a man cannot 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 Popino