Tartarin on the Alps, Alphonse Daudet [digital e reader .TXT] 📗

divan that ran round the room were the members of the committee.
In the first row, sat the former captain of equipment, Bravida, whom all Tarascon called the Commander; a very small man, clean as a new penny, who redeemed his childish figure by making himself as moustached and savage a head as Vercingetorix.
Next came the long, hollow, sickly face of Pegoulade, the collector, last survivor of the wreck of the "Medusa." Within the memory of man, Tarascon has never been without a last survivor of the wreck of the "Medusa." At one time they even numbered three, who treated one another mutually as impostors, and never con~ sented to meet in the same room. Of these three the only true one was Pegoulade. Setting sail with his parents on the "Medusa," he met with the fatal disaster when six months old,--which did not prevent him from relating the event, _de visu_, in its smallest details, famine, boats, raft, and how he had taken the captain, who was selfishly saving himself, by the throat: "To your duty, wretch!.. "At six months old, _outre!_... Wearisome, to tell the truth, with that eternal tale which everybody was sick of for the last fifty years; but he took it as a pretext to assume a melancholy air, detached from life: "After what I have seen!" he would say--very unjustly, because it was to that he owed his post as collector and kept it 'under all administrations.
Near him sat the brothers Rognonas, twins and sexagenarians, who never parted, but always quarrelled and said the most monstrous things to each other; their two old heads, defaced, corroded, irregular, and ever looking in opposite directions out of antipathy, were so alike that they might have figured in a collection of coins with IANVS BIFRONS on the exergue.
Here and there, were Judge Bedaride, Barjavel the lawyer, the notary Cambalalette, and the terrible Doctor Tournatoire, of whom Bravida remarked that he could draw blood from a radish.
In consequence of the great heat, increased by the gas, these gentlemen held the session in their shirt-sleeves, which detracted much from the solemnity of the occasion. It is true that the meeting was a very small one; and the infamous Costecalde was anxious to profit by that circumstance to fix the earliest possible date for the elections without awaiting Tartarin's return. Confident in this manoeuvre, he was enjoying his triumph in advance, and when, after the reading of the minutes by Excourbanies, he rose to insinuate his scheme, an infernal smile curled up the corners of his thin lips.
"Distrust the man who smiles before he speaks," murmured the Commander.
Costecalde, not flinching, and winking with one eye at the faithful Tournatoire, began in a spiteful voice:--
"Gentlemen, the extraordinary conduct of our president, the uncertainty in which he leaves us..."
"False!.. The president has written..."
Bezuquet, quivering, planted himself squarely before the table; but conscious that his attitude was anti-parliamentary, he changed his tone, and, raising one hand according to usage, he asked for the floor, to make an urgent communication.
"Speak! Speak!"
Costecalde, very yellow, his throat tightened, gave him the floor by a motion of his head. Then, and not till then, Bezuquet spoke:
"Tartarin is at the foot of the Jungfrau... he is about to make the ascent... he desires to take with him our banner..."
Silence; broken by the heavy breathing of chests; then a loud hurrah, bravos, stamping of the feet, above which rose the gong of Excourbanies uttering his war-cry "Ha! ha! ha! _fen de brut!_" to which the anxious crowd without responded.
Costecalde, getting more and more yellow, tinkled the presidential bell desperately. Bezuquet at last was allowed to continue, mopping his forehead and puffing as if he had just mounted five pairs of stairs.
_Differemment_, the banner that their president requested in order to plant it on virgin heights, should it be wrapped up, packed up, and sent by express like an ordinary trunk?..
"Never!.. Ah! ah! ah!.." roared Excourbanies.
Would it not be better to appoint a delegation--draw lots for three members of the committee?..
He was not allowed to finish. The time to say _zou!_ and Bezuquet's proposition was voted by acclamation, and the names of three delegates drawn in the following order: 1, Bravida; 2, Pegoulade; 3, the apothecary.
No. 2, protested. The long journey frightened him, so feeble and ill as he was, _pecherel_ ever since that terrible event of the "Medusa."
"I 'll go for you, Pegoulade," roared Excour-banies, telegraphing with all his limbs. As for Bezuquet, he could not leave the pharmacy, the safety of the town depended on him. One imprudence of the pupil, and all Tarascon might be poisoned, decimated:
"_Outre!_" cried the whole committee, agreeing as one man.
Certainly the apothecary could not go himself, but he could send Fascalon; Pascalon could take charge of the banner. That was his business. Thereupon, fresh exclamations, further explosions of the gong, and on the Promenade such a popular tempest that Excourbanies was forced to show himself and address the crowd above its roarings, which his matchless voice soon mastered.
