they
are wont to fling cherries from a tree:

"_Ve_, there's Costecalde, trying to cry. Ha! the beggar! he's got the
armchair now... And that poor Bezuquet, how he blows his nose! and his
eyes are all red!.. _Te!_ they've put crape on the banner... There's
Bompard, coming to the table with the three delegates... He has laid
something down on the desk... He's speaking now... It must be fine! They
are all crying..."

In truth, the grief became general as Bompard advanced in his narrative.
Ah! memory had come back to him--imagination also. After picturing
himself and his illustrious companion alone on the summit of Mont Blanc,
without guides (who had all refused to follow them on account of the
bad weather), alone with the banner, unfurled for five minutes on
the highest peak of Europe, he recounted, and with what emotion! the
perilous descent and fall; Tartarin rolling to the bottom of a crevasse,
and he, Bompard, fastening himself to a rope two hundred feet long in
order to explore that gulf to its very depths.

"More than twenty times, gentlemen--what am I saying? more than
ninety times I sounded that icy abyss without being able to reach our
unfortunate _presidain_ whose fall, however, I was able to prove by
certain fragments left clinging in the crevices of the ice..."

So saying, he spread upon the table-cloth a fragment of a tooth, some
hairs from a beard, a morsel of waistcoat, and one suspender buckle;
almost the whole ossuary of the Grands-Mulets.

In presence of such an exhibition the sorrowful emotions of the assembly
could not be restrained; even the hardest hearts, the partisans of
Costecalde, and the gravest personages--Cambalalette, the notary, the
doctor, Tournatoire--shed tears as big as the stopper of a water-bottle.
The invited ladies uttered heart-rending cries, smothered, however, by
the sobbing howls of Excourbanies and the bleatings of Pascalon, while
the funeral march of the drums and trumpets played a slow and lugubrious
bass.

Then, when he saw the emotion, the nervous excitement at its height,
Bompard ended his tale with a grand gesture of pity toward the scraps
and the buckles, as he said:--

"And there, gentlemen and dear fellow-citizens, there is all that I
recovered of our illustrious and beloved president... The remainder the
glacier will restore to us in forty years..."

He was about to explain, for ignorant persons, the recent discoveries
as to the slow but regular movement of