“Yes, if this shock has not been too much for him.”

“Poor man! who can have vexed him?  There isn’t nobody like him on earth except his friend M. Schmucke.  I will find out what is the matter, and I will undertake to give them that upset my gentleman a hauling over the coals—­”

“Look here, my dear Mme. Cibot,” said the doctor as they stood in the gateway, “one of the principal symptoms of his complaint is great irritability; and as it is hardly to be supposed that he can afford a nurse, the task of nursing him will fall to you.  So—­”

“Are you talking of Mouchieu Ponsh?” asked the marine store-dealer.  He was sitting smoking on the curb-post in the gateway, and now he rose to join in the conversation.

“Yes, Daddy Remonencq.”

“All right,” said Remonencq, “ash to moneysh, he ish better off than Mouchieu Monishtrol and the big men in the curioshity line.  I know enough in the art line to tell you thish—­the dear man has treasursh!” he spoke with a broad Auvergne dialect.

“Look here, I thought you were laughing at me the other day when my gentlemen were out and I showed you the old rubbish upstairs,” said Mme. Cibot.

In Paris, where walls have ears, where doors have tongues, and window bars have eyes, there are few things more dangerous than the practice of standing to chat in a gateway.  Partings are like postscripts to a letter—­indiscreet utterances that do as much mischief to the speaker as to those who overhear them.  A single instance will be sufficient as a parallel to an event in this history.

In the time of the Empire, when men paid considerable attention to their hair, one of the first coiffeurs of the day came out of a house where he had just been dressing a pretty woman’s head.  This artist in question enjoyed the custom of all the lower floor inmates of the house; and among these, there flourished an elderly bachelor guarded by a housekeeper who detested her master’s next-of-kin.  The ci-devant young man, falling seriously ill, the most famous of doctors of the day (they were not as yet styled the “princes of science”) had been called in to consult upon his case; and it so chanced that the learned gentlemen were taking leave of one another in the gateway just as the hairdresser came out.  They were talking as doctors usually talk among themselves when the farce of a consultation is over.  “He is a dead man,” quoth Dr. Haudry.—­“He had not a month to live,” added Desplein, “unless a miracle takes place.”—­These were the words overheard by the hairdresser.

Like all hairdressers, he kept up a good understanding with his customers’ servants.  Prodigious greed sent the man upstairs again; he mounted to the ci-devant young man’s apartment, and promised the servant-mistress a tolerably handsome commission to persuade her master to sink a large portion of his money in an annuity.  The dying bachelor, fifty-six by count of years, and twice as old as his