Tartarin on the Alps by Alphonse Daudet (best classic books TXT) 📕

and stretching its necks in hopes to catch a fragment of what is said in session. But the windows are too high, and no one would have any idea of what was going on without the help of two or three urchins perched in the branches of a tall linden who fling down scraps of information as they are wont to fling cherries from a tree:
"_Ve_, there's Costecalde, trying to cry. Ha! the beggar! he's got the armchair now... And that poor Bezuquet, how he blows his nose! and his eyes are all red!.. _Te!_ they've put crape on the banner... There's Bompard, coming to the table with the three delegates... He has laid something down on the desk... He's speaking now... It must be fine! They are all crying..."
In truth, the grief became general as Bompard advanced in his narrative. Ah! memory had come back to him--imagination also. After picturing himself and his illustrious companion alone on the summit of Mont Blanc, without guides (who had all refused to follow them on account of the bad weather), alone with the banner, unfurled for five minutes on the highest peak of Europe, he recounted, and with what emotion! the perilous descent and fall; Tartarin rolling to the bottom of a crevasse, and he, Bompard, fastening himself to a rope two hundred feet long in order to explore that gulf to its very depths.
"More than twenty times, gentlemen--what am I saying? more than ninety times I sounded that icy abyss without being able to reach our unfortunate _presidain_ whose fall, however, I was able to prove by certain fragments left clinging in the crevices of the ice..."
So saying, he spread upon the table-cloth a fragment of a tooth, some hairs from a beard, a morsel of waistcoat, and one suspender buckle; almost the whole ossuary of the Grands-Mulets.
In presence of such an exhibition the sorrowful emotions of the assembly could not be restrained; even the hardest hearts, the partisans of Costecalde, and the gravest personages--Cambalalette, the notary, the doctor, Tournatoire--shed tears as big as the stopper of a water-bottle. The invited ladies uttered heart-rending cries, smothered, however, by the sobbing howls of Excourbanies and the bleatings of Pascalon, while the funeral march of the drums and trumpets played a slow and lugubrious bass.
Then, when he saw the emotion, the nervous excitement at its height, Bompard ended his tale with a grand gesture of pity toward the scraps and the buckles, as he said:--
"And there, gentlemen and dear fellow-citizens, there is all that I recovered of our illustrious and beloved president... The remainder the glacier will restore to us in forty years..."
He was about to explain, for ignorant persons, the recent discoveries as to the slow but regular movement of glaciers, when the squeaking of a door opening at the other end of the room interrupted him; some one entered, paler than one of Home's apparitions, directly in front of the orator.
"_Ve!_ Tartarin!.."
"_Te!_ Gonzague!.."
And this race is so singular, so ready to believe all improbable tales, all audacious and easily refuted lies, that the arrival of the great man whose remains were still lying on the table caused only a very moderate amazement in the assembly.
"It is a misunderstanding, that's all," said Tartarin, comforted, beaming, his hand on the shoulder of the man whom he thought he had killed. "I did Mont Blanc on both sides. Went up one way and came down the other; and that is why I was thought to have disappeared."
He did not mention that he had come down on his back.
"That damned Bompard!" said Bezuquet; "all the same, he harrowed us up with his tale..." And they laughed and clasped hands, while the drums and trumpets, which they vainly tried to silence, went madly on with Tartarin's funeral march.
"_Ve!_ Costecalde, just see how yellow he is!.." murmured Pascalon to Bravida, pointing to the gunsmith as he rose to yield the chair to the rightful president, whose good face beamed, Bravida, always sententious, said in a low voice as he looked at the fallen Costecalde returning to his subaltern rank: "The fate of the Abbe Mandaire, from being the rector he now is _vicaire!_"
And the session went on.
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Publication Date: 11-26-2009

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