expense
of either Pons or Schmucke.

Pons very occasionally put in an appearance in the _foyer_; but all that
Schmucke knew of the theatre was the underground passage from the street
door to the orchestra. Sometimes, however, during an interval, the
good German would venture to make a survey of the house and ask a few
questions of the first flute, a young fellow from Strasbourg, who
came of a German family at Kehl. Gradually under the flute's tuition
Schmucke's childlike imagination acquired a certain amount of knowledge
of the world; he could believe in the existence of that fabulous
creature the _lorette_, the possibility of "marriages at the Thirteenth
Arrondissement," the vagaries of the leading lady, and the contraband
traffic carried on by box-openers. In his eyes the more harmless forms
of vice were the lowest depths of Babylonish iniquity; he did not
believe the stories, he smiled at them for grotesque inventions. The
ingenious reader can see that Pons and Schmucke were exploited, to use
a word much in fashion; but what they lost in money they gained in
consideration and kindly treatment.

It was after the success of the ballet with which a run of success began
for the Gaudissart Company that the management presented Pons with a
piece of plate--a group of figures attributed to Benvenuto Cellini. The
alarming costliness of the gift caused talk in the green-room. It was
a matter of twelve hundred francs! Pons, poor honest soul, was for
returning the present, and Gaudissart had a world of trouble to persuade
him to keep it.

"Ah!" said the manager afterwards, when he told his partner of the
interview, "if we could only find actors up to that sample."

In their joint life, outwardly so quiet, there was the one disturbing
element--the weakness to which Pons sacrificed, the insatiable craving
to dine out. Whenever Schmucke happened to be at home while Pons was
dressing for the evening, the good German would bewail this deplorable
habit.

"Gif only he vas ony fatter vor it!" he many a time cried.

And Schmucke would dream of curing his friend of his degrading vice,
for a true friend's instinct in all that belongs to the inner life is
unerring as a dog's sense of smell; a friend knows by intuition the
trouble in his friend's soul, and guesses at the cause and ponders it in
his heart.

Pons, who always wore a diamond ring on the little finger of his right
hand, an ornament permitted in the time of the Empire, bu