f digestion upon the human economy
produce an internal wrestling-bout of human forces which rivals the
highest degree of amorous pleasure. The gastronome is conscious of an
expenditure of vital power, an expenditure so vast that the brain is
atrophied (as it were), that a second brain, located in the diaphragm,
may come into play, and the suspension of all the faculties is in itself
a kind of intoxication. A boa constrictor gorged with an ox is so stupid
with excess that the creature is easily killed. What man, on the wrong
side of forty, is rash enough to work after dinner? And remark in the
same connection, that all great men have been moderate eaters. The
exhilarating effect of the wing of a chicken upon invalids recovering
from serious illness, and long confined to a stinted and carefully
chosen diet, has been frequently remarked. The sober Pons, whose whole
enjoyment was concentrated in the exercise of his digestive organs, was
in the position of chronic convalescence; he looked to his dinner to
give him the utmost degree of pleasurable sensation, and hitherto he had
procured such sensations daily. Who dares to bid farewell to old
habit? Many a man on the brink of suicide has been plucked back on the
threshold of death by the thought of the cafe where he plays his nightly
game of dominoes.

In the year 1835, chance avenged Pons for the indifference of womankind
by finding him a prop for his declining years, as the saying goes; and
he, who had been old from his cradle, found a support in friendship.
Pons took to himself the only life-partner permitted to him among his
kind--an old man and a fellow-musician.

But for La Fontaine's fable, _Les Deux Amis_, this sketch should have
borne the title of _The Two Friends_; but to take the name of this
divine story would surely be a deed of violence, a profanation from
which every true man of letters would shrink. The title ought to be
borne alone and for ever by the fabulist's masterpiece, the revelation
of his soul, and the record of his dreams; those three words were set
once and for ever by the poet at the head of a page which is his by
a sacred right of ownership; for it is a shrine before which all
generations, all over the world, will kneel so long as the art of
printing shall endure.

Pons' friend gave lessons on the pianoforte. They met and struck up
an acquaintance in 1834, one prize day at a boarding-school; and so
congenial were their ways of thinking and livin