Dr. Poulain had distinguished himself to some extent as a house-student; he was a prudent practitioner, and not without experience.  His deaths caused no scandal; he had plenty of opportunities of studying all kinds of complaints in anima vili.  Judge, therefore, of the spleen that he nourished!  The expression of his countenance, lengthy and not too cheerful to begin with, at times was positively appalling.  Set a Tartuffe’s all-devouring eyes, and the sour humor of an Alceste in a sallow-parchment visage, and try to imagine for yourself the gait, bearing, and expression of a man who thought himself as good a doctor as the illustrious Bianchon, and felt that he was held down in his narrow lot by an iron hand.  He could not help comparing his receipts (ten francs a day if he was fortunate) with Bianchon’s five or six hundred.

Are the hatreds and jealousies of democracy incomprehensible after this?  Ambitious and continually thwarted, he could not reproach himself.  He had once already tried his fortune by inventing a purgative pill, something like Morrison’s, and intrusted the business operations to an old hospital chum, a house-student who afterwards took a retail drug business; but, unluckily, the druggist, smitten with the charms of a ballet-dancer of the Ambigu-Comique, found himself at length in the bankruptcy court; and as the patent had been taken out in his name, his partner was literally without a remedy, and the important discovery enriched the purchaser of the business.  The sometime house-student set sail for Mexico, that land of gold, taking poor Poulain’s little savings with him; and, to add insult to injury, the opera-dancer treated him as an extortioner when he applied to her for his money.

Not a single rich patient had come to him since he had the luck to cure old M. Pillerault.  Poulain made his rounds on foot, scouring the Marais like a lean cat, and obtained from two to forty sous out of a score of visits.  The paying patient was a phenomenon about as rare as that anomalous fowl known as a “white blackbird” in all sublunary regions.

The briefless barrister, the doctor without a patient, are pre-eminently the two types of a decorous despair peculiar to this city of Paris; it is mute, dull despair in human form, dressed in a black coat and trousers with shining seams that recall the zinc on an attic roof, a glistening satin waistcoat, a hat preserved like a relic, a pair of old gloves, and a cotton shirt.  The man is the incarnation of a melancholy poem, sombre as the secrets of the Conciergerie.  Other kinds of poverty, the poverty of the artist—­actor, painter, musician, or poet—­are relieved and lightened by the artist’s joviality, the reckless gaiety of the Bohemian border country—­the first stage of the journey to the Thebaid of genius.  But these two black-coated professions that go afoot through the street are brought continually in contact with disease and dishonor; they see nothing of human