e 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.

"Your daughter banishes us--your daughter is ashamed of us!"

She heard nothing but that "Your daughter--your daughter--your daughter!"
For, in his anger with Sidonie, he denied her, throwing upon his wife the
whole responsibility for that monstrous and unnatural child. It was a
genuine relief for poor Madame Chebe when her husband took an omnibus at
the office to