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,