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Updated: July 12, 2025
To hear their chief speak thus brought tears to the eyes of the hat shooters, and to some, such as the president Ladeveze and the chemist Bezuquet, even a twinge of remorse. Some of the station staff were dabbing their eyes in corners, while outside the crowd peered through the railings and shouted "Vive Tartarin!" Then a bell rang. There was a rumbling noise of wheels.
The clearest evidence that Tartarin was unafraid is that he went to the club not by the short way but by the longest and darkest way, through a tangle of mean little streets, at the end of which one glimpsed the sinister gleam of the Rhone. He almost hoped that at a bend in one of these alleys "They" would come rushing from the shadows to attack him from behind.
The best thing to do is to stop there, and buy some donkeys." "No, no; no donkeys," quickly interrupted Tartarin, becoming quite red at memory of Noiraud. "How can you expect," he added, hypocrite that he was, "that such little beasts could carry all our apparatus?" The prince smiled. "You are making a mistake, my illustrious friend.
Dark came on and objects were blurred, though Tartarin walked on for half an hour more, when he stopped, for it was night. A moonless night, too, but sprinkled with stars. On the highroad there was nobody. The hero concluded that lions are not stage-coaches, and would not of their own choice travel the main ways.
It was into the thick of this saturnalia that the great Tartarin came straying one evening to find oblivion and heart's ease. He was roving alone through the gathering, brooding about his Moorish beauty, when two angered voices arose suddenly from a gaming-table above all the clamour and chink of coin. "I tell you, M'sieu, that I am twenty francs short!" "Stuff, M'sieu!" "Stuff yourself; M'sieu!"
"Prince! prince!" gasped Tartarin pallid as a ghost, as he clung to the dry tuft of the hump, "prince, let's get down. I find I feel that I m-m-must get off; or I shall disgrace France." A deal of good that talk was the camel was on the go, and nothing could stop it.
The bell of the government clock was sounding three when Tartarin awoke. He had slept all evening, all night, all morning and even a good part of the afternoon. It has, of course, to be admitted that over the preceding three days the chechia had had a pretty rough time.
Very politely he arranged for Tartarin to go to the Hotel de l'Europe, and confided him to the care of some locals who led him away with all his baggage loaded on several barrows. As he took his first steps in Algiers, Tartarin looked about him wide-eyed. He had imagined beforehand a fairylike Arabian city, something between Constantinople and Zanzibar... but here he was back in Tarascon.
"What the plague can Baya do with all these pipes?" poor Tartarin wanted to know more than once; but he paid the bills all the same, and without niggardliness. At length, after having purchased a mountainous stack of pipes and poured forth lakes of Oriental poesy, an interview was arranged.
It was the chemist Bezuquet, with his family, coming from singing their family ballad at Costecalde's. "Oh, good even, good even!" Tartarin would growl, furious at his blunder, and plunging fiercely into the gloom with his cane waved on high. On arriving in the street where stood his club-house, the dauntless one would linger yet a moment, walking up and down before the portals ere entering.
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