“Remove your hand, sir!” M. Joyeuse has already said twice over.  The other has only sneered.  Now he wishes to kiss Elise.

“Ah, rascal!”

Too feeble to defend his daughter, M. Joyeuse, foaming with rage, draws his knife from his pocket, stabs the insolent fellow full in the breast, and with head high goes off, strong in the right of an outraged father, to make his declaration at the nearest police-station.

“I have just killed a man in an omnibus!” At the sound of his own voice actually uttering these sinister words, but not in the police-station, the poor fellow wakes us, guesses from the bewildered manner of the passengers that he must have spoken the words aloud, and very quickly takes advantage of the conductor’s call, “Saint-Philippe—­Pantheon—­Bastille—­” to alight, feeling greatly confused, amid general stupefaction.

This imagination constantly on the stretch, gave to M. Joyeuse a singular physiognomy, feverish and worn, in strong contrast with the general correct appearance of a subordinate clerk which he presented.  In one day he lived so many passionate existences.  The race is more numerous than one thinks of these waking dreamers, in whom a too restricted fate compresses forces unemployed and heroic faculties.  Dreaming is the safety-valve through which all those expend themselves with terrible ebullitions, as of the vapour of a furnace and floating images that are forthwith dissipated into air.  From these visions some return radiant, others exhausted and discouraged, as they find themselves once more on the every-day level.  M. Joyeuse was of these latter, rising without ceasing to heights whence a man cannot but re-descend, somewhat bruised by the velocity of the transit.

Now, one morning that our “visionary” had left his house at his habitual hour, and under the usual circumstances, he began at the turning of the Rue Saint-Ferdinand one of his little private romances.  As the end of the year was at hand, perhaps it was the hammer-strokes on a wooden hut which was being erected in the neighbouring timber-yard that caused his thoughts to turn to “presents—­New Year’s Day.”  And immediately the word bounty implanted itself in his mind as the first landmark of a marvelous story.  In the month of December all persons in Hemerlingue’s service received double pay, and you know that in small households there are founded on windfalls of this kind a thousand projects, ambitious or kind, presents to be made, a piece of furniture to be replaced, a little sum of money to be saved in a drawer against the unforeseen.

In simple fact, M. Joyeuse was not rich.  His wife, a Mlle. de Saint-Armand, tormented with ideas of greatness and society, had set this little clerk’s household on a ruinous footing, and though since her death three years had passed during which Bonne Maman had managed the housekeeping with so much wisdom, they had not yet been able to save anything, so heavy had proved the burden of the past.  Suddenly it occurred to the good fellow that this year the bounty would be larger by reason of the increase of work which had been caused by the Tunisian loan.  The loan constituted a very fine stroke of business for the firm, too fine even, for M. Joyeuse had permitted himself to remark in the office that this time “Hemerlingue & Son had shaved the Turk a little too close.”