Guy on fire, p.24
Delphi Complete Works of Alphonse Daudet (Illustrated), page 24
They had walked for over two hours when, about the middle of a field of snow very difficult to climb, Bompard called out, quite terrified: —
“Tartarin, we are going up!”
“Eh! parbleu! I know that well enough,” returned the P. C. A., almost losing his serenity.
“But according to my ideas, we ought to be going down.”
“Be! yes! but how can I help it? Let’s go on to the top, at any rate; it may go down on the other side.”
It went down certainly — and terribly, by a succession of névés and glaciers, and quite at the end of this dazzling scene of dangerous whiteness a little hut was seen upon a rock at a depth which seemed to them unattainable. It was a haven that they must reach before nightfall, inasmuch as they had evidently lost the way to the Grands-Mulets, but at what cost! what efforts! what dangers, perhaps!
“Above all, don’t let go of me, Gonzague, qué!..”
“Nor you either, Tartarin.”
They exchanged these requests without seeing each other, being separated by a ridge behind which Tartarin disappeared, being in advance and beginning to descend, while the other was going up, slowly and in terror. They spoke no more, concentrating all their forces, fearful of a false step, a slip. Suddenly, when Bompard was within three feet of the crest, he heard a dreadful cry from his companion, and at the same instant, the rope tightened with a violent, irregular jerk... He tried to resist, to hold fast himself and save his friend from the abyss. But the rope was old, no doubt, for it parted, suddenly, under his efforts.
“Outre!”
“Boufre!”
The two cries crossed each other, awful, heartrending, echoing through the silence and solitude, then a frightful stillness, the stillness of death that nothing more could trouble in that waste of eternal snows.
Towards evening a man who vaguely resembled Bompard, a spectre with its hair on end, muddy, soaked, arrived at the inn of the Grands-Mulets, where they rubbed him, warmed him, and put him to bed, before he could utter other words than these — choked with tears, and his hands raised to heaven: “Tartarin... lost!.. broken rope...” At last, however, they were able to make out the great misfortune which had happened.
While the old hut-man was lamenting and adding another chapter to the horrors of the mountain, hoping for fresh ossuary relics for his charnel glass-case, the Swedish youth and his guides, who had returned from their expedition, set off in search of the hapless Tartarin with ropes, ladders, in short a whole life-saving outfit, alas! unavailing... Bompard, rendered half idiotic, could give no precise indications as to the drama, nor as to the spot where it happened. They found nothing except, on the Dôme du Goûter, one piece of rope which was caught in a cleft of the ice. But that piece of rope, very singular thing! was cut at both ends, as with some sharp instrument; the Chambéry newspapers gave a facsimile of it, which proved the fact.
Finally, after eight days of the most conscientious search, and when the conviction became irresistible that the poor president would never be found, that he was lost beyond recall, the despairing delegates started for Tarascon, taking with them the unhappy Bompard, whose shaken brain was a visible result of the terrible shock.
“Do not talk to me about it,” he replied when questioned as to the accident, “never speak to me about it again!”
Undoubtedly the White Mountain could reckon one victim the more — and what a victim!
XIV.
Epilogue.
A REGION MORE impressionable than Tarascon was never seen under the sun of any land. At times, of a fine festal Sunday, all the town out, tambourines a-going, the Promenade swarming, tumultuous, enamelled with red and green petticoats, Arlesian neckerchiefs, and, on big multi-coloured posters, the announcement of wrestling-matches for men and lads, races of Camargue bulls, etc., it is all-sufficient for some wag to call out: “Mad dog!” or “Cattle loose!” and everybody runs, jostles, men and women fright themselves out of their wits, doors are locked and bolted, shutters clang as with a storm, and behold Tarascon, deserted, mute, not a cat, not a sound, even the grasshoppers themselves lying low and attentive.
This was its aspect on a certain morning, which, however, was neither a fête-day nor a Sunday; the shops closed, houses dead, squares and alleys seemingly enlarged by silence and solitude. Vasta silentio, says Tacitus, describing Rome at the funeral of Germanicus; and that citation of his mourning Rome applies all the better to Tarascon, because a funeral service for the soul of Tartarin was being said at this moment in the cathedral, where the population en masse wept for its hero, its god, its invincible leader with double muscles, left lying among the glaciers of Mont Blanc.
