FOOTNOTES:
[66] Voyage by sea and land.
[67] They are bears.
[68] It is my supper.
CHAP. XVI.
Saturday, the twenty-fifth of August, the fête of the king was celebrated with sports and rejoicings. A joûte d'eau was held on the Rhone; that is to say—two boats row as fast as possible in opposite directions bearing each of them a man, standing on the prow, armed with a long pole. At the moment that the boats pass by each other, each of the two men strives to push the other with his pole into the water. If both parties fail, the assistants are, for that time, disappointed; if one of the two tumbles in, they laugh and are delighted. Sometimes it happens, from the unsteadiness of their position and the effort which each makes to overturn the other, that both fall in, and, in that case, the joy of the standers and sitters-by is increased, as Malthus would say, not in an arithmetical, but in a geometrical proportion: it is not merely doubled; it is augmented a hundred-fold. Flags, and bells, and music, and the presence of the authorities and of a vast concourse of spectators, leave not the least doubt in the mind of any one but that he has been well amused. In the evening there was a ball at the prefecture.
Being somewhat indisposed, I did not stir out on this day. Kenelm had for some time past complained of languor and want of appetite, which he attributed to the heat of the summer. At St. Remy he had been in excellent spirits, passing on before us to hinder us from seeing the monuments till arrived at the right point of view; and, on the fête of St. Louis, he had been gay with the gay. No symptom of illness appeared till the following evening at the house of the general commanding the department; he then complained to me of a sensation of cold. I desired him to remove from the open window; he soon felt himself better, and joined in the dance with which the party concluded. This visit is to be remarked as the last he made.
During the three following days he was tolerably well, and, on the alternate days, took his bath in the Rhone, as it had been his custom to do during the summer, in a retired place at a small distance from the town. While bathing the last time, he cried out to his brother, "My pulse is gone." A sensation of cold had induced him to feel his pulse, and he was somewhat alarmed at this symptom of its intermission. He appeared to wish to make light of it when he came home, but it must be supposed that his own feelings made him apprehensive of illness. Afterwards it became evident that the predisposition to the fever, of which the chilliness three evenings before had been a symptom, had again manifested itself by this intermission of the pulse.