t ridiculous
to-day--Pons, who belonged to the "troubadour time," the sentimental
periods of the first Empire, was too much a child of his age, too much
of a Frenchman to wear the expression of divine serenity which softened
Schmucke's hideous ugliness. From Pons' melancholy looks Schmucke knew
that the profession of parasite was growing daily more difficult and
painful. And, in fact, in that month of October 1844, the number of
houses at which Pons dined was naturally much restricted; reduced to
move round and round the family circle, he had used the word family in
far too wide a sense, as will shortly be seen.

M. Camusot, the rich silk mercer of the Rue des Bourdonnais, had married
Pons' first cousin, Mlle. Pons, only child and heiress of one of the
well-known firm of Pons Brothers, court embroiderers. Pons' own father
and mother retired from a firm founded before the Revolution of 1789,
leaving their capital in the business until Mlle. Pons' father sold
it in 1815 to M. Rivet. M. Camusot had since lost his wife and married
again, and retired from business some ten years, and now in 1844 he was
a member of the Board of Trade, a deputy, and what not. But the Camusot
clan were friendly; and Pons, good man, still considered that he was
some kind of cousin to the children of the second marriage, who were not
relations, or even connected with him in any way.

The second Mme. Camusot being a Mlle. Cardot, Pons introduced himself as
a relative into the tolerably numerous Cardot family, a second bourgeois
tribe which, taken with its connections, formed quite as strong a clan
as the Camusots; for Cardot the notary (brother of the second Mme.
Camusot) had married a Mlle. Chiffreville; and the well-known family of
Chiffreville, the leading firm of manufacturing chemists, was closely
connected with the whole drug trade, of which M. Anselme Popinot was for
many years the undisputed head, until the Revolution of July plunged him
into the very centre of the dynastic movement, as everybody knows.
So Pons, in the wake of the Camusots and Cardots, reached the
Chiffrevilles, and thence the Popinots, always in the character of a
cousin's cousin.

The above concise statement of Pons' relations with his entertainers
explains how it came to pass that an old musician was received in 1844
as one of the family in the houses of four distinguished persons--to
wit, M. le Comte Popinot, peer of France, and twice in office; M.
Cardot, retired n