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.

Pons was charmed to hear La Cibot’s tittle-tattle.  Schmucke, Mme. Cibot, and Dr. Poulain meant all humanity to him now, when his sickroom became the universe.  If invalid’s thoughts, as a rule, never travel beyond in the little space over which his eyes can wander; if their selfishness, in its narrow sphere, subordinates all creatures and all things to itself, you can imagine the lengths to which an old bachelor may go.  Before three weeks were out he had even gone so far as to regret, once and again, that he had not married Madeleine Vivet!  Mme. Cibot, too, had made immense progress in his esteem in those three weeks; without her he felt that he should have been utterly lost; for as for Schmucke, the poor invalid looked upon him as a second Pons.  La Cibot’s prodigious art consisted in expressing Pons’ own ideas, and this she did quite unconsciously.

“Ah! here comes the doctor!” she exclaimed, as the bell rang, and away she went, knowing very well that Remonencq had come with the Jew.

“Make no noise, gentlemen,” said she, “he must not know anything.  He is all on the fidget when his precious treasures are concerned.”

“A walk round will be enough,” said the Hebrew, armed with a magnifying-glass and a lorgnette.

The greater part of Pons’ collection was installed in a great old-fashioned salon such as French architects used to build for the old noblesse; a room twenty-five feet broad, some thirty feet in length, and thirteen in height.  Pons’ pictures to the number of sixty-seven hung upon the white-and-gold paneled walls; time, however, had reddened the gold and softened the white to an ivory tint, so that the whole was toned down, and the general effect subordinated to the effect of the pictures.  Fourteen statues stood on pedestals set in the corners of the room, or among the pictures, or on brackets inlaid by Boule; sideboards of carved ebony, royally rich, surrounded the walls to elbow height, all the shelves filled with curiosities; in the middle of the room stood a row of carved credence-tables, covered with rare miracles of handicraft—­with ivories and bronzes, wood-carvings and enamels, jewelry and porcelain.