“I spend my life watching people die, not of their disease, but of another bad and incurable complaint—the want of money,” said the doctor. “How often it happens that so far from taking a fee, I am obliged to leave a five-franc piece on the mantel-shelf when I go—”
“Poor, dear M. Poulain!” cried Mme. Cibot. “Ah, if you hadn’t only the hundred thousand livres a year, what some stingy folks has in the quarter (regular devils from hell they are), you would be like Providence on earth.”
Dr. Poulain had made the little practice, by which he made a bare subsistence, chiefly by winning the esteem of the porters’ lodges in his district. So he raised his eyes to heaven and thanked Mme. Cibot with a solemn face worthy of Tartuffe.
“Then you think that with careful nursing our dear patient will get better, my dear M. Poulain?”
“Yes, if this shock has not been too much for him.”
“Poor man! who can have vexed him? There isn’t nobody like him on earth except his friend M. Schmucke. I will find out what is the matter, and I will undertake to give them that upset my gentleman a hauling over the coals—”
“Look here, my dear Mme. Cibot,” said the doctor as they stood in the gateway, “one of the principal symptoms of his complaint is great irritability; and as it is hardly to be supposed that he can afford a nurse, the task of nursing him will fall to you. So—”
“Are you talking of Mouchieu Ponsh?” asked the marine store-dealer. He was sitting smoking on the curb-post in the gateway, and now he rose to join in the conversation.
“Yes, Daddy Remonencq.”
“All right,” said Remonencq, “ash to moneysh, he ish better off than Mouchieu Monishtrol and the big men in the curioshity line. I know enough in the art line to tell you thish—the dear man has treasursh!” he spoke with a broad Auvergne dialect.