nd they went.

Schmucke, left alone in the room, smiled to himself like a madman free
at last to gratify a desire like the longing of pregnancy. He flung
himself down beside Pons, and yet again he held his friend in a long,
close embrace. At midnight the priest came back and scolded him, and
Schmucke returned to his prayers. At daybreak the priest went, and at
seven o'clock in the morning the doctor came to see Schmucke, and spoke
kindly and tried hard to persuade him to eat, but the German refused.

"If you do not eat now you will feel very hungry when you come back,"
the doctor told him, "for you must go to the mayor's office and take
a witness with you, so that the registrar may issue a certificate of
death."

"_I_ must go!" cried Schmucke in frightened tones.

"Who else?... You must go, for you were the one person who saw him die."

"Mein legs vill nicht carry me," pleaded Schmucke, imploring the doctor
to come to the rescue.

"Take a cab," the hypocritical doctor blandly suggested. "I have given
notice already. Ask some one in the house to go with you. The two women
will look after the place while you are away."

No one imagines how the requirements of the law jar upon a heartfelt
sorrow. The thought of it is enough to make one turn from civilization
and choose rather the customs of the savage. At nine o'clock that
morning Mme. Sauvage half-carried Schmucke downstairs, and from the cab
he was obliged to beg Remonencq to come with him to the registrar as
a second witness. Here in Paris, in this land of ours besotted with
Equality, the inequality of conditions is glaringly apparent everywhere
and in everything. The immutable tendency of things peeps out even in
the practical aspects of Death. In well-to-do families, a relative, a
friend, or a man of business spares the mourners these painful details;
but in this, as in the matter of taxation, the whole burden falls
heaviest upon the shoulders of the poor.

"Ah! you have good reason to regret him," said Remonencq in answer to
the poor martyr's moan; "he was a very good, a very honest man, and he
has left a fine collection behind him. But being a foreigner, sir, do
you know that you are like to find yourself in a great predicament--for
everybody says that M. Pons left everything to you?"

Schmucke was not listening. He was sounding the dark depths of sorrow
that border upon madness. There is such a thing as tetanus of the soul.

"And you would do well to fin