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

white caps on the lake where the gulls, flying low, seemed borne upon the waves; one might have thought one's self on the open ocean.
Tartarin recalled to mind his departure from the port of Marseilles, fifteen years earlier, when he started to hunt the lion--that spotless sky, dazzling with silvery light, that sea so blue, blue as the water of dye-works, blown back by the mistral in sparkling white saline crystals, the bugles of the forts and the bells of all the steeples echoing joy, rapture, sun--the fairy world of a first journey.
What a contrast to this black dripping wharf, almost deserted, on which were seen, through the mist as through a sheet of oiled paper, a few passengers wrapped in ulsters and formless india-rubber garments, and the helmsman standing motionless, muffled in his hooded cloak, his manner grave and sibylline, behind this notice printed in three languages:--
"Forbidden to speak to the man at the wheel."
Very useless caution, for nobody spoke on board the "Winkelried," neither on deck, nor in the first and second saloons crowded with lugubrious-looking passengers, sleeping, reading, yawning, pell-mell, with their smaller packages scattered on the seats--the sort of scene we imagine that a batch of exiles on the morning after a coup-d'Etat might present.
From time to time the hoarse bellow of the steam-pipe announced the arrival of the boat at a stopping-place. A noise of steps, and of baggage dragged about the deck. The shore, looming through the fog, came nearer and showed its slopes of a sombre green, its villas shivering amid inundated groves, files of poplars flanking the muddy roads along which sumptuous hotels were formed in line with their names in letters of gold upon their facades, Hotel Meyer, Mueller, du Lac, etc., where heads, bored with existence, made themselves visible behind the streaming window-panes.
The wharf was reached, the passengers disembarked and went upward, all equally muddy, soaked, and silent. 'Twas a coming and going of umbrellas and omnibuses, quickly vanishing. Then a great beating of the wheels, churning up the water with their paddles, and the shore retreated, becoming once more a misty landscape with its _pensions_ Meyer, Mueller, du Lac, etc., the windows of which, opened for an instant, gave fluttering handkerchiefs to view from every floor, and outstretched arms that seemed to say: "Mercy! pity! take us, take us... if you only knew!.."
At times the "Winkelried" crossed on its way some other steamer with its name in black letters on its white paddle-box: "Germania.".. "Guillaume Tell"... The same lugubrious deck, the same refracting caoutchoucs, the same most lamentable pleasure trip as that of the other phantom vessel going its different way, and the same heart-broken glances exchanged from deck to deck.
And to say that those people travelled for enjoyment! and that all those boarders in the Hotels du Lac, Meyer, and Mueller were captives for pleasure!
Here, as on the Rigi-Kulm, the thing that above all suffocated Tartarin, agonized him, froze him, even more than the cold rain and the murky sky, was the utter impossibility of talking. True, he had again met faces that he knew--the member of the Jockey Club with his niece (h'm! h'm!..), the academician Astier-Rehu, and the Bonn Professor Schwanthaler, those two implacable enemies condemned to live side by side for a month manacled to the itinerary of a Cook's Circular, and others. But none of these illustrious Prunes would recognize the Tarasconese Alpinist, although his mountain muffler, his metal utensils, his ropes in saltire, distinguished him from others, and marked him in a manner that was quite peculiar. They all seemed ashamed of the night before, and the inexplicable impulse communicated to them by the fiery ardour of that fat man.
Mme. Schwanthaler, alone, approached her partner, with the rosy, laughing face of a plump little fairy, and taking her skirt in her two fingers as if to suggest a minuet. "Ballir... dantsir... very choli..." remarked the good lady. Was this a memory that she evoked, or a temptation that she offered? At any rate, as she did not let go of him, Tartarin, to escape her pertinacity, went up on deck, preferring to be soaked to the skin rather than be made ridiculous.
And it rained!.. and the sky was dirty!.. To complete his gloom, a whole squad of the Salvation Army, who had come aboard at Beckenried, a dozen stout girls with stolid faces, in navy-blue gowns and Greenaway bonnets, were grouped under three enormous scarlet umbrellas, and were singing verses, accompanied on the accordion by a man, a sort of David-la-Gamme, tall and fleshless with crazy eyes. These sharp, flat, discordant voices, like the cry of gulls, rolled dragging, drawling through the rain and the black smoke of the engine which the wind beat down upon the deck. Never had Tartarin heard anything so lamentable.
At Bruennen the squad landed, leaving the pockets of the other travellers swollen with pious little tracts; and almost immediately after the songs and the accordion of these poor larvae ceased, the sky began to clear and patches of blue were seen.
They now entered the lake of Uri, closed in and darkened by lofty, untrodden mountains, and the tourists pointed out to each other, on the right at the foot of the Seelisberg, the field of Gruetli, where Melchtal, Fuerst, and Stauffacher made oath to deliver their country.
Tartarin, with much emotion, took off his cap, paying no attention to environing amazement, and waved it in the air three times, to do honour to the ashes of those heroes. A few of the passengers mistook his purpose, and politely returned his bow.
The engine at last gave a hoarse roar, its echo repercussioning from cliff to cliff of the narrow space. The notice hung out on deck before each new landing-place (as they do at public balls to vary the country dances) announced the Tells-platte.
They arrived.
