workshop windows; and on the porch, too!  Why, you’re the talk of the quarter, my dear fellow.”

“So much the better.  The dishonor was public, the reparation must be public, too.”