The master was much inclined to answer, "Look at me!" but how could he venture to joke with pious dowagers and Jansenist confessors?
This apocryphal old fellow held such a place in the lives of the two Maries, they felt such friendship for the grand and simple-minded artist, who was happy and contented in the mere comprehension of his art, that after their marriage, they each gave him an annuity of three hundred francs a year,--a sum which sufficed to pay for his lodging, beer, pipes, and clothes.

Six hundred francs a year and his lessons put him in Eden.

Schmucke had never found courage to confide his poverty and his aspirations to any but these two adorable young girls, whose hearts were blooming beneath the snow of maternal rigor and the ice of devotion.

This fact explains Schmucke and the girlhood of the two Maries.
No one knew then, or later, what abbe or pious spinster had discovered the old German then vaguely wandering about Paris, but as soon as mothers of families learned that the Comtesse de Granville had found a music-master for her daughters, they all inquired for his name and address.

Before long, Schmucke had thirty pupils in the Marais.