One thing remains to be said of the characters of the pair of friends; but this one thing is precisely the hardest to make clear to ninety-nine readers out of a hundred in this forty-seventh year of the nineteenth century, perhaps by reason of the prodigious financial development brought about by the railway system.  It is a little thing, and yet it is so much.  It is a question, in fact, of giving an idea of the extreme sensitiveness of their natures.  Let us borrow an illustration from the railways, if only by way of retaliation, as it were, for the loans which they levy upon us.  The railway train of to-day, tearing over the metals, grinds away fine particles of dust, grains so minute that a traveler cannot detect them with the eye; but let a single one of those invisible motes find its way into the kidneys, it will bring about that most excruciating, and sometimes fatal, disease known as gravel.  And our society, rushing like a locomotive along its metaled track, is heedless of the all but imperceptible dust made by the grinding of the wheels; but it was otherwise with the two musicians; the invisible grains of sand sank perpetually into the very fibres of their being, causing them intolerable anguish of heart.  Tender exceedingly to the pain of others, they wept for their own powerlessness to help; and their own susceptibilities were almost morbidly acute.  Neither age nor the continual spectacle of the drama of Paris life had hardened two souls still young and childlike and pure; the longer they lived, indeed, the more keenly they felt their inward suffering; for so it is, alas! with natures unsullied by the world, with the quiet thinker, and with such poets among the poets as have never fallen into any excess.

Since the old men began housekeeping together, the day’s routine was very nearly the same for them both.  They worked together in harness in the fraternal fashion of the Paris cab-horse; rising every morning, summer and winter, at seven o’clock, and setting out after breakfast to give music lessons in the boarding-schools, in which, upon occasion, they would take lessons for each other.  Towards noon Pons repaired to his theatre, if there was a rehearsal on hand; but all his spare moments were spent in sauntering on the boulevards.  Night found both of them in the orchestra at the theatre, for Pons had found a place for Schmucke, and upon this wise.

At the time of their first meeting, Pons had just received that marshal’s baton of the unknown musical composer—­an appointment as conductor of an orchestra.  It had come to him unasked, by a favor of Count Popinot, a bourgeois hero of July, at that time a member of the Government.  Count Popinot had the license of a theatre in his gift, and Count Popinot had also an old acquaintance of the kind that the successful man blushes to meet.  As he rolls through the streets of Paris in his carriage, it is not pleasant to see his boyhood’s chum down at heel, with a coat of many improbable colors