s
suitable for crackers, but Daudet had an asset--his vivid feeling for
the South. It was not knowledge or observation made Tartarin; it was
instinct. Neither in _Tartarin de Tarascon_ nor in _Tartarin sur les
Alpes_ was Daudet for a moment inconsistent or obscure; for him,
Tartarin and his followers stood all the time in violent light. He knew
not only what they had to say in given circumstances, but also what they
would say in any circumstances that might arise.

It is not wonderful then, that Tartarin appears as a large character.
You will figure him throughout as a French bourgeois, aged about forty
in the first novel, fifty in the second, and sixty in the third.
Daudet's dates being unreliable, you must assume his adventures as
happening between 1861 and 1881, and bridge the gaps that exist between
them with a vision of Tartarin's stormily peaceful life in the sleepy
town of Tarascon. For Tartarin was too adventurous to live without
dangers and storms. When he was not shooting lions in Algeria, or
climbing the Alps, or colonising in Polynesia, Tartarin was still a
hero: he lived in his little white house with the green shutters,
surrounded with knives, revolvers, rifles, double-handed swords,
crishes, and yataghans; he read, not the local paper, but Fenimore
Cooper and Captain Cook; he learned how to fight and how to hunt, how to
follow a trail, or he hypnotised himself with the recitals of Alpine
climbs, of battles in China with the bellicose Tartar. Save under
compulsion, he never did anything, partly because there was nothing to
do at Tarascon, partly because his soul was turned rather towards
bourgeois comfort than towards glory and blood. This, however, the fiery
Southerner could not accept: if he could not do he could pretend, and
thus did Daudet establish the enormous absurdity of his character.

There was nothing to shoot at Tarascon, so Tartarin and his followers
went solemnly into the fields and fired at their caps; there was nothing
to climb, except the neighbouring Alpilles ... whose height was three
hundred feet, but Tartarin bought an alpen-stock and printed upon his
visiting-cards initials which meant 'President of the Alpine Club';
there was no danger in the town, but Tartarin never went out at night
without a dagger and several guns. He was a bourgeois, but he was a
romantic: he had to find in fiction the excitement that life refused
him, to create it where it did not exist. In the rough, Tartarin