around a sieve.  At the office, figures kept his steady attention by reason of their positive quality; but, outside, his mind took its revenge upon that inexorable occupation.  The activity of the walk, the habit that led him by a route where he was familiar with the least incidents, allowed full liberty to his imaginative faculties.  He invented at these times extraordinary adventures, enough of them to crank out a score of the serial stories that appear in the newspapers.

If, for example, M. Joyeuse, as he went up the Faubourg Saint-Honore, on the right-hand footwalk—­he always took that one—­noticed a heavy laundry-cart going along at a quick pace, driven by a woman from the country with a child perched on a bundle of linen and leaning over somewhat: 

“The child!” the terrified old fellow would cry.  “Have a care of the child!”

His voice would be lost in the noise of the wheels and his warning among the secrets of Providence.  The cart passed.  He would follow it for a moment with his eye, then resume his walk; but the drama begun in his mind would continue to unfold itself there, with a thousand catastrophes.  The child had fallen.  The wheels were about to pass over him.  M. Joyeuse dashed forward, saved the little creature on the very brink of destruction; the pole of the cart, however, struck himself full in the chest and he fell bathed in blood.  Then he would see himself borne to some chemists’ shop through the crowd that had collected.  He was placed in an ambulance, carried to his own house, and then suddenly he would hear the piercing cry of his daughters, his well-beloved daughters, when they beheld him in this condition.  And that agonized cry touched his heart so deeply, he would hear it so distinctly, so realistically:  “Papa, my dear papa,” that he would himself utter it aloud in the street, to the great astonishment of the passers-by, in a hoarse voice which would wake him from his fictitious nightmare.

Will you have another sample of this prodigious imagination?  It is raining, freezing; wretched weather.  M. Joyeuse has taken the omnibus to go to his office.  Finding himself seated opposite a sort of colossus, with the head of a brute and formidable biceps, M. Joyeuse, himself very small, very puny, with his portfolio on his knees, draws in his legs in order to make room for the enormous columns which support the monumental body of his neighbour.  As the vehicle moves on and as the rain beats on the windows, M. Joyeuse falls into reverie.  And suddenly the colossus opposite, whose face is kind after all, is very much surprised to see the little man change colour, look at him and grind his teeth, look at him with ferocious eyes, an assassin’s eyes.  Yes, with the eyes of a veritable assassin, for at that moment M. Joyeuse is dreaming a terrible dream.  He sees one of his daughters sitting there opposite him, by the side of this giant brute, and the wretch has put his arm round her waist under her cape.