es.

Adeline Sarcus, a pretty young woman, brought up by a mother (who died
three years before her marriage) as well as a mother can educate an only
daughter in a remote country town, was in love with the handsome son
of Lupin, the Soulanges notary. At the first signs of this romance, old
Lupin, who intended to marry his son to Mademoiselle Elise Gaubertin,
lost no time in sending young Amaury Lupin to Paris, to the care of his
friend and correspondent Crottat, the notary, where, under pretext of
drawing deeds and contracts, Amaury committed a variety of foolish acts,
and made debts, being led thereto by a certain Georges Marest, a clerk
in the same office, but a rich young man, who revealed to him the
mysteries of Parisian life. By the time Lupin the elder went to Paris to
bring back his son, Adeline Sarcus had become Madame Sibilet. In
fact, when the adoring Adolphe offered himself, her father, the old
magistrate, prompted by young Lupin's father, hastened the marriage, to
which Adeline yielded in sheer despair.

The situation of clerk in a government registration office is not a
career. It is, like other such places which admit of no rise, one of
the many holes of the government sieve. Those who start in life in
these holes (the topographical, the professorial, the highway-and-canal
departments) are apt to discover, invariably too late, that cleverer men
then they, seated beside them, are fed, as the Opposition writers say,
on the sweat of the people, every time the sieve dips down into the
taxation-pot by means of a machine called the budget. Adolphe, working
early and late and earning little, soon found out the barren depths
of his hole; and his thoughts busied themselves, as he trotted from
township to township, spending his salary in shoe-leather and costs of
travelling, with how to find a permanent and more profitable place.

No one can imagine, unless he happens to squint and to have two
legitimate children, what ambitions three years of misery and love had
developed in this young man, who squinted both in mind and vision,
and whose happiness halted, as it were, on one leg. The chief cause
of secret evil deeds and hidden meanness is, perhaps, an incompleted
happiness. Man can better bear a state of hopeless misery than those
terrible alternations of love and sunshine with continual rain. If the
body contracts disease, the mind contracts the leprosy of envy. In petty
minds that leprosy becomes a base and bruta