The bells no longer toll. The porch of the cathedral, lately so resounding, is restored to the mutterings of the beggarwoman sitting by the door, and to the cold immovability of its stone saints. The religious ceremony is over; all Taras-con has gone to the Club of the Alpines, where, in solemn session, Bompard is to tell the tale of the catastrophe and relate the last moments of the P. C. A. Besides the members of the Club, many privileged persons of the army, clergy, nobility, and higher commerce have taken seats in the hall of conference, the windows of which, wide open, allow the city band, installed below on the portico, to mingle a few heroic or plaintive notes with the remarks of the gentlemen. An enormous crowd, pressing around the musicians, is standing on the tips of its toes and stretching its necks in hopes to catch a fragment of what is said in session. But the windows are too high, and no one would have any idea of what was going on without the help of two or three urchins perched in the branches of a tall linden who fling down scraps of information as they are wont to fling cherries from a tree: “_Vé_, there’s Costecalde, trying to cry. Ha! the beggar! he’s got the armchair now... And that poor Bézuquet, how he blows his nose! and his eyes are all red!.. _Té!_ they’ve put crape on the banner... There’s Bompard, coming to the table with the three delegates... He has laid something down on the desk... He’s speaking now... It must be fine! They are all crying...” In truth, the grief became general as Bompard advanced in his narrative. Ah! memory had come back to him--imagination also. After picturing himself and his illustrious companion alone on the summit of Mont Blanc, without guides (who had all refused to follow them on account of the bad weather), alone with the banner, unfurled for five minutes on the highest peak of Europe, he recounted, and with what emotion! the perilous descent and fall; Tartarin rolling to the bottom of a crevasse, and he, Bompard, fastening himself to a rope two hundred feet long in order to explore that gulf to its very depths. “More than twenty times, gentlemen--what am I saying? more than ninety times I sounded that icy abyss without being able to reach our unfortunate _présidain_ whose fall, however, I was able to prove by certain fragments left clinging in the crevices of the ice...” So saying, he spread upon the table-cloth a fragment of a tooth, some hairs from a beard, a morsel of waistcoat, and one suspender buckle; almost the whole ossuary of the Grands-Mulets.