Every morning he feigned to start for the office, allowed himself to be equipped and accompanied to the door as usual, his huge leather portfolio all ready for the evening’s numerous commissions. Although he would forget some of them on purpose because of the approaching and so problematical end of the month, he did not lack time now to execute them. He had his day to himself, the whole of an interminable day which he spent in rushing about Paris in search for an employment. People gave him addresses, excellent recommendations. But in that terrible month of December, so cold and with such short hours of daylight, bringing with it so many expenses and preoccupations, employees need to take patience and employers also. Each man tries to end the year in peace, postponing to the month of January, to that great leap of time towards a fresh halting-place, any changes, ameliorations, attempts at a new life.
In every house where M. Joyeuse presented himself, he beheld faces suddenly grow cold as soon as he explained the object of his visit.
“What! You are no longer with Hemerlingue & Son? How is 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in the rain, in the frost, the closed doors, the master who is out or engaged, the promises given and immediately withdrawn, the hopes deceived, the enervation of hours of waiting, the humiliations reserved for every man who asks for work, as though it were a shameful thing to lack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 is invoked in days of stress, which is mingled with every wish, with every hope, even with the games of the children, penetrated as they are with its importance, a name which sustains in the dwelling the part of a sub-Providence, or rather of a household divinity, familiar and supernatural. In the Joyeuse family, it was Hemerlingue, always Hemerlingue, returning ten times, twenty times a day in the conversation of the girls, who associated it with all their plans, with the most intimate details of their feminine ambitions. “If Hemerlingue would only——” “All that depends on Hemerlingue.” And nothing could be more charming than the familiarity with which these young people spoke of that enormously wealthy man whom they had never seen.
They would ask for news of him. Had their father spoken to him? Was he in a good temper? And to think that we all of us, whatever our position, however humble we be, however weighed down by fate, we have always beneath us unfortunate beings more humble, yet more weighed down, for whom we are great, for whom we are as gods, and in our quality of gods, indifferent, disdainful, or cruel.
One imagines the torture of M. Joyeuse, obliged to invent stories and anecdotes about the wretch who had so ruthlessly discharged him after ten years of good service. He played his little comedy, however, so well as completely to deceive everybody. Only one thing had been remarked, and that was that father when he came home in the evening always sat down to table with a great appetite. I believe it! Since he lost his place the poor man had gone without his luncheon.
The days passed. M. Joyeuse found nothing. Yes, one place as accountant in the Territorial Bank, which he refused, however, knowing too much about banking operations, about all the corners and innermost recesses of the financial Bohemia in general, and of the Territorial bank in particular, to set foot in that den.