In truth, a considerable sum of money must be raised:  a hundred thousand francs to be paid on two obligations, and at a moment when, for the first time in thirty years, the strong-box of the house of Fromont was absolutely empty.  What was to be done?  Sigismond had tried several times to speak to Fromont Jeune, but he seemed to shun the burdensome responsibility of business, and when he walked through the offices was always in a hurry, feverishly excited, and seemed neither to see nor hear anything about him.  He answered the old cashier’s anxious questions, gnawing his moustache: 

“All right, all right, my old Planus.  Don’t disturb yourself; I will look into it.”  And as he said it, he seemed to be thinking of something else, to be a thousand leagues away from his surroundings.  It was rumored in the factory, where his liaison with Madame Risler was no longer a secret to anybody, that Sidonie deceived him, made him very unhappy; and, indeed, his mistress’s whims worried him much more than his cashier’s anxiety.  As for Risler, no one ever saw him; he passed his days shut up in a room under the roof, overseeing the mysterious, interminable manufacture of his machines.

This indifference on the part of the employers to the affairs of the factory, this absolute lack of oversight, had led by slow degrees to general demoralization.  Some business was still done, because an established house will go on alone for years by force of the first impetus; but what ruin, what chaos beneath that apparent prosperity?

Sigismond knew it better than any one, and as if to see his way more clearly amid the multitude of painful thoughts which whirled madly through his brain, the cashier lighted his candle, sat down on his bed, and thought, “Where were they to find that hundred thousand francs?”

“Take the notes back.  I have no funds to meet them.”

No, no!  That was not possible.  Any sort of humiliation was preferable to that.

“Well, it’s decided.  I will go to-morrow,” sighed the poor cashier.

And he tossed about in torture, unable to close an eye until morning.

Notwithstanding the late hour, Georges Fromont had not yet retired.  He was sitting by the fire, with his head in his hands, in the blind and dumb concentration due to irreparable misfortune, thinking of Sidonie, of that terrible Sidonie who was asleep at that moment on the floor above.  She was positively driving him mad.  She was false to him, he was sure of it,—­she was false to him with the Toulousan tenor, that Cazabon, alias Cazaboni, whom Madame Dobson had brought to the house.  For a long time he had implored her not to receive that man; but Sidonie would not listen to him, and on that very day, speaking of a grand ball she was about to give, she had declared explicitly that nothing should prevent her inviting her tenor.

“Then he’s your lover!” Georges had exclaimed angrily, his eyes gazing into hers.