The Town of "Tartarin"
I.
The custom observed by English authors of giving fictitious names to places described in works of romance—as for example, Mr. Hardy's "Casterbridge" (Dorchester) and Mr. Barrie's "Thrums" (Kirriemuir)—has so brought their readers to accept the most faithful realism for romance, that when they take up a French novel they are apt to think the places mentioned therein are treated in the same way. But those who have any acquaintance with French fiction will know that the novelists across the Channel follow a method entirely opposed to ours. An English reader who may have enjoyed to the full the famous trilogy of "Tartarin" books may well be excused if he supposes that the town of Tarascon is largely a creation of their author, Alphonse Daudet. It is true that if he has ever travelled from Paris to Marseilles by way of Lyons and Avignon he will have passed through Tarascon, with its wide and open station perched high on a viaduct, and the porter bawling in his rich, southern tongue, "Tarascon, stop five minutes. Change for Nîmes, Montpellier, Cette." And if he has—as he cannot fail to have—delightful memories of the incomparable Tartarin, his feet will itch to be out and wander the dusty streets in the hope of looking upon the scenes of the hero's happy days; to peep perchance at his tiny white-washed villa on the Avignon Road with its green Venetian shutters, where the little bootblacks used to play about the door and hail the great man as his portly figure stepped forth, bound for the Alpine Club "down town." There would certainly be small other reasons for tarrying at this ancient town of France; it owes such interest as it possesses chiefly to the genius of Daudet, whose inimitable humour has vivified and touched it with immortality.
I had been wandering a-wheel over many a league of these fair southern roads one summer before I found myself at the ancient Roman city of Nîmes, the rarest treasure of France, and it was a visit to Daudet's birthplace there that suggested the idea of going on to Tarascon a desire intensified by the ardour of a gentleman from that town whom I met at a hotel, and who perspired with indignation as he denounced "that Daudet" for libelling the good folk of Tarascon. "Tartarin! The whole thing's a farce. There never was such a man!" But he asserted that the town was well worth seeing, if I could only forget Daudet's ribald nonsense.
It went well with my plans for reaching the main route back to Paris to make a little journey through the fragrant olive groves along the high road to Remoulins in order to visit the world-famous Roman aqueduct known as the Pont du Gard, near to which a gipsy told Tartarin he would one day be a king, and thence by the banks of the river Gardon to Beaucaire and Tarascon. Not often have I made a literary pilgrimage of so pleasant or profitable a nature.
II.
You must know, of course, what a rare fellow this Tartarin was—Coquin de bon sort! I am not sure that I should speak of him in the past tense; although his creator eventually gathered him to his fathers, Tartarin was built for immortality, and at most his passing was a translation; he is for all time the archetype of southern character, and Tarascon is alive with him to-day. Of medium height, stout of body, scant of hair on his head, but bushy-whiskered and jovial-faced, you will see his like sipping absinth at any café on the promenade of the sleepy old town, or playing a game of billiards with the grand manner of a Napoleon figuring out a campaign.
Tartarin, blessed with all the imagination of the generous south, was indeed an ineffectual Bonaparte, in the body of a good-natured provincial. "We are both of the south," he observed to his devoted admirer Pascalon, when that faithful henchman, at a crisis in his hero's career, pointed out the similarity between him of Corsica and him of Tarascon. Daudet makes him, in a bright flash of self-knowledge, describe himself as "Don Quixote in the skin of Sancho Panza," and Mr. Henry James has in this wise elaborated the point with his usual deftness:
"There are two men in Tartarin, and there are two men in all of us; only, of course, to make a fine case, M. Daudet has zigzagged the line of their respective oddities. As he says so amusingly in Tartarin of Tarascon, in his comparison of the very different promptings of these inner voices, when the Don Quixote sounds the appeal, 'Cover yourself with glory!' the Sancho Panza murmurs the qualification, 'Cover yourself with flannel!' The glory is everything the imagination regales itself with as a luxury of reputation—the regardelle so prettily described in the last pages of Port Tarascon; the flannel is everything that life demands as a tribute to reality—a gage of self-preservation. The glory reduced to a tangible texture too often turns out to be mere prudent underclothing."