The pet name Yaia amused Monsieur le Baron immensely; he also inquired as to the resources of the family.
"My salary, Monsieur le Baron, nothing but that. I had a little money laid by, but my poor wife's sickness and the girls' education—"
"What you earn is not enough, my dear Joyeuse. I raise you to a thousand francs a month."
"Oh! Monsieur le Baron, that is too much!"
But, although he had uttered this last phrase aloud, in the face of a policeman who watched with a suspicious eye the little man who gesticulated and shook his head so earnestly, the poor visionary did not awake. He joyously imagined himself returning home, telling the news to his daughters, and taking them to the theatre in the evening to celebrate that happy day. God! how pretty the Joyeuse girls were, sitting in the front of their box! what a nosegay of rosy cheeks! And then, on the next day, lo and behold the two oldest are sought in marriage by—Impossible to say by whom, for M. Joyeuse suddenly found himself under the porch of the Hemerlingue establishment, in front of a swing-door surmounted by the words, "Counting Room" in gold letters.
"I shall always be the same," he said to himself with a little laugh, wiping his forehead, on which the perspiration stood in beads.
Put in good humor by his fancy, by the blazing fires in the long line of offices, with inlaid floors and wire gratings, keeping the secrets confided to them in the subdued light of the ground floor, where one could count gold pieces without being dazzled by them, M. Joyeuse bade the other clerks a cheery good-morning, and donned his working-coat and black velvet cap. Suddenly there was a whistle from above; and the cashier, putting his ear to the tube, heard the coarse, gelatinous voice of Hemerlingue, the only, the genuine Hemerlingue—the other, the son, was always absent—asking for M. Joyeuse. What! was he still dreaming? He was greatly excited as he took the little inner stairway, which he had ascended so jauntily just before, and found himself in the banker's office, a narrow room with a very high ceiling, and with no other furniture than green curtains and enormous leather arm-chairs, proportioned to the formidable bulk of the head of the house. He was sitting there at his desk, which his paunch prevented him from approaching, corpulent, puffing, and so yellow that his round face with its hooked nose, the face of a fat, diseased owl, shone like a beacon light in that solemn, gloomy office. A coarse, Moorish merchant mouldering in the dampness of his little courtyard. His eyes gleamed an instant beneath his heavy slow-moving eyelids when the clerk entered; he motioned to him to approach, and slowly, coldly, with frequent breaks in his breathless sentences, instead of: "M. Joyeuse, how many daughters have you?" he said this:
"Joyeuse, you have assumed to criticize in our offices our recent operations on the market in Tunis. No use to deny it. What you said has been repeated to me word for word. And as I can't allow such things from one of my clerks, I notify you that with the end of this month you will cease to be in my employ."
The blood rushed to the clerk's face, receded, returned, causing each time a confused buzzing in his ears, a tumult of thoughts and images in his brain.
His daughters!