What would become of them?
Places are so scarce at that time of year!
Want stared him in the face, and also the vision of a poor devil falling at Hemerlingue's feet, imploring him, threatening him, leaping at his throat in an outburst of desperate frenzy. All this agitation passed across his face like a gust of wind which wrinkles the surface of a lake, hollowing out shifting caverns of all shapes therein; but he stood mute on the same spot, and at a hint from his employer that he might withdraw, went unsteadily down to resume his task in the counting-room.
That evening, on returning to Rue Saint-Ferdinand, M. Joyeuse said nothing to his daughters. He dared not. The thought of casting a shadow upon that radiant gayety, which was the whole life of the house, of dimming with great tears those sparkling eyes, seemed to him unendurable. Moreover he was timid and weak, one of those who always say: "Let us wait till to-morrow." So he waited before speaking, in the first place until the month of November should be at an end, comforting himself with the vague hope that Hemerlingue might change his mind, as if he did not know that unyielding will, like the flabby, tenacious grasp of a mollusk clinging to its gold ingot. Secondly, when his accounts were settled and another clerk had taken his place at the tall desk at which he had stood so long, he hoped speedily to find something else and to repair the disaster before he was obliged to avow it.
Every morning he pretended to start for the office, allowed himself to be equipped and escorted to the door as usual, his great leather bag all ready for the numerous parcels he was to bring home at night. Although he purposely forgot some of them because of the approach of the perplexing close of the month, he no longer lacked time in which to do his daughters' errands. He had his day to himself, an interminable day, which he passed in running about Paris in search of a place. They gave him addresses and excellent recommendations. But in that month of December, when the air is so cold and the days 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 led by dreams, drawn on by an invisible leash. The terrible feature of it all was this, that when M. Joyeuse returned home, after those long, cruel days of inaction and fatigue, he must enact the comedy of the man returning from work, must describe the events of the day, tell what he had heard, the gossip of the office, with which he was always accustomed to entertain the young ladies.
In humble households there is always one name that comes to the lips more frequently than others, a name that is invoked on days of disaster, that plays a part in every wish, in every hope, even in the play of the children, who are permeated with the idea of its importance, a name that fills the rôle of a sub-providence in the family, or rather of a supernatural household god. It is the name of the employer, the manager of the factory, the landlord, the minister, the man, in short, who holds in his powerful hand the welfare, the very existence of the family. In the Joyeuse household it was Hemerlingue, always Hemerlingue; ten, twenty times a day the name was mentioned in the conversation of the girls, who associated it with all their plans, with the most trivial details of their girlish ambitions: "If Hemerlingue would consent. It all depends on Hemerlingue." And nothing could be more delightful than the familiar way in which those children spoke of the wealthy boor whom they had never seen.
They asked questions about him. Had their father spoken to him? Was he in good humor? To think that all of us, however humble we may be, however cruelly enslaved by destiny, have always below us some poor creature more humble, more enslaved than ourselves, in whose eyes we are great, in whose eyes we are gods, and, as gods, indifferent, scornful or cruel.