lain went, you may be sure, to thank Count Popinot; but as Count
Popinot's family physician was the celebrated Horace Bianchon, it was
pretty clear that his chances of gaining a footing in that house were
something of the slenderest. The poor doctor had fondly hoped for the
patronage of a powerful cabinet minister, one of the twelve or fifteen
cards which a cunning hand has been shuffling for sixteen years on the
green baize of the council table, and now he dropped back again into his
Marais, his old groping life among the poor and the small tradespeople,
with the privilege of issuing certificates of death for a yearly stipend
of twelve hundred francs.

Dr. Poulain had distinguished himself to some extent as a house-student;
he was a prudent practitioner, and not without experience. His deaths
caused no scandal; he had plenty of opportunities of studying all kinds
of complaints _in anima vili_. Judge, therefore, of the spleen that
he nourished! The expression of his countenance, lengthy and not
too cheerful to begin with, at times was positively appalling. Set a
Tartuffe's all-devouring eyes, and the sour humor of an Alceste in
a sallow-parchment visage, and try to imagine for yourself the gait,
bearing, and expression of a man who thought himself as good a doctor as
the illustrious Bianchon, and felt that he was held down in his narrow
lot by an iron hand. He could not help comparing his receipts (ten
francs a day if he was fortunate) with Bianchon's five or six hundred.

Are the hatreds and jealousies of democracy incomprehensible after this?
Ambitious and continually thwarted, he could not reproach himself.
He had once already tried his fortune by inventing a purgative pill,
something like Morrison's, and intrusted the business operations to an
old hospital chum, a house-student who afterwards took a retail drug
business; but, unluckily, the druggist, smitten with the charms of a
ballet-dancer of the Ambigu-Comique, found himself at length in the
bankruptcy court; and as the patent had been taken out in his name,
his partner was literally without a remedy, and the important discovery
enriched the purchaser of the business. The sometime house-student set
sail for Mexico, that land of gold, taking poor Poulain's little savings
with him; and, to add insult to injury, the opera-dancer treated him as
an extortioner when he applied to her for his money.

Not a single rich patient had come to him since he had the luck to c