arance of life and grace. The mother prepared the
work under her daughter's direction; for Desiree, though she was still a
mere girl, was endowed with exquisite taste, with a fairy-like power of
invention, and no one could, insert two pearl eyes in those tiny heads
or spread their lifeless wings so deftly as she. Happy or unhappy,
Desiree always worked with the same energy. From dawn until well into
the night the table was covered with work. At the last ray of daylight,
when the factory bells were ringing in all the neighboring yards, Madame
Delobelle lighted the lamp, and after a more than frugal repast they
returned to their work. Those two indefatigable women had one object,
one fixed idea, which prevented them from feeling the burden of enforced
vigils. That idea was the dramatic renown of the illustrious Delobelle.
After he had left the provincial theatres to pursue his profession
in Paris, Delobelle waited for an intelligent manager, the ideal and
providential manager who discovers geniuses, to seek him out and offer
him a role suited to his talents. He might, perhaps, especially at the
beginning, have obtained a passably good engagement at a theatre of the
third order, but Delobelle did not choose to lower himself.

He preferred to wait, to struggle, as he said! And this is how he
awaited the struggle.

In the morning in his bedroom, often in his bed, he rehearsed roles in
his former repertory; and the Delobelle ladies trembled with emotion
when they heard behind the partition tirades from 'Antony' or the
'Medecin des Enfants', declaimed in a sonorous voice that blended with
the thousand-and-one noises of the great Parisian bee-hive. Then, after
breakfast, the actor would sally forth for the day; would go to "do his
boulevard," that is to say, to saunter to and fro between the Chateau
d'Eau and the Madeline, with a toothpick in the corner of his mouth, his
hat a little on one side-always gloved, and brushed, and glossy.

That question of dress was of great importance in his eyes. It was one
of the greatest elements of success, a bait for the manager--the famous,
intelligent manager--who never would dream of engaging a threadbare,
shabbily dressed man.

So the Delobelle ladies took good care that he lacked nothing; and you
can imagine how many birds and insects it required to fit out a blade of
that temper! The actor thought it the most natural thing in the world.

In his view, the labors, the privations of hi