The blood of Tarascon boiled over at once.

“Wretches that you are!” he roared in a voice of thunder, “thus to debase such noble beasts!”

Springing to the lion, he wrenched the loathsome bowl from between his royal jaws.  The two Africans, believing they had a thief to contend with, rushed upon the foreigner with uplifted cudgels.  There was a dreadful conflict:  the blackamoors smiting, the women screaming, and the youngsters laughing.  An old Jew cobbler bleated out of the hollow of his stall, “Dake him to the shustish of the beace!” The lion himself; in his dark state, tried to roar as his hapless champion, after a desperate struggle, rolled on the ground among the spilt pence and the sweepings.

At this juncture a man cleft the throng, made the Negroes stand back with a word, and the women and urchins with a wave of the hand, lifted up Tartarin, brushed him down, shook him into shape, and sat him breathless upon a corner-post.

“What, prince, is it you?” said the good Tartarin, rubbing his ribs.

“Yes, indeed, it is I, my valiant friend.  As soon as your letter was received, I entrusted Baya to her brother, hired a post-chaise, flew fifty leagues as fast as a horse could go, and here I am, just in time to snatch you from the brutality of these ruffians.  What have you done, in the name of just Heaven, to bring this ugly trouble upon you?”

“What done, prince?  It was too much for me to see this unfortunate lion with a begging-bowl in his mouth, humiliated, conquered, buffeted about, set up as a laughing-stock to all this Moslem rabble” —­

“But you are wrong, my noble friend.  On the contrary, this lion is an object of respect and adoration.  This is a sacred beast who belongs to a great monastery of lions, founded three hundred years ago by Mahomet Ben Aouda, a kind of fierce and forbidding La Trappe, full of roarings and wild-beastly odours, where strange monks rear and feed lions by hundreds, and send them out all over Northern Africa, accompanied by begging brothers.  The alms they receive serve for the maintenance of the monastery and its mosques; and the two Negroes showed so much displeasure just now because it was their conviction that the lion under their charge would forthwith devour them if a single penny of their collection were lost or stolen through any fault of theirs.”

On hearing this incredible and yet veracious story Tartarin of Tarascon was delighted, and sniffed the air noisily.  “What pleases me in this,” he remarked, as the summing up of his opinion, “is that, whether Monsieur Bombonnel likes it or not, there are still lions in Algeria.” —­

“I should think there were!” ejaculated the prince enthusiastically.  “We will start to-morrow beating up the Shelliff Plain, and you will see lions enough!”

“What, prince! have you an intention to go a-hunting, too?”

“Of course!  Do you think I am going to leave you to march by yourself into the heart of Africa, in the midst of ferocious tribes of whose languages and usages you are ignorant!  No, no, illustrious Tartarin, I shall quit you no more.  Go where you will, I shall make one of the party.”