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 brutal cupidity, both insolent and shrinking; in cultivated minds it fosters anti-social doctrines, which serve a man as footholds by which to rise above his superiors. May we not dignify with the title of proverb the pregnant saying, “Tell me what thou hast, and I will tell thee of what thou art thinking”?
Though Adolphe loved his wife, his hourly thought was: “I have made a mistake; I have three balls and chains, but I have only two legs. I ought to have made my fortune before I married. I could have found an Adeline any day; but Adeline stands in the way of my getting a fortune now.”
Adolphe had been to see his relation Gaubertin three times in three years. A few words exchanged between them let Gaubertin see the muck of a soul ready to ferment under the hot temptations of legal robbery. He warily sounded a nature that could be warped to the exigencies of any plan, provided it was profitable. At each of the three visits Sibilet grumbled at his fate.