Now, while the death-knell dropped its heavy notes along the silent streets, Mile. Tournatoire, the doctor’s sister, whose ailments kept her always at home, was sitting in her big armchair close to the window, looking out into the street and listening to the bells. The house of the Tournatoires was on the road to Avignon, very nearly opposite to that of Tartarin; and the sight of that illustrious home to which its master would return no more, that garden gate forever closed, all, even the boxes of the little shoe-blacks drawn up in line near the entrance, swelled the heart of the poor spinster, consumed for more than thirty years with a secret passion for the Tarasconese hero. Oh, mystery of the heart of an old maid! It was her joy to watch him pass at his regular hours and to ask herself: “Where is he going?..” to observe the permutations of his toilet, whether he was clothed as an Alpinist or dressed in his suit of serpent-green. And now! she would see him no more! even the consolation of praying for his soul with all the other ladies of the town was denied her.
Suddenly the long white horse head of Mile. Tournatoire coloured faintly; her faded eyes with a pink rim dilated in a remarkable manner, while her thin hand with its prominent veins made the sign of the cross.. He! it was he, slipping along by the wall on the other side of the paved road... At first she thought it an hallucinating apparition... No, Tartarin himself, in flesh and blood, only paler, pitiable, ragged, was creeping along that wall like a beggar or a thief. But in order to explain his furtive presence in Tarascon, it is necessary to return to the Mont Blanc and the Dôme du Goûter at the precise instant when, the two friends being each on either side of the ridge, Bompard felt the rope that bound them violently jerked as if by the fall of a body.
In reality, the rope was only caught in a cleft of the ice; but Tartarin, feeling the same jerk, believed, he too, that his companion was rolling down and dragging him with him. Then, at that supreme moment — good heavens! how shall I tell it? — in that agony of fear, both, at the same instant, forgetting their solemn vow at the Hôtel Baltet, with the same impulse, the same instinctive action, cut the rope, — Bompard with his knife, Tartarin with his axe; then, horrified at their crime, convinced, each of them, that he had sacrificed his friend, they fled in opposite directions.
When the spectre of Bompard appeared at the Grands-Mulets, that of Tartarin was arriving at the tavern of the Avesailles. How, by what miracle? after what slips, what falls? Mont Blanc alone could tell. The poor P. C. A. remained for two days in a state of complete apathy, unable to utter a single sound. As soon as he was fit to move they took him down to Courmayeur, the Italian Chamonix. At the hotel where he stopped to recover his strength, there was talk of nothing but the frightful catastrophe on Mont Blanc, a perfect pendant to that on the Matterhorn: another Alpinist engulfed by the breaking of the rope.
In his conviction that this meant Bompard, Tartarin, torn by remorse, dared not rejoin the delegation, or return to his own town. He saw, in advance, on every lip, in every eye, the question: “Cain, what hast thou done with thy brother?..” Nevertheless, the lack of money, deficiency of linen, the frosts of September which were beginning to thin the hostelries, obliged him to set out for home. After all, no one had seen him commit the crime... Nothing hindered him from inventing some tale, no matter what... and so (the amusements of the journey lending their aid), he began to feel better. But when, on approaching Tarascon, he saw, iridescent beneath the azure heavens, the fine sky-line of the Alpines, all, all grasped him once more; shame, remorse, the fear of justice, and, to avoid the notoriety of arriving at the station, he left the train at the preceding stopping-place.
Ah! that beautiful Tarasconese highroad, all white and creaking with dust, without other shade than the telegraph poles and their wires, erected along the triumphal way he had so often trod at the head of his Alpinists and the sportsmen of caps. Would they now have known him, he, the valiant, the jauntily attired, in his ragged and filthy clothes, with that furtive eye of a tramp looking out for gendarmes? The atmosphere was burning, though the season was late, and the watermelon which he bought of a marketman seemed to him delicious as he ate it in the scanty shade of the barrow, while the peasant exhaled his wrath against the housekeepers of Tarascon, all of them absent from market that morning “on account of a black mass being sung for a man of the town who was lost in a hole, over there in the Swiss mountains... Té! how the bells rang... You can hear ’em from here...”
