It was then the fashion to ornament hats and ballgowns with the lovely little insects from South America that have the brilliant coloring of jewels and reflect the light like diamonds.  The Delobelles had adopted that specialty.

A wholesale house, to which consignments were made directly from the Antilles, sent to them, unopened, long, light boxes from which, when the lid was removed, arose a faint odor, a dust of arsenic through which gleamed the piles of insects, impaled before being shipped, the birds packed closely together, their wings held in place by a strip of thin paper.  They must all be mounted—­the insects quivering upon brass wire, the humming-birds with their feathers ruffled; they must be cleansed and polished, the beak in a bright red, claw repaired with a silk thread, dead eyes replaced with sparkling pearls, and the insect or the bird restored to an appearance 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.