"It was the Englishman, I tell thee!" one of his customers asserted indignantly. "Ask any one who saw him! Ask the tappe-durs! Ask Robespierre himself! _He_ saw him, and turned as grey as--as putty, I tell thee!" he concluded, with more conviction than eloquence. "And _I_ tell thee," broke in citizen Sical, the butcher--he with the bullet-head and hull-neck and a fist that could in truth have felled an ox; "I tell thee that it was citizen Rateau. Don't I know citizen Rateau?" he added, and brought that heavy fist of his down upon the upturned cask on which stood pewter mugs and bottles of eau de vie, and glared aggressively round upon the assembly. He had only one eye; the other presented a hideous appearance, scarred and blotched, the result of a terrible fatality in his early youth. The one eye leered with a glance of triumph as well as of challenge, daring any less muscular person to impugn his veracity. One man alone was bold enough to take up the challenge--a wizened little fellow, a printer by trade, with skin of the texture of grained oak and a few unruly curls that tumbled over one another above a highly polished forehead. "And I tell thee, citizen Sical," he said with firm decision; "I tell thee and those who aver, as thou dost, that citizen Rateau had anything to do with those monkey-tricks, that ye lie. Yes!" he reiterated emphatically, and paying no heed to the glowering looks and blasphemies of Sical and his friends. "Yes, ye lie! Not consciously, I grant you; but you lie nevertheless. Because----" He paused and glanced around him, like a clever actor conscious of the effect which he produced. His tiny beady eyes blinked in the glare of the lamp before him. "Because what?" came in an eager chorus from every side. "Because," resumed the other sententiously, "all the while that ye were supping at the expense of the State in the open, and had your gizzards stirred by the juggling devices of some unknown mountebank, citizen Rateau was lying comfortably drunk and snoring lustily in the antechamber of Mother Théot, the soothsayer, right at the other end of Paris!" "How do you know that, citizen Langlois?" queried the host with icy reproval, for butcher Sical was his best customer, and Sical did not like being contradicted. But little Langlois with the shiny forehead and tiny, beady, humorous eyes, continued unperturbed. "Pardi!" he said gaily, "because I was at Mother Théot's myself, and saw him there." That certainly was a statement to stagger even the great Sical. It was received in complete silence. Every one promptly felt that the moment was propitious for another drink; nay! that the situation demanded it.