their opera-glasses levelled up
to him, recalled Tartarin to a sense of the grandeur of his mission. He
tore thee, O Tarasconese banner! from the hands of the guide, waved thee
twice or thrice, and then, plunging the handle of his ice-axe deep into
the snow, he seated himself upon the iron of the pick, banner in hand,
superb, facing the public. And there--unknown to himself--by one of
those spectral reflections frequent upon summits, taken between the sun
and the mists that rose behind him, a gigantic Tartarin was outlined on
the sky, broader, dumpier, his beard bristling beyond the muffler, like
one of those Scandinavian gods enthroned, as the legend has it, among
the clouds.

XI.

En route for Tarascon. The Lake of Geneva. Tartarin proposes
a visit to the dungeon of Bonnivard. Short dialogue amid the
roses. The whole band under lock and key. The unfortunate
Bonnivard. Where the rope made at Avignon was found.

As a result of the ascension, Tartarin's nose peeled, pimpled, and
his cheeks cracked. He kept to his room in the Hotel Bellevue for five
days--five days of salves and compresses, the sticky unsavouriness
and ennui of which he endeavoured to elude by playing cards with the
delegates or dictating to them a long, circumstantial account of his
expedition, to be read in session, before the Club of the Alpines and
published in the _Forum_. Then, as the general lumbago had disappeared
and nothing remained upon the noble countenance of the P. C. A. but a
few blisters, sloughs and chilblains on a fine complexion of Etruscan
pottery, the delegation and its president set out for Tarascon, via
Geneva.

Let me omit the episodes of that journey, the alarm cast by the Southern
band into narrow railway carriages, steamers, _tables d'hote_, by
its songs, its shouts, its overflowing hilarity, its banner, and its
alpenstocks; for since the ascension of the P. C. A. they had all
supplied themselves with those mountain sticks, on which the names
of celebrated climbs were inscribed, burnt in, together with popular
verses.

Montreux!

Here the delegates, at the suggestion of their master, decided to halt
for two or three days in order to visit the famous shores of Lake Leman,
Chillon especially, and its legendary dungeon, where the great patriot
Bonnivard languished, and which Byron and Delacroix have immortalized.

At heart, Tartarin cared little for Bonnivard, his adventure with
William Tell havi