“He will be uncommonly hard to please,” said La Cibot.

“Look here, mind what I tell you,” the doctor said in a tone of authority, “M.  Pons’ life is in the hands of those that nurse him; I shall come perhaps twice a day.  I shall take him first on my round.”

The doctor’s profound indifference to the fate of a poor patient had suddenly given place to a most tender solicitude when he saw that the speculator was serious, and that there was a possible fortune in question.

“He will be nursed like a king,” said Madame Cibot, forcing up enthusiasm.  She waited till the doctor turned the corner into the Rue Charlot; then she fell to talking again with the dealer in old iron.  Remonencq had finished smoking his pipe, and stood in the doorway of his shop, leaning against the frame; he had purposely taken this position; he meant the portress to come to him.

The shop had once been a cafe.  Nothing had been changed there since the Auvergnat discovered it and took over the lease; you could still read “Cafe de Normandie” on the strip left above the windows in all modern shops.  Remonencq had found somebody, probably a housepainter’s apprentice, who did the work for nothing, to paint another inscription in the remaining space below—­“REMONENCQ,” it ran, “DEALER IN MARINE STORES, FURNITURE BOUGHT”—­painted in small black letters.  All the mirrors, tables, seats, shelves, and fittings of the Cafe de Normandie had been sold, as might have been expected, before Remonencq took possession of the shop as it stood, paying a yearly rent of six hundred francs for the place, with a back shop, a kitchen, and a single room above, where the head-waiter used to sleep, for the house belonging to the Cafe de Normandie was let separately.  Of the former splendor of the cafe, nothing now remained save the plain light green paper on the walls, and the strong iron bolts and bars of the shop-front.

When Remonencq came hither in 1831, after the Revolution of July, he began by displaying a selection of broken doorbells, cracked plates, old iron, and the obsolete scales and weights abolished by a Government which alone fails to carry out its own regulations, for pence and half pence of the time of Louis XVI. are still in circulation.  After a time this Auvergnat, a match for five ordinary Auvergnats, bought up old saucepans and kettles, old picture-frames, old copper, and chipped china.  Gradually, as the shop was emptied and filled, the quality of the stock-in-trade improved, like Nicolet’s farces.  Remonencq persisted in an unfailing and prodigiously profitable martingale, a “system” which any philosophical idler may study as he watches the increasing value of the stock kept by this intelligent class of trader.  Picture-frames and copper succeed to tin-ware, argand lamps, and damaged crockery; china marks the next transition; and after no long tarriance in the “omnium gatherum” stage, the shop becomes a museum.  Some day or other the dusty windows are cleaned, the