anything but good. We began life together in a miserable way. We grew
and prospered side by side. When he attempted to fly with his own wings
I always assisted him, supported him as best I could. It was through me
that he had the contract for supplying the fleet and army for ten
years; almost the whole of his fortune comes from that. And then one
fine morning that idiot of a cold-blooded Bearnese must go and fall in
love with an odalisque whom the bey's mother had turned out of the
harem! She was a handsome, ambitious hussy; she made him marry her, and
naturally, after that excellent marriage, Hemerlingue had to leave
Tunis. They had made him believe that I egged the bey on to forbid him
the country. That is not true. On the contrary, I persuaded His
Highness to allow the younger Hemerlingue--his first wife's child--to
remain at Tunis to look after their interests there, while the father
came to Paris to establish his banking-house. But I was well repaid for
my kindness. When my poor Ahmed died and the _mouchir_, his brother,
ascended the throne, the Hemerlingues, being restored to favor, never
ceased to try to injure me in the eyes of the new master. The bey was
always pleasant with me, but my influence was impaired. Ah well! in
spite of all that, in spite of all the tricks Hemerlingue has played on
me and is playing on me still, I was ready to offer him my hand
to-night. Not only did the villain refuse it, but he sent his wife to
insult me,--an uncivilized, vicious beast, who can never forgive me for
refusing to receive her at Tunis. Do you know what she called me there
to-night when she passed me? 'Robber and son of a dog.' The harlot had
the face to call me that. As if I didn't know my Hemerlingue, who's as
cowardly as he is fat. But, after all, let them say what they choose. I
snap my fingers at 'em. What can they do against me? Destroy my credit
with the bey? That makes no difference to me. I have no more business
in Tunis, and I shall get away from there altogether as soon as
possible. There's only one city, one country in the world, and that is
Paris, hospitable, open-hearted Paris, with no false modesty, where any
intelligent man finds room to do great things. And, you see, de Géry, I
propose to do great things. I've had enough of business life. I have
worked twenty years for money; now I am greedy for respect, glory,
renown. I mean to be a personage of some consequence in the history of
my country, and that will be an easy matter for me. With my great
fortune, my knowledge of men and of affairs, with what I feel here in
my head, I can aspire to anything and reach any eminence. So take my
advice, my dear boy, don't leave me,"--one would have said he was
answering his young companion's secret thought,--"stick loyally to my
ship. The spars are stanch and the hold is full of coal. I swear to you
that we will sail far and fast, damme!"
The artless Southerner thus discharged his plans into the darkness with
an abundance of expressive gestures, and from time to time, as they
paced the vast, deserted square, majestically surrounded by its
tightly-closed silent palaces, he looked up toward the bronze man on
the column, as if calling to witness that great upstart, whose presence
in the heart of Paris justifies the most extravagant ambitions and
renders all chimeras probable.
There is in youth a warmth of heart, a craving for enthusiasm which are
aroused by the slightest breath. As the Nabob spoke, de Géry felt his
suspicions vanishing and all his sympathy reviving with an infusion of
pity. No, surely that man was no vile knave, but a poor deluded mortal
whose fortune had gone to his head, like a wine too powerful for a
stomach that has long slaked its thirst with water. Alone in the midst
of Paris, surrounded by enemies and sharpers, Jansoulet reminded him of
a pedestrian laden with gold passing through a wood haunted by thieves,
in the dark and unarmed. And he thought that it would be well for the
protégé to watch over the patron without seeming to do so, to be the
clear-sighted Telemachus of that blind Mentor, to point out the
pitfalls to him, to defend him against the brigands, in short to assist
him to fight in that swarm of nocturnal ambuscades which he felt to be
lurking savagely about the Nabob and his millions.
V.
THE JOYEUSE FAMILY.
Every morning in the year, at precisely eight o'clock, a new and almost
uninhabited house in an out-of-the-way quarter of Paris was filled with
shouts and cries and happy laughter that rang clear as crystal in the
desert of the hall.
"Father, don't forget my music."
"Father, my embroidery cotton."
"Father, bring us some rolls."
And the father's voice calling from below:
"Yaia, throw down my bag."
"Well, upon my word! he's forgotten his bag."