No longer any doubt. For Bompard were those lugubrious chimes of death, which a warm breeze wafted through the country solitudes.
What an accompaniment of the return of the great Tartarin to his native town!
For one moment, one, when the gate of the little garden hurriedly opened and closed behind him and Tartarin found himself at home, when he saw the little paths with their borders so neatly raked, the basin, the fountain, the gold fish (squirming as the gravel creaked beneath his feet), and the baobab giant in its mignonette pot, the comfort of that cabbage-rabbit burrow wrapped him like a security after all his dangers and adversities... But the bells, those cursed bells, tolled louder than ever; their black heavy notes fell plumb upon his heart and crushed it again. In funereal fashion they were saying to him: “Cain, what hast thou done with thy brother? Tartarin, where is Bompard?” Then, without courage to take one step, he sat down upon the hot coping of the little basin and stayed there, broken down, annihilated, to the great agitation of the gold fish.
The bells no longer toll. The porch of the cathedral, lately so resounding, is restored to the mutterings of the beggarwoman sitting by the door, and to the cold immovability of its stone saints. The religious ceremony is over; all Taras-con has gone to the Club of the Alpines, where, in solemn session, Bompard is to tell the tale of the catastrophe and relate the last moments of the P. C. A. Besides the members of the Club, many privileged persons of the army, clergy, nobility, and higher commerce have taken seats in the hall of conference, the windows of which, wide open, allow the city band, installed below on the portico, to mingle a few heroic or plaintive notes with the remarks of the gentlemen. An enormous crowd, pressing around the musicians, is standing on the tips of its toes and stretching its necks in hopes to catch a fragment of what is said in session. But the windows are too high, and no one would have any idea of what was going on without the help of two or three urchins perched in the branches of a tall linden who fling down scraps of information as they are wont to fling cherries from a tree:
“Vé, there’s Costecalde, trying to cry. Ha! the beggar! he’s got the armchair now... And that poor Bézuquet, how he blows his nose! and his eyes are all red!.. Té! they’ve put crape on the banner... There’s Bompard, coming to the table with the three delegates... He has laid something down on the desk... He’s speaking now... It must be fine! They are all crying...”
In truth, the grief became general as Bompard advanced in his narrative. Ah! memory had come back to him — imagination also. After picturing himself and his illustrious companion alone on the summit of Mont Blanc, without guides (who had all refused to follow them on account of the bad weather), alone with the banner, unfurled for five minutes on the highest peak of Europe, he recounted, and with what emotion! the perilous descent and fall; Tartarin rolling to the bottom of a crevasse, and he, Bompard, fastening himself to a rope two hundred feet long in order to explore that gulf to its very depths.
“More than twenty times, gentlemen — what am I saying? more than ninety times I sounded that icy abyss without being able to reach our unfortunate présidain whose fall, however, I was able to prove by certain fragments left clinging in the crevices of the ice...”
So saying, he spread upon the table-cloth a fragment of a tooth, some hairs from a beard, a morsel of waistcoat, and one suspender buckle; almost the whole ossuary of the Grands-Mulets.
In presence of such an exhibition the sorrowful emotions of the assembly could not be restrained; even the hardest hearts, the partisans of Costecalde, and the gravest personages — Cambalalette, the notary, the doctor, Tournatoire — shed tears as big as the stopper of a water-bottle. The invited ladies uttered heart-rending cries, smothered, however, by the sobbing howls of Excourbaniès and the bleatings of Pascalon, while the funeral march of the drums and trumpets played a slow and lugubrious bass.
Then, when he saw the emotion, the nervous excitement at its height, Bompard ended his tale with a grand gesture of pity toward the scraps and the buckles, as he said: —
“And there, gentlemen and dear fellow-citizens, there is all that I recovered of our illustrious and beloved president... The remainder the glacier will restore to us in forty years...”
