dent. Extravagant versions
appeared. According to some, he had entered La Trappe; he had eloped
with the Dugazon; others declared he had gone to the Isles to found a
colony to be called Port-Tarascon, or else to roam Central Africa in
search of Livingstone.

"Ah! _vai!_ Livingstone!.. Why he has been dead these two years."

But Tarasconese imagination defies all hints of time and space. And the
curious thing is that these ideas of La Trappe, colonization, distant
travel, were Tartarin's own ideas, dreams of that sleeper awake,
communicated in past days to his intimate friends, who now, not knowing
what to think, and vexed in their hearts at not being duly informed,
affected toward the public the greatest reserve and behaved to one
another with a sly air of private understanding. Excourbanies suspected
Bravida of being in the secret; Bravida, on his side, thought: "Bezuquet
knows the truth; he looks about him like a dog with a bone."

True it was that the apothecary suffered a thousand deaths from this
hair-shirt of a secret, which cut him, skinned him, turned him pale and
red in the same minute and caused him to squint continually. Remember
that he belonged to Tarascon, unfortunate man, and say if, in all
martyrology, you can find so terrible a torture as this--the torture of
Saint Bezuquet, who knew a secret and could not tell it.

This is why, on that particular evening, in spite of the terrifying news
he had just received, his step had something, I hardly know what, freer,
more buoyant, as he went to the session of the Club. _Enfin!_.. He was
now to speak, to unbosom himself, to tell that which weighed so heavily
upon him; and in his haste to unload his breast he cast a few half words
as he went along to the loiterers on the Promenade. The day had been
so hot, that in spite of the unusual hour (_a quarter to eight_ on the
clock of the town hall!) and the terrifying darkness, quite a crowd of
reckless persons, bourgeois families getting the good of the air while
that of their houses evaporated, bands of five or six sewing-women,
rambling along in an undulating line of chatter and laughter, were
abroad. In every group they were talking of Tartarin.

"_Et autrement_, Monsieur Bezuquet, still no letter?" they asked of the
apothecary, stopping him on his way.

"Yes, yes, my friends, yes, there is... Read the _Forum_ to-morrow
morning..."

He hastened his steps, but they followed him, fastened on him, and along
the