The delegation! the full delegation, Bravida, Pascalon, Excourbaniès,
piled upon the back seat, pale, horror-stricken, ghastly, and two
gendarmes in front of them, muskets in hand! The sight of all those
profiles, motionless and mute, visible through the narrow frame of the
carriage window, was like a nightmare. Nailed to the ground, as
formerly on the ice by his Kennedy crampons, Tartarin was gazing at that
fantastic vehicle flying along at a gallop, followed at full speed by a
flock of schoolboys, their atlases swinging on their backs, when a
voice shouted in his ears: “And here’s the fourth!..” At the same time
clutched, garotted, bound, he, too, was hoisted into a _locati_ with
gendarmes, among them an officer armed with a gigantic cavalry sabre,
which he held straight up from between his knees, the point of it
touching the roof of the vehicle.
Tartarin wanted to speak, to explain. Evidently there must be some
mistake... He told his name, his nation, demanded his consul, and
named a seller of Swiss honey, Ichener, whom he had met at the fair at
Beaucaire. Then, on the persistent silence of his captors, he bethought
him that this might be another bit of machinery in Bompard’s fairyland;
so, addressing the officer, he said with sly air: “For fun, _qué!_.. ha!
_vaï_, you rogue, I know very well it is all a joke.”
“Not another word, or I’ll gag you,” said the officer, rolling terrible
eyes as if he meant to spit him on his sabre.
The other kept quiet, and stirred no more, but gazed through the door at
the lake, the tall mountains of a humid green, the hotels and pensions
with variegated roofs and gilded signs visible for miles, and on the
slopes, as at the Rigi, a coming and going of market and provision
baskets, and (like the Rigi again) a comical little railway, a dangerous
mechanical plaything crawling up the height to Glion, and--to complete
the resemblance to _Regina Montium_--a pouring, beating rain, an
exchange of water and mist from the sky to Leman and Leman to the sky,
the clouds descending till they touched the waves.
The vehicle crossed a drawbridge between a cluster of little shops of
“chamoiseries,” penknives, corkscrews, pocket-combs, etc., and stopped
in the courtyard of an old castle overgrown with weeds, flanked by two
round pepper-pot towers with black balconies guarded by parapets and
supported by beams. Where was he? Tartarin learned where when he heard
the officer of gendarmerie discussing the matter with the concierge of
the castle, a fat man in a Greek cap who was jangling a bunch of rusty
keys.
“Solitary confinement... but I haven’t a place for him. The others have
taken all... unless we put him in Bonnivard’s dungeon.”
“Yes, put him in Bonnivard’s dungeon; that’s good enough for him,”
ordered the captain; and it was done as he said.
This Castle of Chillon, about which the P. C. A. had never for two days
ceased to discourse to his dear Alpinists, and in which, by the irony of
fate, he found himself suddenly incarcerated without knowing why, is one
of the most frequented historical monuments in Switzerland. After
having served as a summer residence to the Dukes of Savoie, then as a
state-prison, afterwards as an arsenal for arms and munitions, it
is to-day the mere pretext for an excursion, like the Rigi and the
Tellsplatte. It still contains, however, a post of gendarmerie and a
“violon,” that is, a cell for drunkards and the naughty boys of the
neighbourhood; but they are so rare in the peaceable Canton of Vaud that
the “violon” is always empty and the concierge uses it as a receptacle
to store his wood for winter. Therefore the arrival of all these
prisoners had put him out of temper, especially at the thought that he
could no longer take visitors to see the famous dungeon, which at this
season of the year is the chief profit of the place.
Furious, he showed the way to Tartarin, who followed him without the
courage to make the slightest resistance. A few crumbling steps, a damp
corridor smelling like a cellar, a door thick as a wall with enormous
hinges, and there they were, in a vast subterranean vault, with earthen
floor and heavy Roman pillars in which were still the iron rings to
which prisoners of state had been chained. A dim light fell, tremulous
with the shimmer of the lake, through narrow slits in the wall, which
scarcely showed more than a scrap of the sky.
“Here you are at home,” said the jailer. “Be careful you don’t go to the
farther end: the pit is there...”