The World's Greatest Books — Volume 03 — Fiction

Table of Contents
A Complete Index of THE WORLD'S GREATEST BOOKS will be found at the end of Volume XX.
Alphonse Daudet, the celebrated French novelist, was born at Nimes on May 13, 1840, and as a youth of seventeen went to Paris, where he began as a poet at eighteen, and at twenty-two made his first efforts in the drama. He soon found his feet as a contributor to the leading journals of the day and a successful writer for the stage. He was thirty-two when he wrote Tartarin of Tarascon, than which no better comic tale has been produced in modern times. Tarascon is a real town, not far from the birthplace of Daudet, and the people of the district have always had a reputation for drawing the long bow. It was to satirise this amiable weakness of his southern compatriots that the novelist created the character of Tartarin, but while he makes us laugh at the absurd misadventures of the lion-hunter, it will be noticed how ingeniously he prevents our growing out of temper with him, how he contrives to keep a warm corner in our hearts for the bragging, simple-minded, good-natured fellow. That is to say, it is a work of essential humour, and the lively style in which the story is told attracts us to it time and again with undiminished pleasure. In two subsequent books, Tartarin in the Alps, and Port Tarascon, Daudet recounted further adventures of his delightful hero. His Sapho and Kings in Exile have also been widely read. Daudet died on December 17, 1897.
I remember my first visit to Tartarin of Tarascon as clearly as if it had been yesterday, though it is now more than a dozen years ago. When you had passed into his back garden, you would never have fancied yourself in France. Every tree and plant had been brought from foreign climes; he was such a fellow for collecting the curiosities of Nature, this wonderful Tartarin. His garden boasted, for instance, an example of the baobab, that giant of the vegetable world, but Tartarin's specimen was only big enough to occupy a mignonette pot. He was mightily proud of it, all the same.