No! no! Monsieur Delobelle has no right to abandon the stage."

Happy man, whose bulging eyes, always smiling condescendingly, and whose
habit of reigning on the stage had procured for him for life that
exceptional position of a spoiled and admired child-king! When he left
the house, the shopkeepers on the Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, with the
predilection of the Parisian for everything and everybody connected with
the theatre, saluted him respectfully. He was always so well dressed! And
then he was so kind, so obliging! When you think that every Saturday
night, he, Ruy Blas, Antony, Raphael in the 'Filles de Maybre,' Andres in
the 'Pirates de la Savane,' sallied forth, with a bandbox under his arm,
to carry the week's work of his wife and daughter to a flower
establishment on the Rue St.-Denis!

Why, even when performing such a commission as that, this devil of a
fellow had such nobility of bearing, such native dignity, that the young
woman whose duty it was to make up the Delobelle account was sorely
embarrassed to hand to such an irreproachable gentleman the paltry
stipend so laboriously earned.

On those evenings, by the way, the actor did not return home to dinner.
The women were forewarned.

He always met some old comrade on the boulevard, some unlucky devil like
himself--there are so many of them in that sacred profession!--whom he
entertained at a restaurant or cafe. Then, with scrupulous fidelity--and
very grateful they were to him--he would carry the rest of the money
home, sometimes with a bouquet for his wife or a little present for
Desiree, a nothing, a mere trifle. What would you have? Those are the
customs of the stage. It is such a simple matter in a melodrama to toss a
handful of louis through the window!

"Ho! varlet, take this purse and hie thee hence to tell thy mistress I
await her coming."

And so, notwithstanding their marvellous courage, and although their
trade was quite lucrative, the Delobelles often found themselves in
straitened circumstances, especially in the dull season of the 'Articles
de Paris.'

Luckily the excellent Risler was at hand, always ready to accommodate his
friends.

Guillaume Risler, the third tenant on the landing, lived with his brother
Frantz, who was fifteen years his junior. The two young Swiss, tall and
fair, strong and ruddy, brought into the dismal, hard-working house
glimpses of the country and of health. The elder was a draughtsman at the
Fromont factory an