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 his wife and daughter were not, strictly speaking, for his benefit, but for the benefit of that mysterious and unknown genius, whose trustee he considered himself to be.

There was a certain analogy between the position of the Chebe family and that of the Delobelles.  But the latter household was less depressing.  The Chebes felt that their petty annuitant existence was fastened upon them forever, with no prospect of amelioration, always the same; whereas, in the actor’s family, hope and illusion often opened magnificent vistas.

The Chebes were like people living in a blind alley; the Delobelles on a foul little street, where there was no light or air, but where a great boulevard might some day be laid out.  And then, too, Madame Chebe no longer believed in her husband, whereas, by virtue of that single magic word, “Art!” her neighbor never had doubted hers.

And yet for years and years Monsieur Delobelle had been unavailingly drinking vermouth with dramatic agents, absinthe with leaders of claques, bitters with vaudevillists, dramatists, and the famous what’s-his-name, author of several great dramas.  Engagements did not always follow.  So that, without once appearing on the boards, the poor man had progressed from jeune premier to grand premier roles, then to the financiers, then to the noble fathers, then to the buffoons—­

He stopped there!

On two or three occasions his friends had obtained for him a chance to earn his living as manager of a club or a cafe as an inspector in great warehouses, at the ‘Phares de la Bastille’ or the ‘Colosse de Rhodes.’  All that was necessary was to have good manners.  Delobelle was not lacking in that respect, God knows!  And yet every suggestion that was made to him the great man met with a heroic refusal.

“I have no right to abandon the stage!” he would then assert.

In the mouth of that poor devil, who had not set foot on the boards for years, it was irresistibly comical.  But one lost the inclination to laugh when one saw his wife and his daughter swallowing particles of arsenic day and night, and heard them repeat emphatically as they broke their needles against the brass wire with which the little birds were mounted: 

“No! no!  Monsieur Delobelle has no right to abandon the stage.”

Happy man, whose bulging eyes, always smiling condescendingly, and whose habit of reigning on the stage had procured for him for life that exceptional position of a spoiled and admired child-king!  When he left the house, the shopkeepers on the Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, with the predilection of the Parisian for everything and everybody connected with the theatre, saluted him respectfully.  He was always so well dressed!  And then he was so kind, so obliging!  When you think that every Saturday night, he, Ruy Blas, Antony, Raphael in the ‘Filles de Maybre,’ Andres in the ‘Pirates de la Savane,’ sallied forth, with a bandbox under his arm, to carry the week’s work of his wife and daughter to a flower establishment on the Rue St.-Denis!