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 cafés. 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.

The first essential point to be decided was whether the lion had been
killed on civil or military territory. In the first case Tartarin
would come before a civil tribunal, in the second he would be tried by
court-martial: at the word court-martial Tartarin imagined himself
lying shot at the foot of the ramparts, or crouching in the depths of
a dungeon... A major difficulty was that the delimitation of these two