if it had three _b's_ and ten _y's_. But no
matter, they worked themselves into a frenzy over it, threw up their
hands, waved their hats, and waxed excited over their own antics.
Women, deeply affected, wiped their eyes; and suddenly the piercing cry
of a child came from the topmost branches of an elm: "Mamma, mamma, I
see him!" He saw him! They all saw him for that matter; to this day
they would all take their oath that they saw him.

Confronted with such delirious excitement, finding it impossible to
impose silence and tranquillity upon that mob, there was but one course
for the people in the carriages to pursue: to let them alone, raise the
windows and drive at full speed in order to abridge that unpleasant
martyrdom as much as possible. Then it was terrible. Seeing the cortege
quicken its pace, the whole road began to run with it. The _farandoleurs_
of Barbantane, hand-in-hand, bounded from side to side, to the muffled
wheezing of their tambourines, forming a human garland around the
carriage doors. The singing societies, unable to sing at that breathless
pace, but howling none the less, dragged their banner-bearers along,
the banners thrown over their shoulders; and the stout, red-faced
cures, panting, pushing their huge overburdened paunches before them,
still found strength to shout in the mules' ears, in sympathetic,
effusive tones: "Vive notre bon Bey!" And with it all, the rain, the
rain falling in bucketfuls, in sheets, soiling the pink carriages,
increasing the confusion, giving to that triumphal return the aspect of
a rout, but a laughable rout, compounded of songs, laughter, blasphemy,
frantic embraces and infernal oaths, something like the return from a
Corpus Christi procession in the storm, with cassocks tucked up,
surplices thrown over the head, and the good Lord hastily housed under
a porch.

A dull rumbling announced to the poor Nabob, sitting silent and
motionless in a corner of his carriage, that they were crossing the
bridge of boats. They had arrived.

"At last!" he said, looking out through the dripping windows at the
foam-tipped waves of the Rhone, where the storm seemed to him like
repose after that through which he had passed. But, when the first
carriage reached the triumphal arch at the end of the bridge, bombs
were exploded, the drums beat, saluting the monarch's arrival upon his
faithful subject's domain, and the climax of irony was reached when, in
the half light, a blaze of gas sudd