"My friends, Tartarin is found. He is about to cover himself with glory."
Without adding more than "Vive Tartarin!" and his war-cry, given with all the force of his lungs, he stood for a moment enjoying the tremendous clamour of the crowd below, rolling and hustling confusedly in clouds of dust, while from the branches of the trees the grasshoppers added their queer little rattle as if it were broad day.
Hearing all this, Costecalde, who had gone to a window with the rest, returned, staggering, to his arm-chair.
"_Ve!_ Costecalde," said some one. "What's the matter with him?.. Look how yellow he is!"
They sprang to him; already the terrible Tournatoire had whipped out his lancet: but the gunsmith, writhing in distress, made a horrible grimace, and said ingenuously:
"Nothing... nothing... let me alone... I know what it is... it is envy."
Poor Costecalde, he seemed to suffer much.
While these things were happening, at the other end of the Tour de Ville, in the pharmacy, Bezuquet's pupil, seated before his master's desk, was patiently patching and gumming together the fragments of Tartarin's letter overlooked by the apothecary at the bottom of the basket. But numerous bits were lacking in the reconstruction, for here is the singular and sinister enigma spread out before him, not unlike a map of Central Africa, with voids and spaces of _terra incognita_, which the artless standard-bearer explored in a state of terrified imagination:
mad with love reed
-wick lam
preserves of Chicago.
cannot tear myself
Nihilist
to death condition
abom
in exchange
for her
You know me, Ferdi
know my liberal ideas,
but from there to tzaricide
rrible consequences
Siberia hung
adore her
Ah! press thy loyal hand
Tar Tar


VIII.
Memorable dialogue between the jungfrau and Tartarin. A
nihilist salon. The duel with hunting-knives. Frightful
nightmare, "Is it I you are seeking, messieurs?" Strange
reception given by the hotel-keeper Meyer to the Tarasconese
delegation.
Like all the other choice hotels at Interlaken, the Hotel Jungfrau, kept by Meyer, is situated on the Hoeheweg, a wide promenade between double rows of chestnut-trees that vaguely reminded Tar-tarin of the beloved Tour de Ville of his native town, minus the sun, the grasshoppers, and the dust; for during his week's sojourn at Interlaken the rain had never ceased to fall.
He occupied a very fine chamber with a balcony on the first floor, and trimmed his beard in the morning before a little hand-glass hanging to the window, an old habit of his when travelling. The first object that daily struck his eyes beyond the fields of grass and corn, the nursery gardens, and an amphitheatre of solemn verdure in rising stages, was the Jungfrau, lifting from the clouds her summit, like a horn, white and pure with unbroken snow, to which was daily clinging a furtive ray of the still invisible rising sun. Then between the white and rosy Alp and the Alpinist a little dialogue took place regularly, which was not without its grandeur.
"Tartarin, are you coming?" asked the Jung-frau sternly.
"Here, here..." replied the hero, his thumb under his nose and finishing his beard as fast as possible. Then he would hastily take down his ascensionist outfit and, swearing at himself, put it on.
"_Coquin de sort!_ there's no name for it..."
But a soft voice rose, demure and clear among the myrtles in the border beneath his window.
"Good-morning," said Sonia, as he appeared upon the balcony, "the landau is ready... Come, make haste, lazy man..."
"I 'm coming, I 'm coming..."
In a trice he had changed his thick flannel shirt for linen of the finest quality, his mountain knickerbockers for a suit of serpent-green that turned the heads of all the women in Tarascon at the Sunday concerts.
The horses of the landau were pawing before the door; Sonia was already installed beside Boris, paler, more emaciated day by day in spite of the beneficent climate of Interlaken. But, regularly, at the moment of starting, Tartarin was fated to see two forms arise from a bench on the promenade and approach him with the heavy rolling step of mountain bears; these were Rodolphe Kaufmann and Christian Inebnit, two famous Grindelwald guides, engaged by Tartarin for the ascension of the Jungfrau, who came every morning to ascertain if their monsieur were ready to start.
The apparition of these two men, in their iron-clamped shoes and fustian jackets worn threadbare on the back and shoulder by knapsacks and ropes, their naive and serious faces, and the four words of French which they managed to splutter as they twisted their broad-brimmed hats, were a positive torture to Tartarin. In vain he said to them: "Don't trouble yourselves to come; I 'll send for you..."
Every day he found them in the same place and got rid of them by a large coin proportioned to the enormity of his remorse. Enchanted with this method of "doing the Jungfrau," the mountaineers pocketed their _trinkgeld_ gravely, and took, with resigned step, the path to their native village, leaving Tartarin confused and despairing at his own weakness. Then the