III.
Since I visited the town the Tarasconians have proved worthy of their reputation, as a picture post card has been put in circulation bearing a photograph of "La Maison de Tartarin." It shows a square and comfortable white house, flat-roofed, with a series of loop-hole windows that give it a murderous look. In front is a large garden, where an old baobab stretches forth its branches and innumerable exotics mingle their strange leaves in the beautiful disorder of the primeval forest. So, at least, I gather from a French journal. Yet, while pointing out the mendacity of the picture post card, the journal in question publishes with every evidence of sincerity an equally apocryphal account of the real Tartarin, who we are told, was a person named originally Jean Pittalouga, a native of the south of Sardinia, not a Frenchman at all. He was bought out of slavery by the Brotherhood of the Trinity, and came to Tarascon to manage the property of the fraternity in that town. As Sidi-Mouley-Abdallah was the superior of Morocco and that country was part of Barbary, Pittalouga became known in Tarascon, because of his romantic experience among the Moors, first as Sidi-Barbari, and then as Barbarin. The time came when the Trinity fraternity had to clear out, and with them Barbarin, who now rented a neighbouring farm on the outskirts of the town—the veritable "Maison de Tartarin" of the post card. But he did not die there. He went away with the Trinity fathers into Africa, and is believed to have been devoured entirely by some terrible wild beast, with whom he had disputed the sovereignty of the desert. To all of which, as Daudet remarks of the member of the Jockey Club travelling avec sa nièce, "Hum! hum!"
One may note here that the author did first write of his comic hero as Barbarin; but as the French law affords the fullest measure of protection to living people whose names may be introduced in works of fiction, and as there lived in Tarascon a certain M. Barbarin, who wrote to Daudet a letter worthy of his hero, wherein he threatened the utmost rigour of the law unless the novelist ceased to make sport of "what was dearer to him than life itself, the unspotted name of his ancestors," Daudet altered the name to Tartarin, and was inclined to think in after years, when the fame of his creation had travelled around the globe, that his hero would never have been so popular under his original name. It may have been a case of "apt alliteration's artful aid"; but one may suppose that Tartarin would have been equally popular by any other name. He embodies the extravagant, and not the least lovable, side of French character, as truly as Uriah Heep and Mr. Pecksniff represent English humbug and hypocrisy; he has many points of similarity with Mr. Pickwick, but the last-mentioned can hardly be compared with him as reality seen through the eye of kindly caricature.