So Schmucke was fain to bury his chagrin beneath the flowers of his German philosophy; but a week later he grew so yellow that Mme. Cibot exerted her ingenuity to call in the parish doctor.  The leech had fears of icterus, and left Mme. Cibot frightened half out of her wits by the Latin word for an attack of the jaundice.

Meantime the two friends went out to dinner together, perhaps for the first time in their lives.  For Schmucke it was a return to the Fatherland; for Johann Graff of the Hotel du Rhin and his daughter Emilie, Wolfgang Graff the tailor and his wife, Fritz Brunner and Wilhelm Schwab, were Germans, and Pons and the notary were the only Frenchmen present at the banquet.  The Graffs of the tailor’s business owned a splendid house in the Rue de Richelieu, between the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs and the Rue Villedo; they had brought up their niece, for Emilie’s father, not without reason, had feared contact with the very mixed society of an inn for his daughter.  The good tailor Graffs, who loved Emilie as if she had been their own daughter, were giving up the ground floor of their great house to the young couple, and here the bank of Brunner, Schwab and Company was to be established.  The arrangements for the marriage had been made about a month ago; some time must elapse before Fritz Brunner, author of all this felicity, could settle his deceased father’s affairs, and the famous firm of tailors had taken advantage of the delay to redecorate the first floor and to furnish it very handsomely for the bride and bridegroom.  The offices of the bank had been fitted into the wing which united a handsome business house with the hotel at the back, between courtyard and garden.

On the way from the Rue de Normandie to the Rue de Richelieu, Pons drew from the abstracted Schmucke the details of the story of the modern prodigal son, for whom Death had killed the fatted innkeeper.  Pons, but newly reconciled with his nearest relatives, was immediately smitten with a desire to make a match between Fritz Brunner and Cecile de Marville.  Chance ordained that the notary was none other than Berthier, old Cardot’s son-in-law and successor, the sometime second clerk with whom Pons had been wont to dine.

“Ah!  M. Berthier, you here!” he said, holding out a hand to his host of former days.

“We have not had the pleasure of seeing you at dinner lately; how is it?” returned the notary.  “My wife has been anxious about you.  We saw you at the first performance of The Devil’s Betrothed, and our anxiety became curiosity?”

“Old folk are sensitive,” replied the worthy musician; “they make the mistake of being a century behind the times, but how can it be helped?  It is quite enough to represent one century—­they cannot entirely belong to the century which sees them die.”

“Ah!” said the notary, with a shrewd look, “one cannot run two centuries at once.”

“By the by,” continued Pons, drawing the young lawyer into a corner, “why do you not find some one for my cousin Cecile de Marville—­”