ays are so short, a month
overburdened with expenses and anxieties, clerks suffer in patience and
employers too. Every one tries to end the year in tranquillity,
postponing to the month of January, when time takes a great leap onward
toward another station, all changes, ameliorations, attempts to lead a
new life.

Wherever M. Joyeuse called, he saw faces suddenly turn cold as soon as
he explained the purpose of his visit. "What! you are no longer with
Hemerlingue and Son? How does that happen?" He would explain the
condition of affairs as best he could, attributing it to a caprice of
his employer, that violent-tempered Hemerlingue whom all Paris knew;
but he was conscious of a cold, suspicious accent in the uniform reply:
"Come and see us after the holidays." And, timid as he was at best, he
reached a point at which he hardly dared apply anywhere, but would walk
back and forth twenty times in front of the same door, nor would he
ever have crossed the threshold but for the thought of his daughters.
That thought alone would grasp his shoulder, put heart into his legs
and send him to opposite ends of Paris in the same day, to exceedingly
vague addresses given him by comrades, to a great bone-black factory at
Aubervilliers, for instance, where they made him call three days in
succession, and all for nothing.

Oh! the long walks in the rain and frost, the closed doors, the
employer who has gone out or has visitors, the promises given and
suddenly retracted, the disappointed hopes, the enervating effect of
long suspense, the humiliation in store for every man who asks for
work, as if it were a shameful thing to be without it. M. Joyeuse
experienced all those heartsickening details, and he learned too how
the will becomes weary and discouraged in the face of persistent
ill-luck. And you can imagine whether the bitter martyrdom of "the man
in search of a place" was intensified by the fantasies of his
imagination, by the chimeras which rose before him from the pavements
of Paris, while he pursued his quest in every direction.

For a whole month he was like one of those pitiful marionettes who
soliloquize and gesticulate on the sidewalks, and from whom the
slightest jostling on the part of the crowd extorts a somnambulistic
ejaculation: "I said as much," or "Don't you doubt it, monsieur." You
pass on, you almost laugh, but you are moved to pity at the
unconsciousness of those poor devils, possessed by a fixed idea, blind
men