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.