"I believe so," replied the poet, who had already lost interest in his young hearer, and was itching to declaim the purple passage in question, of which he again stood on the brink. La Vireville made a gesture to intimate that he should do so, and diplomatically neglected his meal to listen. "Bravo!" he exclaimed at the end. "Magnificent, citizen! You have the foes of our beloved country on the hip, indeed. Those lines about the émigrés, now!" Mathieu smirked. Then he glowed. "I declare to you, citizen, that if I were to meet one of those scorpions--those vipers, as I have termed them--I would not hesitate a moment to----" "To denounce him, of course," said La Vireville, helping himself to wine. "No, citizen, to kill him with these hands!" "Ma foi," said La Vireville gravely, "if you ply the sword, citizen, as ably as the pen, France may well be proud of you." Mathieu, much flattered, was beginning an answer, when the door opened and the little boy's guardian reappeared. The poet turned round. "I trust your charge is recovered!" said he ingratiatingly. "A most interesting child!" "Thank you," replied the other rather coldly, as he returned to his place; "my nephew was merely overtired." And he ordered coffee, while La Vireville secretly studied him. He looked, thought the Chouan, a person who could neither be bullied nor flustered, a man in whose veins ran some unusually cold liquid. How was he to get him out of the way? Besides, was it certain that the little boy with him was Anne-Hilarion? That he _must_ know. Absorbed in these speculations he paid scant attention to the conclusion of the Ode, which its author had the obligingness to read again for his benefit and for that of the returned guest, who drank his coffee very slowly, but appeared to be interested in neither of his companions. And before very long the Citizen Pourcelles, seeing no fresh worlds to conquer, drifted out, followed, after a moment's hesitation, by La Vireville, who buttonholed him at the door of the hostelry, to say that he could not let him go without thanking him for the pleasure which he had afforded him. A very little of this balm, dexterously applied, sufficed to get out of the poet a description of the little boy upstairs sufficiently detailed to satisfy La Vireville that he was indeed Anne-Hilarion.