, guesses from the bewildered manner
of the passengers that he must have spoken the words aloud,
and very quickly takes advantage of the conductor's call,
"Saint-Philippe--Pantheon--Bastille--" to alight, feeling greatly
confused, amid general stupefaction.

This imagination constantly on the stretch, gave to M. Joyeuse a
singular physiognomy, feverish and worn, in strong contrast with the
general correct appearance of a subordinate clerk which he presented.
In one day he lived so many passionate existences. The race is more
numerous than one thinks of these waking dreamers, in whom a too
restricted fate compresses forces unemployed and heroic faculties.
Dreaming is the safety-valve through which all those expend themselves
with terrible ebullitions, as of the vapour of a furnace and floating
images that are forthwith dissipated into air. From these visions
some return radiant, others exhausted and discouraged, as they find
themselves once more on the every-day level. M. Joyeuse was of these
latter, rising without ceasing to heights whence a man cannot but
re-descend, somewhat bruised by the velocity of the transit.

Now, one morning that our "visionary" had left his house at his habitual
hour, and under the usual circumstances, he began at the turning of the
Rue Saint-Ferdinand one of his little private romances. As the end of
the year was at hand, perhaps it was the hammer-strokes on a wooden hut
which was being erected in the neighbouring timber-yard that caused his
thoughts to turn to "presents--New Year's Day." And immediately the word
bounty implanted itself in his mind as the first landmark of a marvelous
story. In the month of December all persons in Hemerlingue's service
received double pay, and you know that in small households there are
founded on windfalls of this kind a thousand projects, ambitious or
kind, presents to be made, a piece of furniture to be replaced, a little
sum of money to be saved in a drawer against the unforeseen.

In simple fact, M. Joyeuse was not rich. His wife, a Mlle. de
Saint-Armand, tormented with ideas of greatness and society, had set
this little clerk's household on a ruinous footing, and though since her
death three years had passed during which Bonne Maman had managed the
housekeeping with so much wisdom, they had not yet been able to save
anything, so heavy had proved the burden of the past. Suddenly it
occurred to the good fellow that this year the bounty would be larger