Softened by tender thoughts, the hero admired the sweet child before him, reflecting that glory is only a semi-happiness, that 'tis sad to grow old all alone in your greatness, like Moses, and that this fragile flower of the North transplanted into the little garden at Tarascon would brighten its monotony, and be sweeter to see and breathe than that everlasting baobab, _arbos gigantea_, diminutively confined in the mignonette pot. With her childlike eyes, and her broad brow, thoughtful and self-willed, Sonia looked at him, and she, too, dreamed--but who knows what the young girls dream of?
The nights at Tarascon, Where is he? Anxiety. The grasshoppers on the promenade call for Tartarin. Martyrdom of a great Tarasconese saint. The Club of the Alpines. What was happening at the pharmacy. "Help! help! Bêzuquet!"
"A letter, Monsieur Bêzuquet!.. Comes from Switzerland, _vé!_.. Switzerland!" cried the postman joyously, from the other end of the little square, waving something in the air, and hurrying along in the coming darkness.
The apothecary, who took the air, as they say, of an evening before his door in his shirt-sleeves, gave a jump, seized the letter with feverish hands and carried it into his lair among the varied odours of elixirs and dried herbs, but did not open it till the postman had departed, refreshed by a glass of that delicious _sirop de cadavre_ in recompense for what he brought.
Fifteen days had Bêzuquet expected it, this letter from Switzerland, fifteen days of agonized watching! And here it was. Merely from looking at the cramped and resolute little writing on the envelope, the postmark "Interlaken" and the broad purple stamp of the "Hôtel Jungfrau, kept by Meyer," the tears filled his eyes, and the heavy moustache of the Barbary corsair through which whispered softly the idle whistle of a kindly soul, quivered.
"_Confidential. Destroy when read._" Those words, written large at the head of the page, in the telegraphic style of the pharmacopoeia ("external use; shake before using") troubled him to the point of making him read aloud, as one does in a bad dream: "_Fearful things are happening to me_..." In the salon beside the pharmacy where she was taking her little nap after supper, Mme. Bézuquet, _mère_, might hear him, or the pupil whose pestle was pounding its regular blows in the big marble mortar of the laboratory. Bézuquet continued his reading in a low voice, beginning it over again two or three times, very pale, his hair literally standing on end. Then, with a rapid look about him, _cra cra_... and the letter in a thousand scraps went into the waste-paper basket; but there it might be found, and pieced together, and as he was stooping to gather up the fragments a quavering voice called to him: