"Miserable viper," cried Simon, dashing toward the boy with clinched fists, "how dare you turn your hateful eyes toward her, after her expressly forbidding it? Wait, I will teach you to disobey, and give you a lesson that you will not forget."
His heavy hand fell on the back of the boy, and was raised again for a second stroke, when it was held as in an iron vice.
"You good-for-nothing, what are you doing?" cried a thundering voice, and two blazing eyes flashed on him from the reddened face of Doctor Naudin.
Simon's eyes fell before the angry look of the physician, then he broke out into a loud laugh.
"Citizen doctor, I say, what a jolly fellow you are," he said, merrily. "You did that just as if you were in a theatre, and you called out to me just as they call out to the murderers in a tragedy. What do you make such a halloo about when I chastise the wolf's cub a bit, as he has richly deserved?"
"It is true," said Naudin, "I was a little hasty. But that comes from the fact, citizen, that I not only held you to be a good republican, but a good man as well, and therefore it pained me to see you do a thing which becomes neither a republican nor a good man."
"Why, what have I done that is not proper?" asked Simon, in amazement.
"Look at him, the poor, beaten, swollen, stupefied boy," said Naudin, solemnly, pointing to Louis, who sat on his chair, weeping and trembling in all his limbs—"look at him, citizen, and then do not ask me again what you have done that is not proper."
"Well, but he deserves nothing better," cried Simon, with a sneer.
"He is the son of the she-wolf, Madame Veto."
"He is a human being," said Doctor Naudin, solemnly, "and he is, besides, a helpless boy, whom the one, indivisible, and righteous republic deprived of his father and mother, and put under your care to be educated as if he were a son of your own. I ask you, citizen, would you have struck a son of your own as you just struck this boy?"