He was about to explain, for ignorant persons, the recent discoveries as to the slow but regular movement of glaciers, when the squeaking of a door opening at the other end of the room interrupted him; some one entered, paler than one of Home’s apparitions, directly in front of the orator.
“Vé! Tartarin!..”
“Té! Gonzague!..”
And this race is so singular, so ready to believe all improbable tales, all audacious and easily refuted lies, that the arrival of the great man whose remains were still lying on the table caused only a very moderate amazement in the assembly.
“It is a misunderstanding, that’s all,” said Tartarin, comforted, beaming, his hand on the shoulder of the man whom he thought he had killed. “I did Mont Blanc on both sides. Went up one way and came down the other; and that is why I was thought to have disappeared.”
He did not mention that he had come down on his back.
“That damned Bompard!” said Bézuquet; “all the same, he harrowed us up with his tale...” And they laughed and clasped hands, while the drums and trumpets, which they vainly tried to silence, went madly on with Tartarin’s funeral march.
“Vé! Costecalde, just see how yellow he is!..” murmured Pascalon to Bravida, pointing to the gunsmith as he rose to yield the chair to the rightful president, whose good face beamed, Bravida, always sententious, said in a low voice as he looked at the fallen Costecalde returning to his subaltern rank: “The fate of the Abbé Mandaire, from being the rector he now is vicaire!”
And the session went on.
Port Tarascon (1890)
Anonymous translation, 1899
Original French Title: ‘Port-Tarascon’
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION.
PORT-TARASCON.
FIRST BOOK.
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
VII.
SECOND BOOK.
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
THIRD BOOK.
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
The first edition’s title page
The frontispiece for this translation
INTRODUCTION.
FIVE YEARS AFTER the crowning success of Tartarin sur les Alpes, Daudet published the third and last volume of his memorable series, under the appropriate title of Port-Tarascon. The vogue of his humour throughout the whole civilized world was sufficiently proved by the fact that a distinguished American novelist found it worth his while to make an excellent version of these latest adventures of the superb Tartarin, while a popular American magazine was glad to secure permission to give the translation to its readers in serial form. But the Daudet of 1890 was a very different man from the Daudet who had been able to make Europe hold its sides when with inimitable gravity he exclaimed, “Décidément le Mont-Blanc comptait une victime de plus, et quelle victime!” Since 1885 he had been an intense nervous sufferer. That dreadest of all the foes of the man of letters, insomnia, had taken hold upon him. He would indulge himself in long periods of relaxation and then would work with feverish energy, with results not altogether propitious to his fame. The bitter, if interesting satire of L’Immortel belongs to this period, and was hardly the best of forerunners for another Tartarin book. It is, of course, true that great humorists have been known to do excellent work under the pressure of disease, and even of family cares and sufferings, and it is further true that Port-Tarascon shows many traces of the master hand; but it is not given to every one to be a Tom Hood, and it is quite clear that a sustained masterpiece of humorous fiction is about as difficult a task as any ill man could set himself.
But could Daudet have made Port-Tarascon equal to its two predecessors even if he had been in perfect health? We may well doubt it. As we have seen elsewhere, Mark Twain, who, like Dandet, had made Huckleberry Finn the equal or the superior of Tom Sawyer failed when he undertook a trilogy. Even Shakespeare did not make an altogether conspicuous success of his attempt to depict Falstaff as a lover. The ebbing and flowing tide of artistic success seems to reverse the Canute scene, and to say to the kings of poetry and fiction, “Thus far shall ye go and no farther.” Balzac felt the force of this law in his successive portraitures of Vautrin, nor does Cooper seem to escape its workings in his “Leather Stocking” series. Perhaps the indefatigable Trollope, who came as near to being a machine as any author of respectable powers has ever come, approximated unbroken success in his Barsetshire novels more completely than any of his greater brothers has ever done in a continuous group of works; but with all due respect to Trollope’s not fully appreciated ability, most of us would rather make a comparative failure in Daudet’s company than succeed in his.
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