Romantic Cities of Provence

by Mona Caird

"Néomoins," he added, with a naïve little gesture, "néomoins, if chance were to make him the possessor of a little fortune, he would buy a little house—toute petite, with a garden; he would have one servant whom he would treat very well, and he would have a little trap and horse which he would drive himself. And then he would envy no man!"

After all then a desire still lingered.

"Ah ça ne me fait pas de mal!" he said with a shrug, "ç'a m'amuse." "I am not unhappy in knowing it can never come. Voilà la différence!"

Poor Tartarin! And yet in truth was he to be pitied or envied? He must have seemed somewhat strange to his comrades. They would get excited and troubled over all sorts of trivial things, and they would offend one another and flare up into quarrels. Not so Tartarin. He would quietly evade points of difference, laugh off some threatening dispute, make peace between hot-headed combatants. Such things seemed to him needless, foolish. "A quoi bon?" as he asked. "Ça ne vaut pas la peine, mon Dieu!"

As we were nearing our destination his confidences grew more rapid. After all a man who had thought and felt about things to this extent must have badly needed a means of expression at times.

One is so apt to imagine that the lives one touches thus casually are all more or less what one calls "normal." But when the veil is lifted by some accident, it is not often the purely normal that one finds below it. When Tartarin mentioned that he and his sister were born at Tarascon, I had vaguely pictured an ordinary well-conducted French family. But I found my mistake. The man spoke hesitatingly of his childhood. He had the Frenchman's conventional and inconsequent respect for his mother—inconsequent considering the unceremonious manner in which she has previously been treated, as a woman. In this case the conduct of the mother had been painfully out of order. The Frenchman reverences his mother surprisingly indeed, but on strict condition that she carries out her rôle in absolute conformity with expected sentiments. La mère is la mère, neither more nor less, an esteemed functionary rather than a private individual. Is this to be doubted in the country under whose laws the mother is unhesitatingly sacrificed in the case of having to choose between her life and the child's?

So poor Tartarin's state of mind must have been most complex, for his mother had shown a spirit anything but official. She could not stand uninterrupted family life, it appears, and used to go off at intervals in a sort of exasperation, for a week or a month of solitude. Tartarin spoke of it with bated breath, not severely, but sadly, for was she not la mère? She appears to have shown singularly small appreciation of the creditable fact. What she had, at moments, permitted herself to remark about les enfants et la famille generally, her good son refrained from quoting, but I gathered that it was something truly appalling! Of course this led to quarrels; the neighbours were scandalised, and incited the husband to take strong measures, and that was the end.

"If you had but let me go now and then I would not have left you," she cried, as she fled from the house never to return. And thus Tartarin and his sister had been deprived in their early years of la tendresse d'une mère. He spoke of it with a sort of self-pity, evidently engendered by the comments of indignant neighbours and by the sentiments of a maiden-aunt who joyfully seized the happy opportunity to fill the place thus left vacant. The brother and sister had therefore enjoyed all the tendresse that they could have desired, and evidently it was as like the ordinary tendresse d'une mere as one egg is like another. For there was nothing in the way of alternate embracings and irrelevant punishments that had been lacking in the system of education of that admirable aunt. She had worshipped the children; so altogether it was difficult to see what the pair had missed. They had certainly gained the prestige of their misfortune, for all Tarascon had petted and pitied them.

"And where do I come in?" the aunt might have inquired, but she never did. On the contrary, she started the chorus and shed the signal-tear, so that little Tartarin and Antoinette evidently had a splendid time of it.

And was the truant mother still living? Yes, she had a little property, a little house at Arles where she passed her days. And now and then Tartarin and his sister went to see her. The mother was glad to welcome them, and, as far as I could gather, she was fond of Tartarin, not exactly as a son, but as a good fellow whose bonhomie and urbane philosophy appealed to her. It was a curious story, and a most unexpected one in this out of the way city of the south.