e the peasant exhaled his wrath
against the housekeepers of Tarascon, all of them absent from market
that morning "on account of a black mass being sung for a man of the
town who was lost in a hole, over there in the Swiss mountains... _Te!_
how the bells rang... You can hear 'em from here..."

No longer any doubt. For Bompard were those lugubrious chimes of death,
which a warm breeze wafted through the country solitudes.

What an accompaniment of the return of the great Tartarin to his native
town!

For one moment, one, when the gate of the little garden hurriedly opened
and closed behind him and Tartarin found himself at home, when he saw
the little paths with their borders so neatly raked, the basin, the
fountain, the gold fish (squirming as the gravel creaked beneath his
feet), and the baobab giant in its mignonette pot, the comfort of that
cabbage-rabbit burrow wrapped him like a security after all his dangers
and adversities... But the bells, those cursed bells, tolled louder than
ever; their black heavy notes fell plumb upon his heart and crushed it
again. In funereal fashion they were saying to him: "Cain, what hast
thou done with thy brother? Tartarin, where is Bompard?" Then, without
courage to take one step, he sat down upon the hot coping of the little
basin and stayed there, broken down, annihilated, to the great agitation
of the gold fish.

The bells no longer toll. The porch of the cathedral, lately so
resounding, is restored to the mutterings of the beggarwoman sitting
by the door, and to the cold immovability of its stone saints. The
religious ceremony is over; all Taras-con has gone to the Club of the
Alpines, where, in solemn session, Bompard is to tell the tale of the
catastrophe and relate the last moments of the P. C. A. Besides the
members of the Club, many privileged persons of the army, clergy,
nobility, and higher commerce have taken seats in the hall of
conference, the windows of which, wide open, allow the city band,
installed below on the portico, to mingle a few heroic or plaintive
notes with the remarks of the gentlemen. An enormous crowd, pressing
around the musicians, is standing on the tips of its toes and stretching
its necks in hopes to catch a fragment of what is said in session. But
the windows are too high, and no one would have any idea of what
was going on without the help of two or three urchins perched in the
branches of a tall linden who fling down scraps of information as