The courier of the Peruvian party had just started for the Tellsplatte, where he would certainly pass the night.
The Tellsplatte is a memorial chapel, to which pilgrimages are made in honour of William Tell. Some persons go there to see the mural pictures which a famous painter of Bâle has lately executed in the chapel...
As it only took by boat an hour or an hour and a half to reach the place, Tartarin did not hesitate. It would make him lose a day, but he owed it to himself to render that homage to William Tell, for whom he had always felt a peculiar predilection. And, besides, what a chance if he could there pick up this marvellous guide and induce him to do the Jungfrau with him.
Forward, zou!
He paid his bill, in which the setting and the rising sun were reckoned as extras, also the candles and the attendance. Then, still preceded by the rattle of his metals, which sowed surprise and terror on his way, he went to the railway station, because to descend the Rigi as he had ascended it, on foot, would have been lost time, and, really, it was doing too much honour to that very artificial mountain.
IV.
On the boat. It rains. The Tarasconese hero salutes the
Ashes. The truth about William Tell. Disillusion. Tartarin
of Tarascon never existed. “Té! Bompard.”
He had left the snows of the Rigi-Kulm; down below, on the lake, he returned to rain, fine, close, misty, a vapour of water through which the mountains stumped themselves in, graduating in the distance to the form of clouds.
The “Föhn” whistled, raising white caps on the lake where the gulls, flying low, seemed borne upon the waves; one might have thought one’s self on the open ocean.