uired
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 triumph, wiping his
forehead.

M. Chebe adored the summer, the Sundays, the great footraces in the dust
at Clamart or Romainville, the excitement of holidays and the crowd. He
was one of those who went about for a whole week before the fifteenth
of August, gazing at t