“Parfaitemain, young man... Pan!.. pan!.. and as often as you like.”
The time to load an old double-barrelled carbine which must have served several generations of chamois hunters, and—pan!.. pan!.. T is done. Both balls are in the bull’s-eye. Hurrahs of admiration burst forth on all sides. Sonia triumphed. Bolibine laughed no more.
“But that is nothing, that!” said Tartarin; “you shall see...”
The Stand did not suffice him; he looked about for another target, and the crowd recoiled alarmed from this strange Alpinist, thick-set, savage-looking and carbine in hand, when they heard him propose to the old guard of Charles X. to break his pipe between his teeth at fifty paces. The old fellow howled in terror and plunged into the crowd, his trembling plume remaining visible above their serried heads. None the less, Tartarin felt that he must put it somewhere, that ball. “Té! pardi! as we did at Tarascon!..” And the former cap-hunter pitched his headgear high into the air with all the strength of his double muscles, shot it on the fly, and pierced it. “Bravo!” cried Sonia, sticking into the small hole made by the ball the bouquet of cyclamen with which she had stroked her cheek.
With that charming trophy in his cap Tartarin returned to the landau. The trumpet sounded, the convoy started, the horses went rapidly down to Brienz along that marvellous corniche road, blasted in the side of the rock, separated from an abyss of over a thousand feet by single stones a couple of yards apart. But Tartarin was no longer conscious of danger; no longer did he look at the scenery—that Meyringen valley, seen through a light veil of mist, with its river in straight lines, the lake, the villages massing themselves in the distance, and that whole horizon of mountains, of glaciers, blending at times with the clouds, displaced by the turns of the road, lost apparently, and then returning, like the shifting scenes of a stage.
Softened by tender thoughts, the hero admired the sweet child before him, reflecting that glory is only a semi-happiness, that ‘tis sad to grow old all alone in your greatness, like Moses, and that this fragile flower of the North transplanted into the little garden at Tarascon would brighten its monotony, and be sweeter to see and breathe than that everlasting baobab, arbos gigantea, diminutively confined in the mignonette pot. With her childlike eyes, and her broad brow, thoughtful and self-willed, Sonia looked at him, and she, too, dreamed—but who knows what the young girls dream of?
VII.
The nights at Tarascon, Where is he? Anxiety. The
grasshoppers on the promenade call for Tartarin. Martyrdom
of a great Tarasconese saint. The Club of the Alpines. What
was happening at the pharmacy. “Help! help! Bêzuquet!”
“A letter, Monsieur Bêzuquet!.. Comes from Switzerland, vé!.. Switzerland!” cried the postman joyously, from the other end of the little square, waving something in the air, and hurrying along in the coming darkness.