Before the Start.
PENDING Tartarin's delay of the event by all sorts of heroic means, all Tarascon kept an eye upon him, and nothing else was busied about.Cap-popping was winged, and ballad-singing dead.
The piano in Bezuquet's shop mouldered away under a green fungus, and the Spanish flies dried upon it, belly up.Tartarin's expedition had a put a stopper on everything.
Ah, you ought to have seen his a success in the parlours.He was snatched away by one from another, fought for, loaned and borrowed, ay, stolen.There was a no greater honour for the ladies than to go to Mitaine's Menagerie on Tartarin's arms, and have it explained before the lion's den how such large game are hunted, where they should be aimed at, at how many paces off; if the accidents were numerous, and the like of that.
Tartarin furnished all the elucidation desired.He had read "The Life of a Jules Gerard, the Lion-Slayer," and had lion-hunting at his finger ends, as if he had been through it himself.Hence he orated upon these matters with great eloquence.
But where he shone the brightest was at dinner at Chief Judge Ladeveze's, or brave Commandant Bravida's (the former captain in the Army Clothing Factory, you will keep in mind), when coffee came in, and all the chairs were brought up closer together, whilst they chatted of his future hunts.
Thereupon, his elbow on the cloth, his nose over his Mocha, our hero would discourse in a feeling tone of all the dangers awaiting him thereaway.He spoke of the long moonless night lyings-in-wait, the pestilential fens, the rivers envenomed by leaves of poison-plants, the deep snow-drifts, the scorching suns, the scorpions, and rains of grasshoppers; he also descanted on the peculiarities of the great lions of the Atlas, their way of fighting, their phenomenal vigour; and their ferocity in the mating season.
Heating with his own recital, he would rise from table, bounding to the middle of the dining-room, imitating the roar of a lion and the going off of a rifle : crack! bang! the zizz of the explosive bullet --gesticulating and roaring about till he had overset the chairs.
Everybody turned pale around the board: the gentlemen looking at one another and wagging their heads, the ladies shutting their eyes with pretty screams of fright, the elderly men combatively brandishing their canes; and, in the side apartments, the little boys, who had been put to bed betimes, were greatly startled by the sudden outcries and imitated gun-fire, and screamed for lights.
Meanwhile, Tartarin did not start.
