“Pascalon,” said the apothecary in a low voice, and so close to him that the bristle of his moustache pricked his ear. “I have news of Tartarin... It is heart-breaking...”
Seeing him turn pale, he added:
“Courage, child! all can be repaired... Différemment I confide to you the pharmacy... If any one asks you for arsenic, don’t give it; opium, don’t give that either, nor rhubarb... don’t give anything. If I am not in by ten o’clock, lock the door and go to bed.”
With intrepid step, he plunged into the darkness, not once looking back, which allowed Pascalon to spring at the waste-paper basket, turn it over and over with feverish eager hands and finally tip out its contents on the leather of the desk to see if no scrap remained of the mysterious letter brought by the postman.
To those who know Tarasconese excitability, it is easy to imagine the frantic condition of the little town after Tartarin’s abrupt disappearance. Et autrement, pas moins, différemment, they lost their heads, all the more because it was the middle of August and their brains boiled in the sun till their skulls were fit to crack. From morning till night they talked of nothing else; that one name “Tartarin” alone was heard on the pinched lips of the elderly ladies in hoods, in the rosy mouths of grisettes, their hair tied up with velvet ribbons:
“Tartarin, Tartarin...” Even among the plane-trees on the Promenade, heavy with white dust, distracted grasshoppers, vibrating in the sunlight, seemed to strangle with those two sonorous syllables: “Tar.. tar.. tar.. tar.. tar...”
As no one knew anything, naturally every one was well-informed and gave explanations of the departure of the president. Extravagant versions appeared. According to some, he had entered La Trappe; he had eloped with the Dugazon; others declared he had gone to the Isles to found a colony to be called Port-Tarascon, or else to roam Central Africa in search of Livingstone.
“Ah! vaï! Livingstone!.. Why he has been dead these two years.”
But Tarasconese imagination defies all hints of time and space. And the curious thing is that these ideas of La Trappe, colonization, distant travel, were Tartarin’s own ideas, dreams of that sleeper awake, communicated in past days to his intimate friends, who now, not knowing what to think, and vexed in their hearts at not being duly informed, affected toward the public the greatest reserve and behaved to one another with a sly air of private understanding. Excourbaniès suspected Bravida of being in the secret; Bravida, on his side, thought: “Bézuquet knows the truth; he looks about him like a dog with a bone.”
True it was that the apothecary suffered a thousand deaths from this hair-shirt of a secret, which cut him, skinned him, turned him pale and red in the same minute and caused him to squint continually. Remember that he belonged to Tarascon, unfortunate man, and say if, in all martyrology, you can find so terrible a torture as this—the torture of Saint Bézuquet, who knew a secret and could not tell it.