ot break
himself of a habit of thirty-six years' growth. Wine at a hundred and
thirty francs per hogshead is scarcely a generous liquid in a
_gourmet's_ glass; every time that Pons raised it to his lips he
thought, with infinite regret, of the exquisite wines in his
entertainers' cellars.

In short, at the end of three months, the cruel pangs which had gone
near to break Pons' sensitive heart had died away; he forgot
everything but the charms of society; and languished for them like
some elderly slave of a petticoat compelled to leave the mistress who
too repeatedly deceives him. In vain he tried to hide his profound and
consuming melancholy; it was too plain that he was suffering from one
of the mysterious complaints which the mind brings upon the body.

A single symptom will throw light upon this case of nostalgia (as it
were) produced by breaking away from an old habit; in itself it is
trifling, one of the myriad nothings which are as rings in a coat of
chain-mail enveloping the soul in a network of iron. One of the
keenest pleasures of Pons' old life, one of the joys of the
dinner-table parasite at all times, was the "surprise," the thrill
produced by the extra dainty dish added triumphantly to the bill of
fare by the mistress of a bourgeois house, to give a festal air to the
dinner. Pons' stomach hankered after that gastronomical satisfaction.
Mme. Cibot, in the pride of her heart, enumerated every dish beforehand;
a salt and savor once periodically recurrent, had vanished utterly from
daily life. Dinner proceeded without _le plat couvert_, as our
grandsires called it. This lay beyond the bounds of Schmucke's powers
of comprehension.

Pons had too much delicacy to grumble; but if the case of
unappreciated genius is hard, it goes harder still with the stomach
whose claims are ignored. Slighted affection, a subject of which too
much has been made, is founded upon an illusory longing; for if the
creature fails, love can turn to the Creator who has treasures to
bestow. But the stomach! . . . Nothing can be compared to its
sufferings; for, in the first place, one must live.

Pons thought wistfully of certain creams--surely the poetry of
cookery!--of certain white sauces, masterpieces of the art; of
truffled chickens, fit to melt your heart; and above these, and more
than all these, of the famous Rhine carp, only known at Paris, served
with what condiments! There were days when Pons, thinking upon Count
Popinot's c