



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:
"_Pedibusse cum jambisse_, my pretty little cat..." And he went up
behind her, his broad back filling the stairway, parting the persons he
met on his way, while throughout the hotel the clamorous questions ran:
"Who is he? What's this?" muttered in the divers languages of all four
quarters of the globe. Then the second dinner-gong sounded, and nobody
thought any longer of this extraordinary personage.

A sight to behold, that dining-room of the Rigi-Kulm.

Six hundred covers around an immense horseshoe table, where tall,
shallow dishes of rice and of prunes, alternating in long files with
green plants, reflected in their dark or transparent sauces the flame of
the candles in the chandeliers and the gilding of the panelled ceiling.

As in all Swiss _tables d'hote_, rice and prunes divided the dinner into
two rival factions, and merely by the looks of hatred or of hankering
cast upon those dishes it was easy to tell to which party the guests
belonged. The Rices were known by their anaemic pallor, the Prunes by
their congested skins.

That evening the latter were the most numerous, counting among them
several important personalities, European celebrities, such as the great
historian Astier-Rehu, of the French Academy, Baron von Stolz, an
old Austro-Hungarian diplomat, Lord Chipendale (?), a member of the
Jockey-Club and his niece (h'm, h'm!), the illustrious doctor-professor
Schwanthaler, from the University of Bonn, a Peruvian general with eight
young daughters.

To these the Rices could only oppose as a picket-guard a Belgian senator
and his family, Mme. Schwanthaler, the professor's wife, and an Italian
tenor, returning from Russia, who displayed his cuffs, with buttons as
big as saucers, upon the tablecloth.

It was these opposing currents which no doubt caused the stiffness
and embarrassment of the company. How else explain the silence of six
hundred half-frozen, scowling, distrustful persons, and the sovereign
contempt they appeared to affect for one another? A superficial observer
might perhaps have attributed this stiffness to stupid Anglo-Saxon
haughtiness which, nowadays, gives the tone in all countries to the
travelling world.

No! no! Beings with human faces are not born to hate one another thus at
first sight, to despise each other with their very noses, lips, and eyes
for lack of a previous introduction. There must be another cause.

Rice and Prunes, I tell you. There you have the explanation of the
gloomy silence weighing upon this dinner at the Rigi-Kulm, which,
considering the number and international variety of the guests, ought to
have been lively, tumultuous, such as we imagine the repasts at the foot
of the Tower of Babel to have been.

The Alpinist entered the room, a little overcome by this refectory of
monks, apparently doing penance beneath the glare of chandeliers; he
coughed noisily without any one taking notice of him, and seated himself
in his place of last-comer at the end of the room. Divested of his
accoutrements, he was now a tourist like any other, but of aspect more
amiable, bald, barrel-bellied, his beard pointed and bunchy, his nose
majestic, his eyebrows thick and ferocious, overhanging the glance of a
downright good fellow.

Rice or Prunes? No one knew as yet.

Hardly was he installed before he became uneasy, and leaving his place
with an alarming bound: "Ouf! what a draught!" he said aloud, as he
sprang to an empty chair with its back laid over on the table.

He was stopped by the Swiss maid on duty--from the canton of Uri, that
one--silver chains and white muslin chemisette.

"Monsieur, this place is engaged..."

Then a young lady, seated next to the chair, of whom the Alpinist could
see only her blond hair rising from the whiteness of virgin snows, said,
without turning round, and with a foreign accent:

"That place is free; my brother is ill, and will not be down."

"Ill?.." said the Alpinist, seating himself, with an anxious, almost
affectionate manner... "Ill? Not dangerously, _au moins_."

He said _au mouain_, and the word recurred in all his remarks, with
other vocable parasites, such as _he, que, tey zou, ve, vai, et
autrement, differemment_, etc., still further emphasized by a Southern
accent, displeasing, apparently, to the young lady, for she answered
with a glacial glance of a black blue, the blue of an abyss.

His neighbour on the right had nothing encouraging about him either;
this was the Italian tenor, a gay bird with a low forehead, oily pupils,
and the moustache of a matador, which he twirled with nervous fingers
at being thus separated from his pretty neighbour.