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At one moment the cacolet swung high in the air, and the sufferer was banged against the lower rail; the next, it was at the other extreme, and he was almost thrown out there was no rest from the maddening motion until a merciful unconsciousness brought relief to the tortured body.
There was a Struggle, a screaming, a mule rolled over, a wounded man sprang up in a cacolet with a spear through him, and then through the narrow gap surged a stream of naked savages, mad with battle, drunk with slaughter, spotted and splashed with blood blood dripping from their spears, their arms, their faces.
Each camel carried two cacolets, one clamped to each side of a specially constructed saddle. To a wounded man the motion was the very refinement of torture, especially if the other cacolet were occupied by a heavier man.
An occasional example may still be seen, but the "jolies Basquaises" who conducted them have given way to sturdy, barelegged Basque boys as picturesque, perhaps, but not so entrancing to the view. To voyage "en cacolet" was the necessity of our grandfathers; for us it is an amusement only. Napoleon III., or rather Eugénie, his spouse, was the faithful godfather of Biarritz as a resort.
By means of cunningly placed blankets the medical authorities did all that was humanly possible to mitigate the terrible jolting, but with all their care and ingenuity even the shortest journey in a cacolet was a nightmare. The miracle was that even the uninjured men could endure so much.
If the weight were unequal, a balance was struck by adding cobblestones on one side or the other, the patient donkey not minding in the least. This astonishing mode of conveyance was known as a "cacolet," and replaced the "voitures" and "fiacres" of other resorts.
Nowhere in Regnard is there a situation equal in comic power to that in the final act of the Réveillon a situation Molière would have been glad to treat. Especially to be commended in Tricoche et Cacolet is the satire of the hysterical sentimentality and of the forced emotions born of luxury and idleness.
We trot along in a whirlwind of dust, blinded, bewildered, jolted, we cling to the bar of the cacolet, shut our eyes, laugh and groan. We arrive at Chalons more dead than alive; we fall to the gravel like jaded cattle, then they pack us into the cars and we leave Chalons to go where? No one knows. It is night; we fly over the rails.
Among the best of the longer of these comic plays are Tricoche et Cacolet and La Boule. Both were written for the Palais Royal, and they are models of the new dramatic species which came into existence at that theatre about twenty years ago, as M. Francisquc Sarcey recently reminded us in his interesting article on the Palais Royal in The Nineteenth Century.
Nor was this the worst. After the wounds had been cleansed and bound up as well as might be, came the journey down to Kantara. The lucky few were carried in sand-carts, but the large majority went on camel-back, lying in a cacolet. A cacolet is a kind of stretcher-bed with a rail round it, and a hood over the top to protect the occupant from the sun.
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