Thereupon there was joyous haste from top to bottom of the house, a
running to and fro of all those pretty faces, heavy-eyed with sleep, of
all those touzled locks which they put in order as they ran, up to the
very moment when a half-dozen of young girls, leaning over the rail,
bade an echoing farewell to a little old gentleman neatly dressed and
well brushed, whose florid face and slight figure disappeared at last
in the convolutions of the staircase. M. Joyeuse had gone to his
office. Thereupon the whole flock of fugitives from the bird-cage ran
quickly up to the fourth floor, and, after locking the door, gathered
at an open window to catch another glimpse of the father. The little
man turned, kisses were exchanged at a distance, then the windows were
closed; the new, deserted house became quiet once more except for the
signs dancing their wild saraband in the wind on the unfinished street,
as if they too were stirred to gayety by all that manoeuvring. A moment
later the photographer on the fifth floor came down to hang his
show-case at the door, always the same, with the old gentleman in the
white cravat surrounded by his daughters in varied groups; then he went
upstairs again in his turn, and the perfect calm succeeding that little
matutinal tumult suggested the thought that "the father" and his young
ladies had returned to the show-case, where they would remain
motionless and smiling, until evening.
From Rue Saint-Ferdinand to Messieurs Hemerlingue and Son's, his
employers, M. Joyeuse had a walk of three-quarters of an hour. He held
his head erect and stiff, as if he were afraid of disarranging the
lovely bow of his cravat, tied by his daughters, or his hat, put on by
them; and when the oldest, always anxious and prudent, turned up the
collar of his overcoat just as he was going out, to protect him against
the vicious gust of wind at the street corner, M. Joyeuse, even when
the temperature was that of a hothouse, never turned it down until he
reached the office, like the lover fresh from his mistress's embrace,
who dares not stir for fear of losing the intoxicating perfume.
The excellent man, a widower for some years, lived for his children
alone, thought only of them, went out into the world surrounded by
those little blond heads, which fluttered confusedly around him as in a
painting of the Assumption. All his desires, all his plans related to
"the young ladies" and constantly returned to them, sometimes after
long detours; for M. Joyeuse--doubtless because of his very short neck
and his short figure, in which his bubbling blood had but a short
circuit to make--possessed an astonishingly fertile imagination. Ideas
formed in his mind as rapidly as threshed straw collects around the
hopper. At the office the figures kept his mind fixed by their
unromantic rigidity; but once outside, it took its revenge for that
inexorable profession. The exercise of walking and familiarity with a
route of which he knew by heart the most trivial details, gave entire
liberty to his imaginative faculties, and he invented extraordinary
adventures, ample material for twenty newspaper novels.
Suppose, for example, that M. Joyeuse were walking through Faubourg
Saint-Honoré, on the right hand sidewalk--he always chose that
side--and espied a heavy laundress's cart going along at a smart trot,
driven by a countrywoman whose child, perched on a bundle of linen, was
leaning over the side.
"The child!" the good man would exclaim in dismay, "look out for the
child!"
His voice would be lost in the clatter of the wheels and his warning in
the secret design of Providence. The cart would pass on. He would look
after it for a moment, then go his way; but the drama begun in his mind
would go on unfolding itself there with numberless sudden changes. The
child had fallen. The wheels were just about to pass over him. M.
Joyeuse would dart forward, save the little creature on the very brink
of death, but the shaft would strike himself full in the breast, and he
would fall, bathed in his blood. Thereupon he would see himself carried
to the druggist's amid the crowd that had collected. They would place
him on a litter and carry him home, then suddenly he would hear the
heart-rending cry of his daughters, his beloved daughters, upon seeing
him in that condition. And that cry would go so straight to his heart,
he would hear it so distinctly, so vividly: "Papa, dear papa!" that he
would repeat it himself in the street, to the great surprise of the
passers-by, in a hoarse voice which would wake him from his
manufactured nightmare.
Would you like another instance of the vagaries of that prodigious
imagination? It rains, it hails; beastly weather. M. Joyeuse has taken
the omnibus to go to his office. As he takes his seat opposite a
species of giant, with brutish face and formidable biceps, M. Joyeuse,
an insignificant little creature, with his bag on his knees, draws in
his legs to make room for the enormous pillars that support his
neighbor's monumental trunk. In the jolting of the vehicle and the
pattering of the rain on the windows, M. Joyeuse begins to dream. And
suddenly the colossus opposite, who has a good-natured face enough, is
amazed to see the little man change color and glare at him with fierce,
murderous eyes, gnashing his teeth. Yes, murderous eyes in truth, for
at that moment M. Joyeuse is dreaming a terrible dream. One of his
daughters is sitting there, opposite him, beside that annoying brute,
and the villain is putting his arm around her waist under her cloak.
"Take your hand away, monsieur," M. Joyeuse has already said twice. The
other simply laughs contemptuously. Now he attempts to embrace Élise.
"Ah! villain!"
Lacking strength to defend his daughter, M. Joyeuse, foaming with rage,
feels in his pocket for his knife, stabs the insolent knave in the
breast, and goes away with head erect, strong in the consciousness of
his rights as an outraged father, to make his statement at the nearest
police-station.
