It was after the success of the ballet with which a run of success began for the Gaudissart Company that the management presented Pons with a piece of plate—­a group of figures attributed to Benvenuto Cellini.  The alarming costliness of the gift caused talk in the green-room.  It was a matter of twelve hundred francs!  Pons, poor honest soul, was for returning the present, and Gaudissart had a world of trouble to persuade him to keep it.

“Ah!” said the manager afterwards, when he told his partner of the interview, “if we could only find actors up to that sample.”

In their joint life, outwardly so quiet, there was the one disturbing element—­the weakness to which Pons sacrificed, the insatiable craving to dine out.  Whenever Schmucke happened to be at home while Pons was dressing for the evening, the good German would bewail this deplorable habit.

“Gif only he vas ony fatter vor it!” he many a time cried.

And Schmucke would dream of curing his friend of his degrading vice, for a true friend’s instinct in all that belongs to the inner life is unerring as a dog’s sense of smell; a friend knows by intuition the trouble in his friend’s soul, and guesses at the cause and ponders it in his heart.

Pons, who always wore a diamond ring on the little finger of his right hand, an ornament permitted in the time of the Empire, but ridiculous to-day—­Pons, who belonged to the “troubadour time,” the sentimental periods of the first Empire, was too much a child of his age, too much of a Frenchman to wear the expression of divine serenity which softened Schmucke’s hideous ugliness.  From Pons’ melancholy looks Schmucke knew that the profession of parasite was growing daily more difficult and painful.  And, in fact, in that month of October 1844, the number of houses at which Pons dined was naturally much restricted; reduced to move round and round the family circle, he had used the word family in far too wide a sense, as will shortly be seen.

M. Camusot, the rich silk mercer of the Rue des Bourdonnais, had married Pons’ first cousin, Mlle. Pons, only child and heiress of one of the well-known firm of Pons Brothers, court embroiderers.  Pons’ own father and mother retired from a firm founded before the Revolution of 1789, leaving their capital in the business until Mlle. Pons’ father sold it in 1815 to M. Rivet.  M. Camusot had since lost his wife and married again, and retired from business some ten years, and now in 1844 he was a member of the Board of Trade, a deputy, and what not.  But the Camusot clan were friendly; and Pons, good man, still considered that he was some kind of cousin to the children of the second marriage, who were not relations, or even connected with him in any way.