Exciting moment!
The minister, electrified, rose, came to the hero and inflicted upon him a pump-handle exercise of the hand that was truly English. His wife did likewise, then all the young ladies continued the shake hands with enough vigour to have brought water to the fifth floor of the house. The delegates, I ought to mention, were less enthusiastic.
“Eh, bé! as for me,” said Bravida, “I am of M. Baltet’s opinion. In matters of this kind, each man should look to his own skin, pardi! and I understand that cut of the axe perfectly.”
“You amaze me, Placide,” said Tartarin, severely; adding in a low voice: “Behave yourself! England is watching us.”
The old captain, who certainly had kept a root of bitterness in his heart ever since the excursion to Chillon, made a gesture that signified: “I don’t care that for England...” and might perhaps have drawn upon himself a sharp rebuke from the president, irritated at so much cynicism, but at this moment the young man with the heart-broken look, filled to the full with grog and melancholy, brought his extremely bad French into the conversation. He thought, he said, that the guide was right to cut the rope: to deliver from existence those four unfortunate men, still young, condemned to live for many years longer; to send them, by a mere gesture, to peace, to nothingness,—what a noble and generous action!
Tartarin exclaimed against it:—
“Pooh! young man, at your age, to talk of life with such aversion, such anger... What has life done to you?”
“Nothing; it bores me.” He had studied philosophy at Christiania, and since then, won to the ideas of Schopenhauer and Hartmann, he had found existence dreary, inept, chaotic. On the verge of suicide he shut his books, at the entreaty of his parents, and started to travel, striking everywhere against the same distress, the gloomy wretchedness of this life. Tartarin and his friends, he said, seemed to him the only beings content to live that he had ever met with.
The worthy P. C. A. began to laugh. “It is all race, young man. Everybody feels like that in Tarascon. That’s the land of the good God. From morning till night we laugh and sing, and the rest of the time we dance the farandole... like this... té!” So saying, he cut a double shuffle with the grace and lightness of a big cockchafer trying its wings.
But the delegates had not the steel nerves nor the indefatigable spirit of their chief. Excour-baniès growled out: “He ‘ll keep us here till midnight.” But Bravida jumped up, furious. “Let us go to bed, vé! I can’t stand my sciatica...” Tartarin consented, remembering the ascension on the morrow; and the Tarasconese, candlesticks in hand, went up the broad staircase of granite that led to the chambers, while Baltet went to see about provisions and hire the mules and guides.