he 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 the 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 req
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