



Produced by David Widger





TARTARIN ON THE ALPS.

By Alphonse Daudet




TARTARIN ON THE ALPS.




I.

     Apparition on the Rigi-Kulm. Who is it? What was said around
     a table of six hundred covers. Rice and Prunes, An
     improvised ball. The Unknown signs his name on the hotel
     register, P. C. A.

On the 10th of August, 1880, at that fabled hour of the setting sun so
vaunted by the guide-books Joanne and Baedeker, an hermetic yellow fog,
complicated with a flurry of snow in white spirals, enveloped the summit
of the Rigi (_Regina monhum_) and its gigantic hotel, extraordinary to
behold on the arid waste of those heights,--that Rigi-Kulm, glassed-in
like a conservatory, massive as a citadel, where alight for a night and
a day a flock of tourists, worshippers of the sun.

While awaiting the second dinner-gong, the transient inmates of the
vast and gorgeous caravansary, half frozen in their chambers above, or
gasping on the divans of the reading-rooms in the damp heat of lighted
furnaces, were gazing, in default of the promised splendours, at the
whirling white atoms and the lighting of the great lamps on the portico,
the double glasses of which were creaking in the wind.

To climb so high, to come from all four corners of the earth to see
that... Oh, Baedeker!..

Suddenly, something emerged from the fog and advanced toward the hotel
with a rattling of metal, an exaggeration of motions, caused by strange
accessories.

At a distance of twenty feet through the fog the torpid tourists, their
noses against the panes, the _misses_ with curious little heads trimmed
like those of boys, took this apparition for a cow, and then for a
tinker bearing his utensils.

Ten feet nearer the apparition changed again, showing a crossbow on the
shoulder, and the visored cap of an archer of the middle ages, with
the visor lowered, an object even more unlikely to meet with on these
heights than a strayed cow or an ambulating tinker.

On the portico the archer was no longer anything but a fat, squat,
broad-backed man, who stopped to get breath and to shake the snow from
his leggings, made like his cap of yellow cloth, and from his knitted
comforter, which allowed scarcely more of his face to be seen than a few
tufts of grizzling beard and a pair of enormous green spectacles made as
convex as the glass of a stereoscope. An alpenstock, knapsack, coil of
rope worn in saltire, crampons and iron hooks hanging to the belt of
an English blouse with broad pleats, completed the accoutrement of this
perfect Alpinist.

On the desolate summits of Mont Blanc or the Finsteraarhorn this
clambering apparel would have seemed very natural, but on the Rigi-Kulm
ten feet from a railway track!--

The Alpinist, it is true, came from the side opposite to the station,
and the state of his leggings testified to a long march through snow and
mud.

For a moment he gazed at the hotel and its surrounding buildings,
seemingly stupefied at finding, two thousand and more yards above the
sea, a building of such importance, glazed galleries, colonnades, seven
storeys of windows, and a broad portico stretching away between two
rows of globe-lamps which gave to this mountain-summit the aspect of the
Place de l'Opera of a winter's evening.

But, surprised as he may have been, the people in the hotel were
more surprised still, and when he entered the immense antechamber an
inquisitive hustling took place in the doorways of all the salons:
gentlemen armed with billiard-cues, others with open newspapers, ladies
still holding their book or their work pressed forward, while in the
background, on the landing of the staircase, heads leaned over the
baluster and between the chains of the lift.

The man said aloud, in a powerful deep bass voice, the chest voice of
the South, resounding like cymbals:--

"_Coquin de bon sort!_ what an atmosphere!"

Then he stopped short, to take off his cap and his spectacles.

He was suffocating.

The dazzle of the lights, the heat of the gas and furnace, in contrast
with the cold darkness without, and this sumptuous display, these lofty
ceilings, these porters bedizened with _Regina Montium_ in letters
of gold on their naval caps, the white cravats of the waiters and the
battalion of Swiss girls in their native costumes coming forward at
sound of the gong, all these things bewildered him for a second--but
only one.

He felt himself looked at and instantly recovered his self-possession,
like a comedian facing a full house.

"Monsieur desires..?"

This was the manager of the hotel, making the inquiry with the tips of
his teeth, a very dashing manager, striped jacket, silken whiskers, the
head of a lady's dressmaker.

The Alpinist, not disturbed, asked for a room, "A good little room,
_au mouain?_" perfectly at ease with that majestic manager, as if with a
former schoolmate.

But he came near being angry when a Bernese servant-girl, advancing,
candle in hand, and stiff in her gilt stomacher and puffed muslin
sleeves, inquired if Monsieur would be pleased to take the lift. The
proposal to commit a crime would not have made him more indignant.

"A lift! he!.. for him!.." And his cry, his gesture, set all his metals
rattling.

Quickly appeased, however, he said to the maiden, in an amiable tone:
"_