many things the mere name recalled! How many hours, how many days she
had passed there, leaning on that damp sill, without rail or balcony,
looking toward the factory. At that moment she fancied that she could see
up yonder little Chebe's ragged person, and in the frame made by that
poor window, her whole child life, her deplorable youth as a Parisian
street arab, passed before her eyes.

CHAPTER II

LITTLE CHEBE'S STORY

In Paris the common landing is like an additional room, an enlargement of
their abodes, to poor families confined in their too small apartments.
They go there to get a breath of air in summer, and there the women talk
and the children play.

When little Chebe made too much noise in the house, her mother would say
to her: "There there! you bother me, go and play on the landing." And the
child would go quickly enough.

This landing, on the upper floor of an old house in which space had not
been spared, formed a sort of large lobby, with a high ceiling, guarded
on the staircase side by a wrought-iron rail, lighted by a large window
which looked out upon roofs, courtyards, and other windows, and, farther
away, upon the garden of the Fromont factory, which was like a green
oasis among the huge old walls.

There was nothing very cheerful about it, but the child liked it much
better than her own home. Their rooms were dismal, especially when it
rained and Ferdinand did not go out.

With his brain always smoking with new ideas, which unfortunately never
came to anything, Ferdinand Chebe was one of those slothful,
project-devising bourgeois of when there are so many in Paris. His wife,
whom he had dazzled at first, had soon detected his utter insignificance,
and had ended by enduring patiently and with unchanged demeanor his
continual dreams of wealth and the disasters that immediately followed
them.

Of the dot of eighty thousand francs which she had brought him, and which
he had squandered in his absurd schemes, only a small annuity remained,
which still gave them a position of some importance in the eyes of their
neighbors, as did Madame Chebe's cashmere, which had been rescued from
every wreck, her wedding laces and two diamond studs, very tiny and very
modest, which Sidonie sometimes begged her mother to show her, as they
lay in the drawer of the bureau, in an old-fashioned white velvet case,
on which the jeweller's name, in gilt letters, thirty years old, was
gradually fading. That was th