The chapel is situated just five minutes' walk from the landing, at the edge of the lake, on the very rock to which William Tell sprang, during the tempest, from Gessler's boat. It was to Tartarin a most delightful emotion to tread, as he followed the travellers of the Circular Cook along the lakeside, that historic soil, to recall and live again the principal episodes of the great drama which he knew as he did his own life.
From his earliest years, William Tell had been his type. When, in the Bezuquet pharmacy, they played the game of preference, each person writing secretly on folded slips the poet, the tree, the odour, the hero, the woman he preferred, one of the papers invariably ran thus:--
"Tree preferred? ........... the baobab.
Odour? ..................... gunpowder.
Writer? .................... Fenimore Cooper.
What I would prefer to be .. William Tell."
And every voice in the pharmacy cried out: "That's Tartarin!"
Imagine, therefore, how happy he was and how his heart was beating as he stood before that memorial chapel raised to a hero by the gratitude of a whole people. It seemed to him that William Tell in person, still dripping with the waters of the lake, his crossbow and his arrows in hand, was about to open the door to him.
"No entrance... I am at work... This is not the day..." cried a loud voice from within, made louder by the sonority of the vaulted roof.
"Monsieur Astier-Rehu, of the French Academy..."
"Herr Doctor Professor Schwanthaler..."
"Tartarin of Tarascon..."
In the arch above the portal, perched upon a scaffolding, appeared a half-length of the painter in working-blouse, palette in hand.
"My _famulus_ will come down and open to you, messieurs," he said with respectful intonations.
"I was sure of it, _pardi!_" thought Tartarin; "I had only to name myself."
However, he had the good taste to stand aside modestly, and only entered after all the others.
The painter, superb fellow, with the gilded, ruddy head of an artist of the Renaissance, received his visitors on the wooden steps which led to the temporary staging put up for the purpose of painting the roof. The frescos, representing the principal episodes in the life of William Tell, were finished, all but one, namely: the scene of the apple in the market-place of Altorf. On this he was now at work, and his young _famulus_, as he called him, feet and legs bare under a toga of the middle ages, and his hair archangelically arranged, was posing as the son of William Tell.
All these archaic personages, red, green, yellow, blue, made taller than nature in narrow streets and under the posterns of the period, intended, of course, to be seen at a distance, impressed the spectators rather sadly. However, they were there to admire, and they admired. Besides, none of them knew anything.
"I consider that a fine characterization," said the pontifical Astier-Rehu, carpet-bag in hand.
And Schwanthaler, a camp-stool under his arm, not willing to be behindhand, quoted two verses of Schiller, most of it remaining in his flowing beard. Then the ladies exclaimed, and for a time nothing was heard but:--
"Schoen!.. schoen..."
"Yes... lovely..."
"Exquisite! delicious!.."
One might have thought one's self at a confectioner's.
Abruptly a voice broke forth, rending with the ring of a trumpet that composed silence.
"Badly shouldered, I tell you... That crossbow is not in place..."
Imagine the stupor of the painter in presence of this exorbitant Alpinist, who, alpenstock in hand and ice-axe on his shoulder, risking the annihilation of somebody at each of his many evolutions, was demonstrating to him by A + B that the motions of his William Tell were not correct.
"I know what I am talking about, _au mouain_... I beg you to believe it..."
"Who are you?"
"Who am I!" exclaimed the Alpinist, now thoroughly vexed... So it was not to him that the door was opened; and drawing himself up he said: "Go ask my name of the panthers of the Zaccar, of the lions of Atlas... they will answer you, perhaps."
The company recoiled; there was general alarm.
"But," asked the painter, "in what way is my action wrong?"
"Look at me, _te!_"
Falling into position with a thud of his heels that made the planks beneath them smoke, Tar-tarin, shouldering his ice-axe like a crossbow, stood rigid.
"Superb! He's right... Don't stir..."
Then to the _famulus_: "Quick! a block, charcoal!.."
The fact is, the Tarasconese hero was something worth painting,--squat, round-shouldered, head bent forward, the muffler round his chin like a strap, and his flaming little eye taking aim at the terrified _famulus_.
Imagination, O magic power!.. He thought himself on the marketplace of Altorf, in front of his own child, he, who had never had any; an arrow in his bow, another in his belt to pierce the heart of the tyrant. His conviction became so strong that it conveyed itself to others.
"'T is William Tell himself!.." said the painter, crouched on a stool and driving his sketch with a feverish hand. "Ah! monsieur, why did I not know you earlier? What a model you would have been for me!.."
"Really! then you see some resemblance?" said Tartarin, much flattered, but keeping his pose.
Yes, it was just so that the artist imagined his hero.
"The head, too?"
"Oh! the head, that's no matter..." and the painter stepped back to look at his sketch. "Yes, a virile mask, energetic, just what I wanted--inasmuch as nobody knows anything about William Tell, who probably never existed."
Tartarin dropped the cross-bow from stupefaction.
"_Outre!_ {*}.. Never existed!.. What is that you are saying?"
* "Outre" and "boufre" are Tarasconese oaths of mysterious
etymology.
"Ask these gentlemen..."
Astier-Rehu, solemn, his three chins in his white cravat, said: "That is a Danish legend."
"Icelandic.."