a few moments longer."
Thereupon he bowed, and the jailer, who had his eye upon him, locked and
bolted the door, to the stupefaction of everybody.

What a degradation! He perspired with anguish, unhappy man, while
listening to the exclamations of the tourists as they walked away.
Fortunately, the anguish was not renewed. No more tourists arrived that
day on account of the bad weather. A terrible wind blew through the
rotten boards, moans came up from the pit as from victims ill-buried,
and the wash of the lake, swollen with rain, beat against the walls to
the level of the window-slits and spattered its water upon the
captive. At intervals the bell of a passing steamer, the clack of its
paddle-wheels cut short the reflections of poor Tartarin, as evening,
gray and gloomy, fell into the dungeon and seemed to enlarge it.

How explain this arrest, this imprisonment in the ill-omened place?
Costecalde, perhaps... electioneering manoeuvre at the last hour?..
Or, could it be that the Russian police, warned of his very imprudent
language, his liaison with Sonia, had asked for his extradition? But if
so, why arrest the delegates?.. What blame could attach to those poor
unfortunates, whose terror and despair he imagined, although they were
not, like him, in Bonnivard's dungeon, beneath those granite arches,
where, since night had fallen, roamed monstrous rats, cockroaches,
silent spiders with hairy, crooked legs.

But see what it is to possess a good conscience! In spite of rats, cold,
spiders, and beetles, the great Tartarin found in the horror of that
state-prison, haunted by the shades of martyrs, the same solid and
sonorous sleep, mouth open, fists closed, which came to him, between
the abysses and heaven, in the hut of the Alpine Club. He fancied he was
dreaming when he heard his jailer say in the morning:--

"Get up; the prefect of the district is here... He has come to examine
you..." Adding, with a certain respect, "To bring the prefect out in
this way... why, you must be a famous scoundrel."

Scoundrel! no--but you may look like one, after spending the night in a
damp and dusty dungeon without having a chance to make a toilet, however
limited. And when, in the former stable of the castle transformed into a
guardroom with muskets in racks along the walls,--when, I say, Tartarin,
after a reassuring glance at his Alpinists seated between two gendarmes,
appeared before the prefect of the district, he felt his disreputab