“A fine chance to be done with life, to return into chaos through the bowels of the earth, and roll from fissure to fissure like that bit of ice which I kick with my foot...” And he leaned over frightfully to watch the fragment bounding downward and echoing endlessly in the blackness. “Take care!..” cried Tartarin, livid with terror. Then, desperately clinging to the oozing wall, he resumed, with hot ardour, his argument of the night before in favour of existence. “There’s _good_ in it... What the deuce!.. At your age, a fine young fellow like you... Don’t you believe in love, _qué!_” No, the Swede did not believe in it. Ideal love is a poet’s lie; the other, only a need he had never felt... “_Bé!_ yes! _bé!_ yes!.. It is true poets lie, they always say more than there is; but for all that, she is nice, the _femellan_--that’s what they call women in our parts. Besides, there’s children, pretty little darlings that look like us.” “Children! a source of grief. Ever since she had them my mother has done nothing but weep.” “Listen, Otto, you know me, my good friend...” And with all the valorous ardour of his soul Tartarin exhausted himself to revive and rub to life at that distance this victim of Schopenhauer and of Hartmann, two rascals he’d like to catch at the corner of a wood, _coquin de sort!_ and make them pay for all the harm they had done to youth... Represent to yourselves during this discussion the high wall of freezing, glaucous, streaming ice touched by a pallid ray of light, and that string of human beings glued to it in echelon, with ill-omened rumblings rising from the yawning depth, together with the curses of the guides and their threats to detach and abandon the travellers. Tartarin, seeing that no argument could convince the madman or clear off his vertigo of death, suggested to him the idea of throwing himself from the highest peak of the Mont Blanc... That indeed! _that_ would be worth doing, up there! A fine end among the elements... But here, at the bottom of a cave... Ah! _vaï_, what a blunder!.. And he put such tone into his words, brusque and yet persuasive, such conviction, that the Swede allowed himself to be conquered, and there they were, at last, one by one, at the top of that terrible _roture_. They were now unroped, and a halt was called for a bite and sup. It was daylight; a cold wan light among a circle of peaks and shafts, overtopped by the Mont Blanc, still thousands of feet above them. The guides were apart, gesticulating and consulting, with many shakings of the head. Seated on the white ground, heavy and huddled up, their round backs in their brown jackets, they looked like marmots getting ready to hibernate. Bompard and Tartarin, uneasy, shocked, left the young Swede to eat alone, and came up to the guides just as their leader was saying with a grave air:-- “He is smoking his pipe; there’s no denying it.” “Who is smoking his pipe?” asked Tartarin. “Mont Blanc, monsieur; look there...”