s that?"

He would explain the matter as best he could through a caprice of the
head of the firm, the ferocious Hemerlingue whom Paris knew; but he
was conscious of a coldness, a mistrust in the uniform reply which he
received: "Call on us again after the holidays." And, timid as he was to
begin with, he reached a point at which he could no longer bring himself
to call on any one, a point at which he could walk past the same door
a score of times and never have crossed its threshold at all had it not
been for the thought of his daughters. This alone pushed him along by
the shoulders, put heart in his legs, despatched him in the course
of the same day to the opposite extremities of Paris, to very vague
addresses given to him by comrades, to a great manufactory of animal
black at Aubervilliers, where he was made to return for nothing three
days in succession.

Oh, the journeys in the rain, in the frost, the closed doors, the master
who is out or engaged, the promises given and immediately withdrawn,
the hopes deceived, the enervation of hours of waiting, the humiliations
reserved for every man who asks for work, as though it were a shameful
thing to lack it. M. Joyeuse knew all these melancholy things and, too,
the good will that tires and grows discouraged before the persistence of
evil fortune. And you may imagine how the hard martyrdom of "the man who
seeks a place" was rendered tenfold more bitter by the mirages of his
imagination, by those chimeras which rose before him from the Paris
pavements as over them he journeyed along on foot in every direction.

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