t Nimes nor Marseilles, Toulouse nor Tarascon.
The Southerner does not deceive but is self-deceived. He does not always
tell the cold-drawn truth, but he believes he does. His falsehood is not
any such thing, but a kind of mental mirage.

Yes, purely mirage! The better to follow me, you should actually follow
me into the South, and you will see I am right. You have only to look at
that Lucifer's own country, where the sun transmogrifies everything,
and magnifies it beyond life-size. The little hills of Provence are no
bigger than the Butte Montmartre, but they will loom up like the Rocky
Mountains; the Square House at Nimes--a mere model to put on your
sideboard--will seem grander than St. Peter's. You will see--in brief,
the only exaggerator in the South is Old Sol, for he does enlarge
everything he touches. What was Sparta in its days of splendour? a
pitiful hamlet. What was Athens? at the most, a second-class town; and
yet in history both appear to us as enormous cities. This is a sample of
what the sun can do.

Are you going to be astonished after this that the same sun falling upon
Tarascon should have made of an ex-captain in the Army Clothing Factory,
like Bravida, the "brave commandant;" of a sprout an Indian fig-tree;
and of a man who had missed going to Shanghai one who had been there?

VIII. Mitaine's Menagerie--A Lion from the Atlas at Tarascon--A Solemn
and Fearsome Confrontation.

EXHIBITING Tartarin of Tarascon, as we are, in his private life, before
Fame kissed his brow and garlanded him with her well-worn laurel wreath,
and having narrated his heroic existence in a modest state, his delights
and sorrows, his dreams and his hopes, let us hurriedly skip to the
grandest pages of his story, and to the singular event which was to give
the first flight to his incomparable career.

It happened one evening at Costecalde the gunmaker's, where Tartarin was
engaged in showing several sportsmen the working of the needle-gun,
then in its first novelty. The door suddenly flew open, and in rushed a
bewildered cap-popper, howling "A lion, a lion!" General was the alarm,
stupor, uproar and tumult. Tartarin prepared to resist cavalry with
the bayonet, whilst Costecalde ran to shut the door. The sportsman was
surrounded and pressed and questioned, and here follows what he told
them: Mitaine's Menagerie, returning from Beaucaire Fair, had consented
to stay over a few days at Tarascon, and was just unpacking, to s