Daudet says in "Trente Ans de Paris," page 142, that the home of the real Tartarin was five or six miles from Tarascon on the other side of the Rhone. In an article which appeared in "Les Annales," July 6, 1913, Charles Le Goffic tells of a visit to the house in Tarascon known as la maison de Tartarin, and reports a conversation he had with Mistral, the great Provençal poet, an intimate friend of Daudet. Mistral said that the real Tartarin lived at Nîmes, eighteen miles from Tarascon, to the west of the Rhone, and was no other than Raynaud, Daudet's own cousin. "Raynaud," Mistral told Le Goffic, "had travelled among the Teurs and talked about nothing but his lion hunts; he talked about them with his lower lip extended so as to form a terrible pout (moue), which gave a character of good-natured ferocity to the little gentleman's honest face. Raynaud recognized himself in Tartarin and became very angry with Daudet; the reconciliation between the cousins was not effected till toward the end of the novelist's life".
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
A definitive edition of the works of Daudet has been published by Houssiaux, in octavo, 1899 ff. (18 volumes). Convenient editions of most of them are published by Flammarion, Lemerre, Fasquelle, and others.
The best sources for the study of Daudet's life and works are his Trente Ans de Paris, Souvenirs d'un homme de lettres, Notes sur la vie (Paris, 1899), his brother Ernest's Mon Frère et moi (Paris, 1882), and his son Léon's Alphonse Daudet (Paris, 1898).
The following may also be consulted:
J. BRIVOIS, Essai de bibliographie des oeuvres de M. Alphonse Daudet, Paris, 1895.
H. CÉARD, introduction to the definitive edition.
B. DIEDERICH, Alphonse Daudet, Berlin, 1900.
R. DOUMIC, in Portraits d'écrivains and Études sur la littérature française, Vol. III.
HENRY JAMES, in Partial Portraits.
J. LEMAÎTRE, in Les Contemporains, Vol. II.
R. H. SHERARD, Alphonse Daudet, London, 1894.
B. W. WELLS, in A Century of French Fiction, New York, 1903.
E. ZOLA, in Les Romanciers naturalistes.
The illustrations in the following articles are of interest:
J. A. HAMMERTON, "The Town of Tartarin," in The Critic, vol. 47, pp 317 ff.
A. B. MAURICE, "The Trail of Tartarin," in The Bookman, vol. 14, pp. 128 ff.; vol. 15, pp. 520 ff.
WORKS OF ALPHONSE DAUDET
POEMS, NOVELS, TALES, AND SKETCHES