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Updated: May 10, 2025
Very reluctantly, and after many most absurd grimaces, Matamore crosses swords with Doralice's ferocious brother, but he trembles so that the latter, with one quick movement, sends his weapon flying out of his hand, and chastises him with the flat of his sword until he roars for mercy. To cap the climax, Mme.
Matamore!" but there was no reply, nothing to be heard but the howling of the large black dog, at intervals now, or the scream of an owl, disturbed by the light of the lantern. At last de Sigognac, with his penetrating vision, thought he could make out a recumbent figure at the foot of a tree, a little way off from the road, and they all pressed forward to the spot he indicated.
She was not at all displeased at his ardent glances, and smiled radiantly and encouragingly upon him, thereby unconsciously making poor Matamore, who was secretly enamoured of her, desperately unhappy, though he well knew that his passion was an utterly hopeless one.
When the first spadeful of earth fell upon his body the pedant, with great tears slowly rolling down his cheeks, bent reverently over the grave and sighed out, "Alas! poor Matamore!" little thinking that he was, using the very words of Hamlet, prince of Denmark, when he apostrophized the skull of Yorick, an ancient king's jester, in the famous tragedy of one Shakespeare a poet of great renown in England, and protege of Queen Elizabeth.
Matamore was very abstemious, both in eating and drinking, and could have lived like the impoverished Spanish hidalgo, who dines on three olives and sups on an air upon his mandoline. There was a reason for his extreme frugality; he feared that if he ate and drank like other people he might lose his phenomenal thinness, which was of inestimable value to him in a professional point of view.
The village for which they were bound was still a league away; but they could not stay where they were all night, and they decided to go on, even if they had to abandon the chariot and walk anything would be better than freezing to death like poor Matamore.
The piece opens with a quarrel between the testy old bourgeois, Pandolphe, and his daughter, Isabelle, who, being in love with a handsome young suitor, obstinately refuses to obey her father's commands and marry a certain Captain Matamore, with whom he is perfectly infatuated.
As soon as he was informed of what had occurred, he lighted a lantern, and with the baron set forth, under the guidance of the droll old actor, to find and rescue the chariot in distress. When they reached it Leander and Matamore were tugging vainly at the wheels, while his majesty, the king, pricked up the weary oxen with the point of his dagger.
Poor Matamore was dead, stiff and stark, with wide-open, sunken eyes staring out vaguely into the darkness, and his ghastly face wearing that pinched, indescribable expression which the mortal puts on when the spirit that dwelt within has fled. The three who had found him thus were inexpressibly shocked, and stood for a moment speechless and motionless, in the presence of death.
They reached at last the lonely spot where they were to leave the mortal remains of poor Matamore, and the stable-boy, who had accompanied them carrying a spade, set to work to dig the grave.
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