“My friends, Tartarin is found. He is about to cover himself with glory.”
Without adding more than “Vive Tartarin!” and his war-cry, given with all the force of his lungs, he stood for a moment enjoying the tremendous clamour of the crowd below, rolling and hustling confusedly in clouds of dust, while from the branches of the trees the grasshoppers added their queer little rattle as if it were broad day.
Hearing all this, Costecalde, who had gone to a window with the rest, returned, staggering, to his arm-chair.
“Vé! Costecalde,” said some one. “What’s the matter with him?.. Look how yellow he is!”
They sprang to him; already the terrible Tournatoire had whipped out his lancet: but the gunsmith, writhing in distress, made a horrible grimace, and said ingenuously:
“Nothing... nothing... let me alone... I know what it is... it is envy.”
Poor Costecalde, he seemed to suffer much.
While these things were happening, at the other end of the Tour de Ville, in the pharmacy, Bézuquet’s pupil, seated before his master’s desk, was patiently patching and gumming together the fragments of Tartarin’s letter overlooked by the apothecary at the bottom of the basket. But numerous bits were lacking in the reconstruction, for here is the singular and sinister enigma spread out before him, not unlike a map of Central Africa, with voids and spaces of terra incognita, which the artless standard-bearer explored in a state of terrified imagination:
mad with love reed
-wick lam
preserves of Chicago.
cannot tear myself
Nihilist
to death condition
abom in exchange
for her
You know me, Ferdi
know my liberal ideas,
but from there to tzaricide
rrible consequences
Siberia hung
adore her
Ah! press thy loyal hand
Tar Tar