“A moi! prince!...  A Moi!...  The lion!"...  There was no answer.  “Prince!... prince!  Are you there?"....  The prince was not there.  Against the white wall of the Marabout was only the silhouette of the worthy camel’s hump.  The prince Gregory had disappeared, taking with him the wallet and the banknotes.  His highness had been waiting for a month for such an opportunity.

Chapter 29.

The day after this adventurous yet tragic evening, when at first light our hero awoke and realised that the prince and his money had gone and would not return; when he saw himself alone in this little white tomb, betrayed, robbed and abandoned in the middle of savage Algeria with a one-humped camel and some loose change as his total resources, for the first time some misgivings entered his mind.  He began to have doubts about Montenegro, about friendship, fame and even lions.  Overcome by misery he shed bitter tears.

While he was sitting disconsolately at the door of the Marabout with his head in his hands, his rifle between his knees and watched over by the camel... behold!  The undergrowth opposite was thrust aside and the thunderstruck Tartarin saw not ten paces away a gigantic lion, which advanced towards him uttering roars which shook the ragged offerings on the wall of the Marabout and even the slippers of the holy man in their recess.  Only Tartarin remained unshaken.  “At last!” He cried, jumping to his feet with his rifle butt to his shoulder...  Pan!...  Pan!...  Pft!...  Pft!...  The lion had two explosive bullets in its head!  Fragments of lion erupted like fireworks into the burning African sky, and as they fell to earth, Tartarin saw two furious negroes, who ran towards him with raised cudgels.  The two negroes of Milianah...  Oh!  Misere!...  It was the the tame lion, the poor blind lion of the convent of Mahommed that the bullets of the Tarasconais had felled.

This time Tartarin had the narrowest of escapes.  Drunk with fanatical fury, the two negro mendicants would surely have had him in pieces had not the God of the Christians sent him a Guardian Angel in the shape of the District Police Officer from Orleansville, who arrived down the pathway, his sabre tucked under his arm, at that very moment.  The sight of the municipal kepi had an immediate calming effect on the two negroes.  Stern and majestic the representative of the law took down the particulars of the affair, had the remains of the lion loaded onto the camel, and ordered the plaintiff and the accused to follow him to Orleansville, where the whole matter was placed in the hands of the legal authorities.

There then commenced a long and involved process.  After the tribal Algeria in which he had been wandering, Tartarin now made the acquaintance of the no less peculiar and cock-eyed Algeria of the towns:  litigious and legalistic.  He encountered a sleazy justicary who stitched up shady deals in the back rooms of cafes.  The Bohemian society of the gentlemen of the law; dossiers which stank of absinthe, white cravats speckled with drink and coffee stains.  He was embroiled with ushers, solicitors, and business agents, all the locusts of officialdom, thin and ravenous, who strip the colonist down to his boots and leave him shorn leaf by leaf like a stalk of maize.