บทที่ บทที่ 10 · X. Before the Start.

. X. Before the Start.

PENDING Tartarin’s delay of the event by all sorts of heroic means,

all Tarascon kept an eye upon him, and nothing else was busied about.

Cap-popping was winged, and ballad-singing dead. The piano in Bezuquet’s

shop mouldered away under a green fungus, and the Spanish flies

dried upon it, belly up. Tartarin’s expedition had a put a stopper on

everything.

Ah, you ought to have seen his success in the parlours. He was snatched

away by one from another, fought for, loaned and borrowed, ay, stolen.

There was no greater honour for the ladies than to go to Mitaine’s

Menagerie on Tartarin’s arms, and have it explained before the lion’s

den how such large game are hunted, where they should be aimed at, at

how many paces off; if the accidents were numerous, and the like of

that.

Tartarin furnished all the elucidation desired. He had read “The Life of

Jules Gerard, the Lion-Slayer,” and had lion-hunting at his finger ends,

as if he had been through it himself. Hence he orated upon these matters

with great eloquence.

But where he shone the brightest was at dinner at Chief Judge

Ladeveze’s, or brave Commandant Bravida’s (the former captain in the

Army Clothing Factory, you will keep in mind), when coffee came in, and

all the chairs were brought up closer together, whilst they chatted of

his future hunts.

Thereupon, his elbow on the cloth, his nose over his Mocha, our hero

would discourse in a feeling tone of all the dangers awaiting him

thereaway. He spoke of the long moonless night lyings-in-wait, the

pestilential fens, the rivers envenomed by leaves of poison-plants,

the deep snow-drifts, the scorching suns, the scorpions, and rains of

grasshoppers; he also descanted on the peculiarities of the great lions

of the Atlas, their way of fighting, their phenomenal vigour; and their

ferocity in the mating season.

Heating with his own recital, he would rise from table, bounding to the

middle of the dining-room, imitating the roar of a lion and the

going off of a rifle crack! bang! the zizz of the explosive

bullet--gesticulating and roaring about till he had overset the chairs.

Everybody turned pale around the board: the gentlemen looking at one

another and wagging their heads, the ladies shutting their eyes with

pretty screams of fright, the elderly men combatively brandishing their

canes; and, in the side apartments, the little boys, who had been put to

bed betimes, were greatly startled by the sudden outcries and imitated

gun-fire, and screamed for lights. Meanwhile, Tartarin did not start.