grandee, has poor enough health, he is bald, and his teeth are bad.
The first sight of him was enough for me; I distrusted him from the
first."

"But how about the great fortune that you spoke of?" a young married
woman asked shyly.

"The fortune was not nearly so large as they said. These tailors and
the landlord and he all scraped the money together among them, and put
all their savings into this bank that they are starting. What is a
bank for those that begin in these days? Simply a license to ruin
themselves. A banker's wife may lie down at night a millionaire and
wake up in the morning with nothing but her settlement. At first word,
at the very first sight of him, we made up our minds about this
gentleman--he is not one of us. You can tell by his gloves, by his
waistcoat, that he is a working man, the son of a man that kept a
pot-house somewhere in Germany; he has not the instincts of a
gentleman; he drinks beer, and he smokes--smokes? ah! madame,
_twenty-five pipes a day!_ . . . What would have become of poor Lili?
. . . It makes me shudder even now to think of it. God has indeed
preserved us! And besides, Cecile never liked him. . . . Who would
have expected such a trick from a relative, an old friend of the house
that had dined with us twice a week for twenty years? We have loaded
him with benefits, and he played his game so well, that he said Cecile
was his heir before the Keeper of the Seals and the Attorney General
and the Home Secretary! . . . That Brunner and M. Pons had their story
ready, and each of them said that the other was worth millions! . . .
No, I do assure you, all of you would have been taken in by an
artist's hoax like that."

In a few weeks' time, the united forces of the Camusot and Popinot
families gained an easy victory in the world, for nobody undertook to
defend the unfortunate Pons, that parasite, that curmudgeon, that
skinflint, that smooth-faced humbug, on whom everybody heaped scorn;
he was a viper cherished in the bosom of the family, he had not his
match for spite, he was a dangerous mountebank whom nobody ought to
mention.

About a month after the perfidious Werther's withdrawal, poor Pons
left his bed for the first time after an attack of nervous fever, and
walked along the sunny side of the street leaning on Schmucke's arm.
Nobody in the Boulevard du Temple laughed at the "pair of
nutcrackers," for one of the old men looked so shattered, and the
other so touchingly car