"I have just killed a man in an omnibus!"
The poor fellow wakes at the sound of his own voice actually uttering
those sinister words, but not at the police-station; he realizes
from the horrified faces of the passengers that he must have spoken
aloud, and speedily avails himself of the conductor's call:
"Saint-Philippe--Panthéon--Bastille," to alight, in dire confusion and
amid general stupefaction.
That imagination, always on the alert, gave to M. Joyeuse's face a
strangely feverish, haggard expression, in striking contrast to the
faultlessly correct dress and bearing of the petty clerk. He lived
through so many passionate existences in a single day. Such waking
dreamers as he, in whom a too restricted destiny holds in check
unemployed forces, heroic faculties, are more numerous than is
generally supposed. Dreaming is the safety valve through which it all
escapes, with a terrible spluttering, an intensely hot vapor and
floating images which instantly disappear. Some come forth from these
visions radiant, others downcast and abashed, finding themselves once
more on the commonplace level of everyday life. M. Joyeuse was of the
former class, constantly soaring aloft to heights from which one cannot
descend without being a little shaken by the rapidity of the journey.
Now, one morning when our _Imaginaire_ had left his house at the usual
hour and under the usual circumstances, he started upon one of his
little private romances as he turned out of Rue Saint-Ferdinand. The
end of the year was close at hand, and, perhaps it was the sight of a
board shanty under construction in the neighboring woodyard that made
him think of "New Year's gifts." And thereupon the word _bonus_
planted itself in his mind, as the first landmark in an exciting story.
In the month of December all Hemerlingue's clerks received double pay,
and in small households, you know, a thousand ambitious or generous
projects are based upon such windfalls,--presents to be given, a piece
of furniture to be replaced, a small sum tucked away in a drawer for
unforeseen emergencies.
The fact is that M. Joyeuse was not rich. His wife, a Mademoiselle de
Saint-Amand, being tormented with aspirations for worldly grandeur, had
established the little household on a ruinous footing, and in the three
years since her death, although _Grandmamma_ had managed affairs so
prudently, they had not been able as yet to save anything, the burden
of the past was so heavy. Suddenly the excellent man fancied that the
honorarium would be larger than usual that year on account of the
increased work necessitated by the Tunisian loan. That loan was a very
handsome thing for his employers, too handsome indeed, for M. Joyeuse
had taken the liberty to say at the office that on that occasion
"Hemerlingue and Son had shaved the Turk a little too close."
"Yes, the bonus will certainly be doubled," thought the visionary as he
walked along; and already he saw himself, a month hence, ascending the
staircase leading to Hemerlingue's private office, with his
fellow-clerks, for their New Year's call. The banker announced the good
news; then he detained M. Joyeuse for a private interview. And lo! that
employer, usually so cold, and encased in his yellow fat as in a bale
of raw silk, became affectionate, fatherly, communicative. He wished to
know how many daughters Joyeuse had.
"I have three--that is to say, four, Monsieur le Baron. I always get
confused about them. The oldest one is such a little woman."
How old were they?
"Aline is twenty, Monsieur le Baron. She's the oldest. Then we have
Élise who is eighteen and preparing for her examination, Henriette who
is fourteen, and Zaza or Yaia who is only twelve."
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!
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.
We can fancy M. Joyeuse's torture when he was compelled to invent
incidents, to manufacture anecdotes concerning the villain who had
dismissed him so heartlessly after ten years of faithful service.
However, he played his little comedy in such way as to deceive them all
completely. They had noticed only one thing, and that was that their
father, on returning home at night, always had a hearty appetite for
the evening meal. I should say as much! Since he had lost his place,
the poor man had ceased to eat any luncheon.
The days passed. M. Joyeuse found nothing. Yes, he was offered a
clerkship at the _Caisse Territoriale_, which he declined, being too
well acquainted with the banking operations, with all the nooks and
corners of financial Bohemia in general and the _Caisse Territoriale_
in particular, to step foot in that den.
"But," said Passajon--for it was Passajon, who, happening to meet the
good man and finding that he was unemployed, had spoken to him of
taking service with Paganetti--"but I tell you again that it's all
right. We have plenty of money. We pay our debts. I have been paid;
just see what a dandy I am."
In truth, the old clerk had a new livery, and his paunch protruded
majestically beneath his tunic with silver buttons. For all that, M.
Joyeuse had withstood the temptation, even after Passajon, opening wide
his bulging eyes, had whispered with emphasis in his ear these words
big with promise:
"The Nabob is in it."
Even after that, M. Joyeuse had had the courage to say no. Was it not
better to die of hunger than to enter the service of an unsubstantial
house whose books he might some day be called upon to examine as an
expert before a court of justice?