"The fact is," said I to Madame Kerouët, "I have met M. Belmont somewhere in my travels, or it might have been some one who is remarkably like him; for, on account of the circumstances under which we met, I cannot believe that the person I speak of can be the M. Belmont of this portrait."
"There is a very easy way of finding out if your M. Belmont is ours. What are your M. Belmont's teeth like?" said Marie's aunt.
"There is no longer the slightest doubt. It is he!" thought I.
"His teeth are like no one else's," I said, "they are sharp, and very wide apart."
"That is just how they are," said Madame Kerouët, laughing, "and so for fun we call him the ogre."
Then it was he!
Everything was explained now.
In the ballroom at the château, the English ambassador had told me that they were on the track of the pirate, and hoped to capture him. The ball had taken place about the middle of January, just the time that Belmont had returned to Nantes, to hasten his union with Marie.
Our rencontre at the Variétés, and the fear of discovery, had, doubtless, caused the anxiety Madame Kerouët noticed in his behaviour subsequent to that time.
Thus, had it not been for the note of warning, the commissaire and the officer of gendarmerie would have arrested this miserable man on the day of his marriage. And I quite understood that M. Duvallon, the pirate's best man, should have held him up to the eyes of Marie and her aunt in the light of a political victim, in order to deceive them as to the real cause of his arrest.