cost what it might, a good dinner that satisfied his palate
was a necessity to him, even as your gay Lothario must have a mistress
to tease.

In time Schmucke understood; not just at once, for he was too much of
a Teuton to possess that gift of swift perception in which the French
rejoice; Schmucke understood and loved poor Pons the better. Nothing so
fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is
superior to the other. An angel could not have found a word to say to
Schmucke rubbing his hands over the discovery of the hold that
gluttony had gained over Pons. Indeed, the good German adorned their
breakfast-table next morning with delicacies of which he went in search
himself; and every day he was careful to provide something new for his
friend, for they always breakfasted together at home.

If any one imagines that the pair could not escape ridicule in Paris,
where nothing is respected, he cannot know that city. When Schmucke
and Pons united their riches and poverty, they hit upon the economical
expedient of lodging together, each paying half the rent of the very
unequally divided second-floor of a house in the Rue de Normandie in the
Marais. And as it often happened that they left home together and walked
side by side along their beat of boulevard, the idlers of the quarter
dubbed them "the pair of nutcrackers," a nickname which makes any
portrait of Schmucke quite superfluous, for he was to Pons as the famous
statue of the Nurse of Niobe in the Vatican is to the Tribune Venus.

Mme. Cibot, portress of the house in the Rue de Normandie, was the pivot
on which the domestic life of the nutcrackers turned; but Mme. Cibot
plays so large a part in the drama which grew out of their double
existence, that it will be more appropriate to give her portrait on her
first appearance in this Scene of Parisian Life.

One thing remains to be said of the characters of the pair of friends;
but this one thing is precisely the hardest to make clear to ninety-nine
readers out of a hundred in this forty-seventh year of the nineteenth
century, perhaps by reason of the prodigious financial development
brought about by the railway system. It is a little thing, and yet it
is so much. It is a question, in fact, of giving an idea of the extreme
sensitiveness of their natures. Let us borrow an illustration from the
railways, if only by way of retaliation, as it were, for the loans which
they levy upon us. The railway tr