“Oh! a little stout man who sent his servants to beg your pardon--for his wife’s blunder?--The housemaid came asking me questions about you, an affected old creature she is, my fingers itched to give her velvet tippet a dusting with my broom handle! A servant wearing a velvet tippet! did anybody ever see the like? No, upon my word, the world is turned upside down; what is the use of making a Revolution? Dine twice a day if you can afford it, you scamps of rich folk! But laws are no good, I tell you, and nothing will be safe if Louis-Philippe does not keep people in their places; for, after all, if we are all equal, eh, sir? a housemaid didn’t ought to have a velvet tippet, while I, Mme. Cibot, haven’t one, after thirty years of honest work.--There is a pretty thing for you! People ought to be able to tell who you are. A housemaid is a housemaid, just as I myself am a portress. Why do they have silk epaulettes in the army? Let everybody keep their place. Look here, do you want me to tell you what all this comes to? Very well, France is going to the dogs.... If the Emperor had been here, things would have been very different, wouldn’t they, sir?... So I said to Cibot, I said, ‘See here, Cibot, a house where the servants wear velvet tippets belongs to people that have no heart in them--’” “No heart in them, that is just it,” repeated Pons. And with that he began to tell Mme. Cibot about his troubles and mortifications, she pouring out abuse of the relations the while and showing exceeding tenderness on every fresh sentence in the sad history. She fairly wept at last. To understand the sudden intimacy between the old musician and Mme. Cibot, you have only to imagine the position of an old bachelor lying on his bed of pain, seriously ill for the first time in his life. Pons felt that he was alone in the world; the days that he spent by himself were all the longer because he was struggling with the indefinable nausea of a liver complaint which blackens the brightest life. Cut off from all his many interests, the sufferer falls a victim to a kind of nostalgia; he regrets the many sights to be seen for nothing in Paris. The isolation, the darkened days, the suffering that affects the mind and spirits even more than the body, the emptiness of the life,--all these things tend to induce him to cling to the human being who waits on him as a drowned man clings to a plank; and this especially if the bachelor patient’s character is as weak as his nature is sensitive and incredulous.