“Switzerland, in our day, vé! Monsieur Tar-tarin, is nothing more than a vast Kursaal, open from June to September, a panoramic casino, where people come from all four quarters of the globe to amuse themselves, and which is manipulated and managed by a Company richissime by hundreds of thousands of millions, which has its offices in London and Geneva. It costs money, you may be sure, to lease and brush up and trick out all this territory, lakes, forests, mountains, cascades, and to keep a whole people of employés, supernumeraries, and what not, and set up miraculous hotels on the highest summits, with gas, telegraphs, telephones...”
“That, at least, is true,” said Tartarin, thinking aloud, and remembering the Rigi.
“True!.. But you have seen nothing yet... Go on through the country and you ‘ll not find one corner that is n’t engineered and machine-worked like the under stage of the Opera,—cascades lighted à giorno, turnstiles at the entrance to the glaciers, and loads of railways, hydraulic and funicular, for ascensions. To be sure, the Company, in view of its clients the English and American climbers, keeps up on the noted mountains, Jungfrau, Monk, Finsteraarhorn, an appearance of danger and desolation, though in reality there is no more risk there than elsewhere...”
“But the crevasses, my good fellow, those horrible crevasses... Suppose one falls into them?”
“You fall on snow, Monsieur Tartarin, and you don’t hurt yourself, and there is always at the bottom a porter, a hunter, at any rate some one, who picks you up, shakes and brushes you, and asks graciously: ‘Has monsieur any baggage?’”
“What stuff are you telling me now, Gonzague?”
Bompard redoubled in gravity.
“The keeping up of those crevasses is one of the heaviest expenses of the Company.”
Silence fell for a moment under the tunnel, the surroundings of which were quieting down. No more varied fireworks, Bengal lights, or boats on the water; but the moon had risen and made another conventional landscape, bluish, liquides-cent, with masses of impenetrable shadow...
Tartarin hesitated to believe his companion on his word. Nevertheless, he reflected on the extraordinary things he had seen in four days—the sun on the Rigi, the farce of William Tell—and Bompard’s inventions seemed to him all the more probable because in every Tarasconese the braggart is leashed with a gull.