For nearly three months Pons and Schmucke dined together every day.  Pons was obliged to retrench at once; for dinner at forty-five francs a month and wine at thirty-five meant precisely eighty francs less to spend on bric-a-brac.  And very soon, in spite of all that Schmucke could do, in spite of his little German jokes, Pons fell to regretting the delicate dishes, the liqueurs, the good coffee, the table talk, the insincere politeness, the guests, and the gossip, and the houses where he used to dine.  On the wrong side of sixty a man cannot break himself of a habit of thirty-six years’ growth.  Wine at a hundred and thirty francs per hogshead is scarcely a generous liquid in a gourmet’s glass; every time that Pons raised it to his lips he thought, with infinite regret, of the exquisite wines in his entertainers’ cellars.

In short, at the end of three months, the cruel pangs which had gone near to break Pons’ sensitive heart had died away; he forgot everything but the charms of society; and languished for them like some elderly slave of a petticoat compelled to leave the mistress who too repeatedly deceives him.  In vain he tried to hide his profound and consuming melancholy; it was too plain that he was suffering from one of the mysterious complaints which the mind brings upon the body.

A single symptom will throw light upon this case of nostalgia (as it were) produced by breaking away from an old habit; in itself it is trifling, one of the myriad nothings which are as rings in a coat of chain-mail enveloping the soul in a network of iron.  One of the keenest pleasures of Pons’ old life, one of the joys of the dinner-table parasite at all times, was the “surprise,” the thrill produced by the extra dainty dish added triumphantly to the bill of fare by the mistress of a bourgeois house, to give a festal air to the dinner.  Pons’ stomach hankered after that gastronomical satisfaction.  Mme. Cibot, in the pride of her heart, enumerated every dish beforehand; a salt and savor once periodically recurrent, had vanished utterly from daily life.  Dinner proceeded without le plat couvert, as our grandsires called it.  This lay beyond the bounds of Schmucke’s powers of comprehension.

Pons had too much delicacy to grumble; but if the case of unappreciated genius is hard, it goes harder still with the stomach whose claims are ignored.  Slighted affection, a subject of which too much has been made, is founded upon an illusory longing; for if the creature fails, love can turn to the Creator who has treasures to bestow.  But the stomach! . . .  Nothing can be compared to its sufferings; for, in the first place, one must live.