No one imagines how the requirements of the law jar upon a heartfelt sorrow.  The thought of it is enough to make one turn from civilization and choose rather the customs of the savage.  At nine o’clock that morning Mme. Sauvage half-carried Schmucke downstairs, and from the cab he was obliged to beg Remonencq to come with him to the registrar as a second witness.  Here in Paris, in this land of ours besotted with Equality, the inequality of conditions is glaringly apparent everywhere and in everything.  The immutable tendency of things peeps out even in the practical aspects of Death.  In well-to-do families, a relative, a friend, or a man of business spares the mourners these painful details; but in this, as in the matter of taxation, the whole burden falls heaviest upon the shoulders of the poor.

“Ah! you have good reason to regret him,” said Remonencq in answer to the poor martyr’s moan; “he was a very good, a very honest man, and he has left a fine collection behind him.  But being a foreigner, sir, do you know that you are like to find yourself in a great predicament —­for everybody says that M. Pons left everything to you?”

Schmucke was not listening.  He was sounding the dark depths of sorrow that border upon madness.  There is such a thing as tetanus of the soul.

“And you would do well to find some one—­some man of business—­to advise you and act for you,” pursued Remonencq.

“Ein mann of pizness!” echoed Schmucke.

“You will find that you will want some one to act for you.  If I were you, I should take an experienced man, somebody well known to you in the quarter, a man you can trust. . . .  I always go to Tabareau myself for my bits of affairs—­he is the bailiff.  If you give his clerk power to act for you, you need not trouble yourself any further.”

Remonencq and La Cibot, prompted by Fraisier, had agreed beforehand to make a suggestion which stuck in Schmucke’s memory; for there are times in our lives when grief, as it were, congeals the mind by arresting all its functions, and any chance impression made at such moments is retained by a frost-bound memory.  Schmucke heard his companion with such a fixed, mindless stare, that Remonencq said no more.

“If he is always to be idiotic like this,” thought Remonencq, “I might easily buy the whole bag of tricks up yonder for a hundred thousand francs; if it is really his. . . .  Here we are at the mayor’s office, sir.”

Remonencq was obliged to take Schmucke out of the cab and to half-carry him to the registrar’s department, where a wedding-party was assembled.  Here they had to wait for their turn, for, by no very uncommon chance, the clerk had five or six certificates to make out that morning; and here it was appointed that poor Schmucke should suffer excruciating anguish.

“Monsieur is M. Schmucke?” remarked a person in a suit of black, reducing Schmucke to stupefaction by the mention of his name.  He looked up with the same blank, unseeing eyes that he had turned upon Remonencq, who now interposed.