For a month he was one of those woeful puppets, talking in monologue, gesticulating on the footways, from whom every chance collision with the crowd wrests an exclamation as of one walking in his sleep.  “I told you so,” or “I have no doubt of it, sir.”  One passes by, almost one would laugh, but one is seized with pity before the unconsciousness of those unhappy men possessed by a fixed idea, blind whom the dream leads, drawn along by an invisible leash.  The terrible thing was that after those long, cruel days of inaction and fatigue, when M. Joyeuse returned home, he had perforce to play the comedy of the man returning from his work, to recount the incidents of the day, the things he had heard, the gossip of the office with which he had been always wont to entertain his girls.

In humble homes there is always a name which comes up more often than all others, which is invoked in days of stress, which is mingled with every wish, with every hope, even with the games of the children, penetrated as they are with its importance, a name which sustains in the dwelling the part of a sub-Providence, or rather of a household divinity, familiar and supernatural.  In the Joyeuse family, it was Hemerlingue, always Hemerlingue, returning ten times, twenty times a day in the conversation of the girls, who associated it with all their plans, with the most intimate details of their feminine ambitions.  “If Hemerlingue would only——­” “All that depends on Hemerlingue.”  And nothing could be more charming than the familiarity with which these young people spoke of that enormously wealthy man whom they had never seen.

They would ask for news of him.  Had their father spoken to him?  Was he in a good temper?  And to think that we all of us, whatever our position, however humble we be, however weighed down by fate, we have always beneath us unfortunate beings more humble, yet more weighed down, for whom we are great, for whom we are as gods, and in our quality of gods, indifferent, disdainful, or cruel.

One imagines the torture of M. Joyeuse, obliged to invent stories and anecdotes about the wretch who had so ruthlessly discharged him after ten years of good service.  He played his little comedy, however, so well as completely to deceive everybody.  Only one thing had been remarked, and that was that father when he came home in the evening always sat down to table with a great appetite.  I believe it!  Since he lost his place the poor man had gone without his luncheon.

The days passed.  M. Joyeuse found nothing.  Yes, one place as accountant in the Territorial Bank, which he refused, however, knowing too much about banking operations, about all the corners and innermost recesses of the financial Bohemia in general, and of the Territorial bank in particular, to set foot in that den.

“But,” said Passajon to him—­for it was Passajon who, meeting the honest fellow and hearing that he was out of employment, had suggested to him that he should come to Paganetti’s—­“but since I repeat that it is serious.  We have lots of money.  They pay one.  I have been paid.  See how prosperous I look.”