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-Honore, 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.