“You must not think on that account that you can waste and pillage every thing,” he declared rudely. “Besides, I have greatly exaggerated.” And he started in search of a situation. To find one was likely to be difficult. Times of revolution are not exactly propitious to industry. Whilst the parties discussed in the Chamber, there were on the street twenty thousand clerks, who, every morning as they rose, wondered where they would dine that day. For want of any thing better, Vincent Favoral undertook to keep books in various places,--an hour here, an hour there, twice a week in one house, four times in another. In this way he earned as much and more than he did at the factory; but the business did not suit him. What he liked was the office from which one does not stir, the stove-heated atmosphere, the elbow-worn desk, the leather-cushioned chair, the black alpaca sleeves over the coat. The idea that he should on one and the same day have to do with five or six different houses, and be compelled to walk an hour, to go and work another hour at the other end of Paris, fairly irritated him. He found himself out of his reckoning, like a horse who has turned a mill for ten years; if he is made to trot straight before him. So, one morning, he gave up the whole thing, swearing that he would rather remain idle until he could find a place suited to his taste and his convenience; and, in the mean time, all they would have to do would be to put a little less butter in the soup, and a little more water in the wine. He went out, nevertheless, and remained until dinner-time. And he did the same the next and the following days. He started off the moment he had swallowed the last mouthful of his breakfast, came home at six o’clock, dined in haste, and disappeared again, not to return until about midnight. He had hours of delirious joy, and moments of frightful discouragement. Sometimes he seemed horribly uneasy. “What can he be doing?” thought Mme. Favoral. She ventured to ask him the question one morning, when he was in fine humor. “Well,” he answered, “am I not the master? I am operating at the bourse, that’s all!” He could hardly have owned to any thing that would have frightened the poor woman as much. “Are you not afraid,” she objected, “to lose all we have so painfully accumulated? We have children--” He did not allow her to proceed. “Do you take me for a child?” he exclaimed; “or do I look to you like a man so easy to be duped? Mind to economize in your household expenses, and don’t meddle with my business.”