e only bit of luxury in that poor
annuitant's abode.

For a very long time M. Chebe had sought a place which would enable him
to eke out their slender income. But he sought it only in what he called
standing business, his health forbidding any occupation that required him
to be seated.

It seemed that, soon after his marriage, when he was in a flourishing
business and had a horse and tilbury of his own, the little man had had
one day a serious fall. That fall, to which he referred upon every
occasion, served as an excuse for his indolence.

One could not be with M. Chebe five minutes before he would say in a
confidential tone:

"You know of the accident that happened to the Duc d'Orleans?"

And then he would add, tapping his little bald pate "The same thing
happened to me in my youth."

Since that famous fall any sort of office work made him dizzy, and he had
found himself inexorably confined to standing business. Thus, he had been
in turn a broker in wines, in books, in truffles, in clocks, and in many
other things beside. Unluckily, he tired of everything, never considered
his position sufficiently exalted for a former business man with a
tilbury, and, by gradual degrees, by dint of deeming every sort of
occupation beneath him, he had grown old and incapable, a genuine idler
with low tastes, a good-for-nothing.

Artists are often rebuked for their oddities, for the liberties they take
with nature, for that horror of the conventional which impels them to
follow by-paths; but who can ever describe all the absurd fancies, all
the idiotic eccentricities with which a bourgeois without occupation can
succeed in filling the emptiness of his life? M. Chebe imposed upon
himself certain rules concerning his goings and comings, and his walks
abroad. While the Boulevard Sebastopol was being built, he went twice a
day "to see how it was getting on."

No one knew better than he the fashionable shops and the bargains; and
very often Madame Chebe, annoyed to see her husband's idiotic face at the
window while she was energetically mending the family linen, would rid
herself of him by giving him an errand to do. "You know that place, on
the corner of such a street, where they sell such nice cakes. They would
be nice for our dessert."

And the husband would go out, saunter along the boulevard by the shops,
wait for the omnibus, and pass half the day in procuring two cakes, worth
three sous, which he would bring home in triump